El Hazard: Katsuhiko Jinnai, the megalomaniac student body president at Shinonome High School, gained office through a scandalous secret deal with the president of the baseball club, who endorsed him in exchange for promises of a larger budget, which his younger sister in the press club now exposes, which she learned about from her beloved Makoto, who is a nice young man and the only student in school with higher exam scores than Jinnai as well as the student truly responsible for the recent discovery of buried artifacts of an ancient civilization beneath the school, a discovery for which Jinnai is now trying to take credit in order to deflect attention from his own scandalous failures, all of which drive him to seek Makoto's life. If all this sounds like an awful lot of plot to try to follow in literally the first three minutes of an episode, don't worry- it isn't relevant at all to the actual story. Late one night someone disturbs a mysterious relic beneath the high school. A beautiful woman, dormant for ten thousand years, emerges from a cocoon and, in a flash, transports the only four people on campus that night to the land of El Hazard where the real story begins. Our hero Makoto and the drunken high school principal, Fujisawa Sensei, find themselves in an otherworldly forest where a squad of man-sized insects attack a radiant, half-clothed woman. How fortunate that at this point Sensei discovers for the first time that he has superhuman powers of kung fu, explained later as a perfectly natural side effect of dimensional jumping. What, you didn't know that? Immediately after saving what turns out to be the princess of the realm, Rune Venus, another crisis consumes Makoto and Sensei. More to come� The Great Holy river of God splits the mystical land of El Hazard. The good kingdoms on one side, led by Princess Rune Venus of Roshtario, constantly endure attack by the Bugrom and their evil Queen Diva from the other side. Naturally Katsuhiko Jinnai lands on the side of the evil kingdom where he instantly rises to the position of commander in chief of the insects - while Makoto must dress in woman's clothing to pose as Venus' missing sister Princess Fatora for the duration of a summit meeting. (I could go into greater detail, but if after reading thus much you actually want to hear MORE about the plot, then I must not be making myself clear). Nothing that happens in the episode provokes as much interest as it ending with a mysterious woman climbing under the sheets with Makoto, who is still posing as a princess, and kissing him...somewhere.

Starring:

Steve Blum

Genre:

Action, Adventure, Animation, Fantasy, Japanese