ケロロ軍曹 Episode 84
Sgt. Frog anime, 84
Keroro Gunsou 84

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Momoka spends an entire night making the perfect bento to serve Fuyuki and now must come up with a good excuse to have Fuyuki enjoy this bento with her. As she stands outside the Hinata residence, she can hear Fuyuki getting excited about the approach of a red comet. So, she offers him a ride on her custom space shuttle to see this comet. The comet approaches, then does the unexpected — it turns toward them. Turns out, Keroro and Tamama are inside as it is a MS-06S craft — My Suisei, 06 Special (actual name).

Fuyuki is depressed so Momoka tries to feed him some of the bento, but Tamama and Keroro keep interfering. Eventually, Momoka’s rage causes her to punch out a shuttle window where she and Fuyuki are left in space. They are eventually rescued by Keroro and Tamama and since Fuyuki managed to rescue a single sausage from the bento, he eats it and loves it, to Momoka’s delight. Mission success!

Natsumi and Fuyuki are depressed because matsutake mushrooms are too expensive for their family to afford. Keroro mistakes the siblings remarks about not being able to get a matsutake to mean they can’t defeat these mushrooms since on Keron, mushrooms are quite fearsome. So, the platoon (sans Dororo) set out on a mission to capture these powerful matsutake and thus conquer Earth.

Giroro goes off on his own to test his warrior skills while Kururu tells Keroro he’s set up some Earth-style traps. Unfortunately, Giroro encounters each of these traps and thinks they are from the matsutake while Kururu and the others think the matsutake have set off the traps. After continued misunderstandings, Dororo and Koyuki-chan show up and reveal what matsutake really are, having been gathering a few themselves. Now, everyone can enjoy these mushrooms but unfortunately, they forgot about Giroro, who’s still in the mountains to snare these matsutake.

Thoughts/Review:

I realize that this series is done for fun and such, but to me, that’s no excuse for the writers to just do whatever they feel like. What do I mean? Well, if you are going to have a story where Fuyuki goes to the moon, why would you a year later write a story where you make Fuyuki act as if this is his first time ever in space? Having him be excited about going into space again would be cool OR having him be excited to ride in the space shuttle (vs. whatever Keron ship Keroro might provide) is understandable.

Onto the story, it has been a while since I’d seen a Space Battleship Yamato reference. I think that the comet Keroro flew to Earth is the first direct reference to Space Battleship Yamato 2 though. It would have been perfect if they could have provided music that would have better emulated the White Comet appearance in Yamato 2 rather than the Psycho music emulation. The 2001 (and 2010) parody reference was pretty cool though. Momoka going off ended up getting funny to me after a while for some reason, especially when the giant lobster got involved.

As to the second story, I laugh at how much the Japanese appear to hold the matsutake mushroom in such high regard. Urusei Yatsura episode 87 (which came out in the 1980’s) shows that the passage of time hasn’t lessened the Japanese love of this delicacy. Anyway, it was amusing seeing how mushrooms on Keron are a fearsome opponent and that the platoon assumed matsutake would be something similar on Earth.