…you didn’t think the dumb mech show was actually an allusion to something, did you? (/jk)

Meta context: This post was written mostly around when I was close to finishing RobiHachi in August 2022. I figured I’d clean it up while I don’t have a lot of other posts coming out and while I procrastinate on my final assignment.

Shinji Takamatsu’s roots are in mecha and comedy (typically separately), but this time he put them together.

…well, yes. RobiHachi is actually an extended allusion to a work called Tokaido Hizakurige, at least by the names given. The author’s name is Ikku and the main characters’ names are Yajirobe (“Yarge Robby”) and Kitahachi (“Kita Hachi”), geddit? Hizakurige appears to be an old version of a fictional travelogue and its picaresque nature and innuendo-laden source material makes it a great way for a comedy director to work his magic. Not only is Robby and Hachi’s ultimate destination Isekandar a parody of Iscandar from the Yamato series, it references Hizakurige‘s trip to Ise Grand Shrine. Even the Amazon parody that shows up on the boxes in episode 10, nametake, is actually enoki mushrooms cooked in a certain soy sauce-based…er, sauce.

To top this off, “the Don” in episode 5 is actually Wombat (not his real name), the pink wombat with a pouch from the Boueibu series. In episode 9, the twist involves an obvious Boueibu parody, right down to the shooting star scene from Kinshiro and Atsushi’s backstories, and in episode 10, the weird lady-shaped dakimakura is a character from the Boueibu livestreams dubbed “Loveko”. She’s typically rendered on a piece of cardboard like in this video, but there is merch of her (…but sadly, no dakimakura of her own).

…it took me a while to realise this, but the “Umatani siblings” are actually Pony Canyon (uma + tani in Japanese) staff or staff previously of that company, likely unified under Shinji Takamatsu…which makes me speculate of a Fairy Ranmaru from his brains…Takamatsu did go AWOL from the internet around the time of Fairy Ranmaru, after all.

I haven’t quite figured out what “Taiga” is meant to mean, since it’s in hiragana and could be read several ways when rendered with kanji or katakana, but “Kurari” can mean “when everything changes suddenly” (using the 2nd meaning from this link) – like Boueibu did near the end of the first season or alternatively, when it goes from slice of life to magical boy in the middle of most episodes.

Sidebar: I feel like Fairy Ranmaru is what you get if you gave the Boueibu formula to someone else…because that seems to be what it essentially is in the first place. Fairies and other mythical creatures are usually used as metaphors for LGBTIQ+ people, which doesn’t sound so significant until you know what happens in the back half of that anime…

So what do you think about RobiHachi? Without knowing much of the context, the anime is a much duller show and almost seems like some kind of old-school throwback amongst the other anime of 2019, right? Admittedly, I don’t think I’ve covered all the references in this post, because it’s possible I missed more than a few of them. (Also, I didn’t mention this at all in the post because I only sampled a bit of it, but the dub is awesome!)