Rio: Rainbow Gate! (Episodes 4 - 6)

(For a review of Episodes 1 - 3, click here.)

Some have referred to it as "nuking the fridge". Perhaps even "razing the hospital" may make it into the televised vernacular of the future. However, no matter how you rewrite the series, its downfall will always be gauged as the point where the series has "jumped the shark".

Its origin comes from that agonizingly-long time in a particular episode of Happy Days for the Fonz approach a ramp to jump over a shark with a relatively-slow set of water skis and a perfectly unblemished leather jacket. Aerodynamics and primal instincts be damned—the Fonz jumped the shark.

Meet Rio's breast best friend Rina.

I bring this up during an anime review to emphasize a particular flaw in the "Jumping the Shark" theory—sometimes the show is so ridiculously inept in its plausibility from Square One that "jumping the shark" actually helps the show stay memorable, despite all of its other flaws.

Case in point: so far in Rio: Rainbow Gate!, we've seen our share of cases where our main character Rio has won her matches out of sheer luck. A metaphorical journey through a house of cards results in Rio winning poker with a pair of twos. A hallucinogenic volleyball game breaks out during a "bowling roulette" challenge, in which the opponent loses thanks to a band-aid coming loose. A game of craps is won when a ghost's possession is thwarted by spicy habanero chicken wings.

"Me wa horrible stereotype desu!"

Despite all of these ridiculous games and unrealistic finishes, the series now decides to unfold with plot, as Rio is reunited with her long-lost "sister" Rina, who has been hired to become a dealer at Howard Resort. While Rio is excited, there's definitely something uneasy about Rina, as she is not only ruthless in her competitive spirit and deflating when it comes to customer luck, but she seems to have her eye on the "Gates" Rio has collected so far.

To test the limits of the show's over-the-top stretch towards implausibilities, the casino's owner Tom Howard goes beyond the beyond, introducing the island's tourists to the first flying casino. It is here that Rio is forced to fight against two more Gate Holders; one in a lengthy water-slide race against the ship's chipper female android Linda, and another in a too-realistic game of "Space Pinball" versus a telekinetic kid promised freedom from his boss in he were to win. Both games pit Rio's team against the conniving Cartia, a vamp who plans to take Howard Resort by force.

Seriously. She should be dead by now.

Rio: Rainbow Gate! is obviously in it to tantalize the viewer with cheesecake and costume changes that get Rio into skimpier and skimpier situations. Logically speaking, there really should be no reason at all to follow the show. The plot is limping to the finish line as characters from the pachislo games crash the party with hardly a reason—we get an overweight cowboy who speaks in "You wa SHOCK!" Japanese and an Afro samurai with a severe losing streak, but neither factor into the major battles. So why have them there in the first place?

Like Fonzie's jump, there's just nothing that makes sense. Why is the ship's android not getting electrocuted by a water-slide race? How in blazes does the "wind from the excited customers" affect the trajectory of clay pigeons in a shooting contest? How can holograms be so realistic that a meteorite could smash the glass of a viewing room and drag Rio's stalker friend Mint towards a black hole? It's like monkeys are hammering this show's script out with typewriters.

And as far as the "jumping the shark" analogy goes, Rio has taken that approach a step further. By Episode 6, "Roll Ruler", she's actually jumping onto holographic space sharks. Seriously. I'm half-expecting a dinosaur to be reconstructed and the crew to travel back in time, all for the sake of a Gate Battle and a costume change that shows more of Rio's mother-of-pearl breasts.

I'd like to see Henry Winkler do THIS in a leather jacket!

It's this unfortunate mockery of all reality that makes the show so much more of a car crash to watch. There's nothing exceptional about the characters. The acting is shoddy. The art is forgettable. The only thing keeping the show from oblivion is the anticipation that the next episode couldn't be any worse than the next one.

In fact, the show is so bad that it continues to be good due to its badness. The formula cannot be changed from here on out. It's best the show continues to jump sharks; if Rio: Rainbow Gate! ever gets serious and gets dramatic, it's all downhill from there.

Rio: Rainbow Gate! (Episodes 1 - 3)

Japan's fixation on gambling, particularly pachinko which developed from the American version of "Corinthian Bagatelle", has a pretty large overlap with its anime and manga industry. If a series does well (Lupan the 3rd, Hokuto no Ken) or produces characters that people go bonkers over (Lucky Star, Evangelion), you can guarantee that there is a pachinko machine that has taken advantage of its popularity. Heck, you don't even need those tiny metal balls; "pachislo", a similar game with the central slot machine dissected from the banging metal sounds, has been a booming diversion as well.

While "moe-slo" has managed to do well with the use of moe characters in these slot machines, it usually borrows the characters for the machine, not the other way around. Very rarely will you have a pachinko or pachislo machine series so popular that it spawns its own animated show, and such examples haven't necessarily translated into successes (such examples are Umi Monogatari and Kaitô Tenshi Twin Angel...wait, it's coming back?!)

Our heroine Rio in work mode.

Okay, maybe the industry is just big enough for another venture into animation. Rio: Rainbow Gate! is an odd attempt at glamorizing the gambling industry through the conversion of a pachislo game series to anime. Realistically in Japan, pachinko and pachislo are about as close to diversionary gambling as you might get, but the gambling racket is mostly dominated by horse racing circuits. Casinos, in the Vegas sense of the word, are a relative unknown and are almost nonexistent in Japan.

Perhaps this mystique about the casino has drawn people to the popular pachislo game and the title character Rio Rollins Tachibana, the game's buxom dealer. To some, she may be vaguely familiar, as she made cameos on the gaming disaster Dead or Alive Paradise, but Rio: Rainbow Gate! is her big debut on the anime scene. On the fictional island casino known as Howard Resort, Rio is known as the "Goddess of Victory" to its gambling patrons, as she is able to bring good luck to gamblers with her very presence. She's become such a big name at the resort that she's constantly being used as an advertisement by her employer, the nutcracker-like Tom Howard.

Mint following Rio's pet ferret Chip into the rabbit hole (ferret hole?)

It is Rio's popularity that has brought a variety of people to her inner circle of friends. One of Rio's sudden admirers in the show, the cherubic Mint, is left in Rio's care for the most part, developing a "big-sister" crush on her new guardian. In the first episode, we meet the rest of Howard Resort's main employees through Mint's wandering flight of fancy through the casino—the Hollywood starlet Rosa Canyon, buoyant bunny-girl waitress Tiffany, and twin sisters Elle and Ille.

Of course, Rio's charm and success rate as a "Gate Holder"—a dealer who possesses one of 13 special "Gate" cards—also brings a variety of ruffians to the casino. While her matches with the sparkly-eyed gambler Orlin and a ghost known only as "Misery" are for other wagers, Rio must accept gambling duels from other Gate Holders. The arrival of Elvis, a ladykiller of a dealer with an uncanny knack of mathematics and probability, puts Rio on the hotseat in a bizarre game of roulette bowling for her Gate, even though she never won her own card in the first place. Each opponent challenges Rio in a display of gallant hallucinations, where the game is animated in something bigger than it actually is (and with Rio in a multitude of costume changes).

This is NOT a commercial for Segram's 7 whiskey.

If you were to watch Rio: Rainbow Gate! with the presupposition of seeing a sincere story unfold, Lady Luck isn't on your side. There is very little coherence in the show's actual plot, as dull one-on-one card games and roulette spins turn into nonsensical scenes of mazes composed of playing cards and volleyball games with oversized numbers. The epic Orlin-Rio poker game is over Mint's teddy bear, of all things. While the stakes for the match between Rio and the ghoulish Misery are much higher (Misery wants the casino for herself), the scene of Rio fending off flying ghost chicken wings while trying to keep Mr. Howard from being sliced in half by Elle and Ille is so amazingly ridiculous that...

...it's actually fun to watch.

Yes, this is how we first meet Rio. (Eyes up here, pal!)

Seriously. In the same way that Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was hilarious to the MST3K crew, Rio: Rainbow Gate! is such a bizarre mishmash of unrelated imagery and inept characters (you'll love to hate the klutz Anya) that the unintentional comedy is off the scale. Fan service is sold at high premiums that rival gold, as revealing outfits are the norm and skin is buffed to such a shine that you'd be able to see Rio's breasts from orbit. The absurd characterization of Mr. Howard, in comparison to the other characters, is so over-the-top that the chain-smoking owner (voiced by the thunderous Kôji Ishii, Garterbelt from Panty & Stocking) rescues the show's cast from being bland.

Considering the expectations of Rio: Rainbow Gate! were basically in negative-number territory, the show's shipwreck of a plot unbelievably keeps it from submerging. Granted, the introduction of a particular character in Episode 3 does establish some sense of plot in the upcoming chapters, so the story may still be taking up water and sinking a slow death, but so far the show has a reason to exist, if only to make us wonder just how absurd it could end up getting. Perhaps Rio loses her top in a game of human Plinko?

No, Rio darling, dealer is showing 17.

Perhaps the best thing Rio: Rainbow Gate! has going for it is its self-awareness. Those who know Rio already will probably be her biggest fans, and much of them are have probably already lost ten thousand yen to a pachislo machine since the beginning of this review. Those who are left have to be snagged in the only way the show knows how—through the theater of the absurd.

Yes, Rio: Rainbow Gate! may be a slug compared to a shiny gold coin, but even a whole barrel of slugs has got to be worth something.

(Rio: Rainbow Gate! is simulcast on Crunchyroll every Tuesday at 10:30 AM EST.)