Chargeman Ken! Review

The brief was a ten minute weekday slot, five episodes a week, on a budget that shows in every cel, and judged against that brief the series does one thing well. It never stalls. Each episode gets a threat, a transformation and a resolution inside its runtime, and there is real craft in that economy which the show's modern reputation tends to skip past. Everything else is broken.

The animation reuses the same handful of cycles, holds on still frames for whole exchanges, and regularly loses track of what is on screen, with characters changing color or disappearing between cuts. The writing is worse. Plots resolve by having Ken do something arbitrary, threats are established and forgotten inside the same ten minutes, and Ken kills indiscriminately, including targets who are not attacking or are already running, without the script registering any of it as a choice he has made.

Ken himself is the one durable thing here, a genuinely strange lead whose cheerfulness bears no relationship to the events around him, and that strangeness is what brought the series back decades later as a cult object with real affection behind it. The affection is deserved and so is the grade. This is a show that met a schedule and abandoned nearly everything else.