How About That Thing?

This is Puffy AmiYumi, or Puffy for short. If you were watching Cartoon Network around the 2000s, you probably knew who these two were. They were kinda all over the place back then.

I’m just going to come clean here, folks: if you’re looking for an in depth, detailed biography and history of Puffy AmiYumi, you might want to look elsewhere. If you want an adequately written opinion piece with some bits and pieces of trivia wrapped up as some rando’s glorious nostalgia, though, you’re in luck. Because that’s pretty much this site’s gimmick in a nutshell these days.

Anyway, I, like most Americans, were first introduced to Puffy AmiYumi through their contribution to Teen Titans. Surely, I don’t have to explain who The Teen Titans are. Their cartoon from the 2000s, while not without a few negative reviews in the early going, was excellent. Their 2010s show, Teen Titans Go!, was… Well… It was definitely a thing that existed. I’ll own up to hating it at first like a lot of other people expecting a continuation of the original show, but once you realize it’s a reimagining intended for five-year-olds… Although that episode where everybody gets obsessed with Raven’s legs was kind of perverted and weird…

You get the idea. The Teen Titans have been around for a while, and among many other things, they’re responsible for introducing a lot of American viewers to Puffy AmiYumi via the show’s theme song.

As I said earlier, The Teen Titans weren’t without their critics. The 2000s show, while remembered fondly nowadays, was criticized pretty heavily in those early days. Largely for being another example of why American artists apparently shouldn’t draw in the anime art style. But even with all that going on, the one thing everybody agreed on was the theme song was, as the kids say nowadays, a banger. It definitely set the tone of the show, letting you know that it COULD get dark at times, but it’s not taking itself quite as seriously as, say, Justice League. Sure, it doesn’t take a safecracker to point out English is clearly Ami and Yumi’s second language… But it wouldn’t be the first time I enjoyed a band who attempted English. Frankly, compared to some of the Norwegians I was listening to at the time, Puffy AmiYumi actually had a pretty good grasp of the language overall.

Through Teen Titans, Puffy gained a following. And then, someone decided Puffy needed their own cartoon series.

That’s right, folks, Puffy AmiYumi had their very own cartoon show here in The States. It wasn’t even a Japanese show that got dubbed into English, either. This was all American from the ground up. And it SUUUUUUUUUCKED!

I’ll admit, Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi show came out at a point where I was probably getting a little too old to be watching Cartoon Network proper sober. I was mostly here for Adult Swim, Toonami, and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy at this point. And maybe Code Lyoko… But that’s an article for a different time. So yeah, this cartoon probably wasn’t meant for a college-aged individual like myself.

That being said, I remember watching episodes of Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi Show anyway. Because millennial, I guess.

I get that the animation industry was convinced everything had to look like it came from Newgrounds in the mid-2000s. Flash animation itself was probably at the height of its popularity around that same time, and big time animation studios were starting to figure out they could make everything in Flash for much cheaper. But there’s something about TV studios making something in flash that looks significantly tackier than it would if it was a one-man production over on Newgrounds. And that’s kind of how this show looked to me: like something from Newgrounds. And that’s me being NICE.

Add on the fact it wasn’t funny, Ami and Yumi were voiced by American voice actors, and without taking anything away from said voice actors, it’s just weird. Partly because I wasn’t used to those voices being associated with those people, but also because Ami and Yumi respectively had all the time in the world to appear in live action segments between the cartoons. And yet they didn’t voice themselves? Even GWAR had time to voice themselves in their little cartoon on YouTube, and I imagine their production takes forever to set up, take down, and transport to the next city.

Maybe that last one is more of a personal pet peeve of mine.

All I know is the show was pretty bad. You could make the argument that it was intended for fans of Puffy, and not for nihilistic basement dwellers on the verge of flunking out of college… Except I’m pretty sure people who LIKED Puffy didn’t like the show either.

The last thing I remember, before Puffy AmiYumi’s fifteen minutes of fame came to a screeching halt here in The States and they went back over to Japan, was their cover of “Give a Little Bit of Your Love” being all over the place on Cartoon Network. I forget off hand what it was promoting exactly, but all the same, I wasn’t shocked Cartoon Network had gotten THEM to do it.

Ever since then, I haven’t heard so much as a hint of anything from them. The last time I even heard the NAME Puffy AmiYumi was when The Mysterious Mr. Enter reviewed their cartoon, and that was quite a while ago. Before he went insane and started insisting Turning Red needed more 9/11.

In any case, Puffy is a band that had their fifteen minutes of fame, and went back home. They didn’t really become especially huge outside of their Cartoon Network following, but they thankfully weren’t around long enough to wear out their welcome and become obnoxious either. They came, they went, and they left those who liked them with some fond memories. And in the end, that’s really all anybody asks for in life.

Did I like Puffy AmiYumi’s music? Well… Yes and no. They weren’t my favorite band ever, by any stretch of the imagination. I’ll admit to being a hardcore weeb in the 2000s, but even then, I just thought they were okay. In terms of Japanese bands I’d die for, my heart belonged to Maximum the Hormone. Before all the “indie” douches hijacked the whole [NOUN] the [NOUN] format to go with their millennial whooping, ukulele playing, Apple computer promoting shit. But Puffy weren’t bad.

If they’re still around today, it’s honestly news to me. But if you like them, I’m not about to discourage you. And if you’re looking for something different, they’re definitely worth a look.