Tiger and Bunny S:01 E:04

Episode Title: Fear is Often Greater Than the Danger
Original Airdate: 4-24-11

After spending so much time with Barnaby and Kotetsu, the show takes a break to focus on one of the other heroes working for Hero TV, namely Blue Rose. Her real name is Karina and she is one of the youngest heroes on the show. The episode kicks off by having her off her game when she gets shot at in the middle of her catchphrase and rescued by Barnaby, but most of the rest of the episode follows her around in her life outside of the heroism as she tries to have a normal life at school and her fledgling singing career. In fact, she’s more interested in singing than she is in being a hero, and through some of the advice she gets from Barnaby and Kotetsu, we finally get a moment where it seems that they do have something in common after all.
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Tiger and Bunny S:01 E:03

Episode Title: Many a True Word is Spoken in Jest
Original Airdate: 4-17-11

This is the first episode that had no part of it included in the first movie so it was all new to me. It also focuses on what I think is the most interesting aspect of the show as a whole, and that’s the show within a show. Here, Hero TV’s crew follows the newest hero on the block Barnaby to get some footage of him when he’s not out saving the city, and of course since Wild Tiger isn’t the most popular hero on the block, he’s generally pushed off to the side and given lines to read. But when they start filming in a newly finished building, there’s a bomb threat and Tiger and Bunny are forced to work together once again to save the day, if they don’t kill each other first.
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Tiger and Bunny S:01 E:02

Episode Title: A Good Beginning Makes a Good Ending
Original Airdate: 4-10-11

The second episode picks up right where the first one left off with Wild Tiger getting stuck with Barnaby as his new partner and immediately the two don’t mesh well as they go after a giant moving statue. There’s a bit of a comedy of errors as Barnaby wants to check out the situation while Wild Tiger wants to jump right in and they end up getting in each others way and only making it out alive by sheer luck. There’s a lot of great comedy moments in this episode, but there’s also the first bit of real heart as we get to see some of Wild Tiger’s backstory that parallels the NEXT behind this episode’s attack.
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Tiger and Bunny S:01 E:01

Episode Title: All’s Well That Ends Well
Original Airdate: 4-3-11

The show starts off with a really great introduction into the world of this series in the city of Stern Bild starting off with the ubiquitous Hero TV telecast as it narrates the action of the heroes and in doing so gives a very succinct introduction to both the heroes and the state of televised superheroism. Each hero gets their own moment to do what they do best, whether it is heroically capturing a criminal, saving a civilian, or making an inopportune blunder like Rock Bison who stops the speeding van, but gets the entire van stuck on the horns of his costume as the criminals escape, or Origami Cyclone who doesn’t actually do anything but stay in the background for screen time. We also get quite a bit of time in the television production booth as Agnes directs both the heroes as well as the cameras, and her motivation isn’t catching criminals, it’s making engaging television that will draw in ratings.
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Tiger and Bunny: Introduction

I first found out about Tiger and Bunny through my site last year when I discovered the spin-off movie Tiger and Bunny: The Beginning which essentially just rehashed the first couple episodes of the series or so and added in a new third act. This year I watched the second spin-off film from the single season series called the Rising which followed after the end of the show and made me want to watch the whole series even more. The world of Tiger and Bunny is fascinating to me, it’s set in a world similar to the X-Men, but instead of being persecuted for being different, the mutants, or NEXTs as they’re called in this series, are celebrated as celebrities and heroes. There’s even a popular television station dedicated to their coverage in a season long reality style competition with points for capturing criminals, saving civilians, and other various heroics.
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