Pipupurin!
A variety of different video tape formats at T...

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Lately, I’ve been having dreams that aren’t just recurring, but continue a storyline across several nights.  Usually, it’s something along the lines of the standard “Oh noes, I am still back in school and it turns out I didn’t get my high school diploma despite having a BA and I need to do that, just for whatever reason!” type of thing that I think just about everyone has — though, of late, it’s my media obsession taking over.

 

As it turns out, a few nights ago — maybe a week and a half, I don’t know — dream me happened to be watching TBN’s hilarious kids’ shows — and after one Public-Access Level kids show ended, a cartoon started up — it was anime, so I figured it’d be something like Superbook or Flying House.  But this one was more modern in look — and not at all like those shows.

 

 

The show was called (something like) Pipupurin and it’s a completely surrealist, vaguely dirty cartoon.  It’s based on a manga — some dreams involve me trying to track down copies of the manga — and the description from the dream is usually some variation of “It makes the weirdest thing on [adult swim] look coherent.”

 

Unfortunately, in the dream, I’ve only seen one or two episodes — it airs very late night/early mornings on TBN, like around 3AM, but I basically fell in love with it at first sight.  I don’t remember much about the episodes, other than that they don’t make a whole lot of sense, which is the allure, but it’s generally a fantasy-type series, taking place in a forest with a princess and a man/boy from the real, modern world who’s been transplanted there.  As for why it’s airing on TBN:  One of the episodes had a character called “Shit Jesus” or “Shitting Jesus” — a chibi-style Jesus who flies by doing, well, what you’d expect, and apparently the TBN programmers saw that Jesus was in it, so therefore it must be the new Superbook.  The character isn’t really blasphemous — it’s less “oh, we are being so edgy!” as just one of about a billion weird and disparate elements shoved into the show.

 

Like Shit Jesus, the show as a whole isn’t really offensive, though it is clearly for adults.  It’s mostly just, well, weird.  I wish I remembered more about it and a lot of the dreams are about trying to find out more about this mystery show, the manga, DVDs of the series, toys, or just information — who made it, what they were going for, does it ever make sense, that sort of thing.

 

The most recent dream was going to a comic convention and asking around for the anime/manga section or part of the convention so I could find out — unfortunately, I woke up before I got there.  Earlier dreams include going to Kinokuniya to find manga; as it turns out, the manga is incredibly cheap (five bucks a volume), but hard-to-find.  I believe Kinokuniya had copies in their system, but none on the shelves, so they were either out-and-about in the store or had been swiped.  In a much earlier dream, I’d found a couple bootleg VHS tapes from near the end of the series — I remember a vague robo-suit-up theme to them, but it wasn’t clear if the show had moved in that direction, if they were doing an Excel Saga-style parody of different anime genres, or if it was just yet another random thing they shoehorned in.

 

The strangest thing about this is that it seems like something that’d just be a one-shot dream, but it keeps coming up.  I suppose the ideal thing is that it turns out that EVERYONE’s been dreaming about this weird show, and that, I don’t know, we’ve entered into some sort of weird Cronenbergian world or something and pretty soon it’s gonna turn out that Pipupurin is going to be the new Videodrome and all the anime-loving, [adult swim]-watching anti-comedy fans would either be weeded out or perhaps grow flesh guns…. and, knowing most of that demographic, just sit around still watching Pipupurin until we grow VCRs in our chests… at which point we’ll just put tapes of Pipupurin in so we can watch ‘em in our head instead of wasting time with the TV as a middleman.

 

….that’d actually be pretty awesome.

 

Addendum: After I wrote this piece, I had a dream where B. Root had done an installment of his comic The Dawn Chapel that had referenced not only Pipupurin but the whole common-dream and Videodrome idea.  In the dream, this was BEFORE I’d posted this to Kittysneezes.   I guess the main point of adding this, however, is to encourage everyone to check out The Dawn Chapel, as it’s a gorgeous strip.

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