Arakawa Under the Bridge is about a Yuppie (you know those rich successful young pricks you see drinking Starbucks) named Ko Ichinomiyo who gets his pants stolen and put on top of a bridge by a gang of young hoodlums. Ko does get offered some help by the beautiful but weird Nino but refuses because of his family motto “Never get into debt from anybody” he also has this printed on his tie. While climbing the bridge one of the beams break and falls into the river dragging him with it and all he does is nothing but complain about it while drowning. Lucky for him he is saved by Nino and to express his appreciation he complains even more about how he has to repay her for saving his life. Ko ends up settling for being her boyfriend and moves in with her. As weird as she is there are much more weird people living under the bridge like a guy in a turtle costume, a washed up rock star in a starfish mask, a very rude but very beautiful farmer, two kids in iron masks, and a cross-dressing nun with a gun. (Click "Read More" for full review)

The show focuses on comedy and romance and mixes them very well and doesn't feel cliche at all, in fact it feels very original and is very refreshing to see. All the characters are very loveable and well written and greatly adds to the originally and charm and you will definitely end up caring about these guys a whole lot. The way the show is laid out is like a manga, each episode is made of several mini-episodes marked as chapters which feels like reading the funny pages each day in the newspaper, so think of each episode as a trade-paperback and this set as an omnibus edition. The show is also continuous right from the first scene all the way to the last and does it very well making it very smooth to watch so this could of easily had a marathon mode (a mode where the show plays all the episodes in a way where it feels more like a movie than a TV show) .

Inconsistent screens?  You deserve death!

The music used in the credit sequences (both intro and outro) are very good catchy tunes and will make you smile every time you hear them which is a very good mood-setter and will help inspire to watch more because we all know as good as some shows are if it has a bad outro it will hurt the chances of continuing on the DVD (well that could just be me). The rest of the music in the show is also really good but can be a bit forgettable. Artwork and animation is far from being forgettable as the character designs are just so well done and very unique looking. This set only has the Japanese dub (with English subtitles naturally) and it's good and while it's not the greatest of all time it does suit the characters very well.

BLLLLLAAARRRRRRHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

There were more special features than what I was expecting there to be. The back cover only listed a few things and there ended up being a whole bunch of stuff with most of them being TV spots advertising the Japanese DVD and blu rays. There is also a neat little art gallery showing some original pieces that weren't in the show and I do recommend checking them out. Surprisingly there are no text-less credits which is ironic as I was looking forward to re-watching the credits in text-less form GO FIGURE!

What the hell are you looking at?

Overall this is a must see show, it's fresh, hip, sexy and full on balls to the walls fun. Highly recommended and should be an essential to everyone's anime collection.