Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 26 “The Centennial Tournament”

Well…we made it. After five weeks, we’ve come to the end of our journey with Baki Hanma who was more some guy that we happened to drive by and wave to rather than an active participant on our trek.

As much as it’s seems as if I’ve been hate-watching this for the past couple of weeks, things weren’t all bad. The first half of the series was awesome and exciting, but just seemed to completely lose its way and become oatmeal. Total mush with nothing of substance.

I’m really not expecting a lot out of this finale. Which sucks because I’d like to see this go out with a bang, but I just don’t believe that to even be an option at this point in the series.

When we left off, Baki was mortally wounded, but was being healed by noted shaman Andre Stallone (not his real name, but may as well be) when Kaioh Retsu comes back from the dead after digging himself out of the earthquake crater to become Baki’s new guardian and…I dunno…what do you do with kids? Take them to the zoo? Sure. Retsu’s going to take this dying teenager and his girlfriend to the fucking zoo.

Oh, and did I mention the Chinese are here in a goddamn helicopter? Because that’s a thing. Let’s find out what any of this has to do with Muhammad Ali.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 25 “God and the Devil”

Welcome to the penultimate Baki episode recap! Five weeks is a long time to stay consistent and I give you all a lot of credit for coming back each day to keep up with the happenings in Tokyo.

For half of that time, this show has been a jumbled mess with no real direction or apparent endgame and that certainly continued in yesterday’s episode where it was revealed that there’s some kind of history between Yujiro Hanma and – I still can’t believe this is a thing – Muhammad Ali.

Yep. THAT Muhammad Ali.

They can’t possibly have the rights to use the character of Muhammad Ali, can they? I mean, it’s on Netflix; someone must have noticed. But…really?

Look: there’s two episodes left. I shouldn’t let this drive me crazy, but here we are. Going crazy. I just…ya know what? I’m not going to do this. I’m just going to hit play and see where this takes me. You do the same.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 24 “Defeat”

Welcome back to another Baki episode recap! Just a few days remain before we can put this show to rest and move on to something that hopefully remembers what it’s actually about.

In yesterday’s episode, we got more new bad guy vs. old bad guy stuff with one of the newbies cutting off one of the oldie’s hands. His dangerous hand. His poisonous hand. The hand that rocks the cradle. Hands across America. Hands up, baby, hands up, give me your heart, gimme, gimme your heart.

Sorry, got lost for a second

Yanagi is now worthless since he had his hand cut clean off by the newly-arriving Izuo Motobe. Whatever, man. These writers are going to do whatever they’re going to do and they don’t care about what some guy with a cartoon blog thinks about it.

Either way, it seems like curtains for Yanagi as Yujiro Hanma is on the scene and is encouraging Yanagi to pack it up, pack it in.

As with all episodes, we shall pick up where yesterday’s left off. Let’s go.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 22 “Clash of the Alphas”

Welcome back to another cartoon recap! We’re getting toward the end of our run with Netflix’s Baki, but as the Macho Man would say,

This has become a strain to get through, but we’ve come way too far to turn back now. The only thing we can hope for is for things to pick up and begin to make some semblance of sense before we close out and move along to the next show.

Even the fight scenes have become less impressive as we’ve gotten further into things here. I don’t know if that’s because they blew their wad early into the series or if they’re just less striking purposely, but when the story was slow, you could usually hang your hat on a badass action sequence and that has gone away for the most part.

Maybe that’s also because we’re just recycling fighters to an extent and are already familiar with their specialties and go-to maneuvers, but regardless, they just don’t have the same impact.

So we check another box on the road to completion today. Being an adult means finishing the tasks in front of you and watching cartoons is no different. With that, we move to a fresh episode of Baki.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 21 “Punishment”

Welcome to our final week of Baki recaps! We’ve made it to the homestretch so let’s get right to business and close this out.

Since getting to Part 2, this show has gone completely off the rails, but now that Baki has punched his V-Card he’s ready to become the fighter we’ve all heard he could be. People get motivation from all sorts of things and sex is one thing that is tried and true in society so good for Baki.

When we left off, Baki was taking on the dual forces of Yanagi and Sikorsky and they quickly realized that he was now too strong for either of them to take on single-handedly so they were going to have to form their version of Voltron if they had any chance at defeating the young fighter. It’ll still be a tough nut to crack because sex has leveled up Baki to serious levels, but these bad guys always have some tricks up their sleeves when they are in fact wearing sleeves.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 20 “Saga”

Welcome back to another cartoon recap as we close out our fourth week of Baki on Netflix! As I’ve said, this has become a tough watch since moving into Part 2, but with just a week of episodes left to cover there’s no turning back now.

To recap, Doyle has blown up the Shinshinkai Dojo which killed nobody, but somehow, Biscuit Oliver was killed by a meteor and Retsu was killed when he fell into a crack in the ground during an earthquake that apparently claimed no other lives nor has left any damage anywhere else in Tokyo.

I’ve said it from the beginning, but this show is really the anti-tourism advertisement for Tokyo. High-powered monsters fighting in the streets and now the addition of meteors and contained earthquakes? FOH, bro. No thanks.

Counting today’s, we have seven episodes remaining and it’s amazing how my tone has shifted for this show. Where as I was once excited to get to the next episode and see what would happen next, I’m no dreading it and just pushing myself to get to the end since we’re close enough to see the finish line. Yikes.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and get a solid half-hour here to close out the week, but once again, not getting my hopes up.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 17 “Dad!!”

Welcome back, friends. It’s another Baki recap here and things are slowly but surely swirling down the toilet. Things have gone completely off the rails and with only ten episodes to go, I honestly don’t have all that much faith that they’ll get it back on track before then.

When we left yesterday, Hanayama was trying to convince Baki to come get beautiful girls and leave “her” behind. “Her” meaning Kozue who was none too happy that Hanayama didn’t even respect her enough to say her name.

Doyle was also greeted by Kosho Shinogi who is a friend of Katsumi Orochi known for “cord-cutting” technique which means he can slice through things with karate chops. Kosho is desperate to be in this tournament and insulted he wasn’t asked earlier. Why wasn’t he asked earlier? Because the last time he was in one, he got his shit pushed in by Baki.

I mean…sounds like enough of a reason for his invite to get lost in the mail.

We’re on the countdown now. Ten episodes to go so let’s get with this and do that work.

Daily Cartoon: BAKI Ep. 16 “Slash”

Welcome to a brand new week of episode recaps! This will begin our fourth week watching the Netflix series Baki and, my god, has it really shit the bed the past few days.

Feel free to go back and read the prior blogs, but – to make a long story short – this show just has no idea what it’s doing story-wise and just throwing fight scenes in the middle of everything so maybe you’ll forget about everything else.

Well, hate to break it to the writers, but I don’t forget anything, especially not to the degree that they’ve forgotten the entire premise of the show.

Counting today, we’ve got 11 episodes to go and I’m really hoping that this doesn’t become a hate-watch for me to get through. I can understand that not every episode is going to be great, but the past few days have been really bad and even before that, the show had just gotten away from any kind of story. Hopefully that changes soon. Preferably today since I don’t want to sit through another stinker.