So, Okazu Staff all read the initial comments about this series and decided right away that this one was going to have to be a group review. ^_^
On the face of it, Turkey! Time to Strike,which is streaming on Crunchyroll, seems like a relatively typical school cute girls doing cute things sports club anime, with girls bowling as the sport of choice. Mai-chan is a brilliant bowler, who always seems to choke. Her friends are part of the bowling club because she asked them to be. Rina, their star bowler, has had it with the low energy of the group and threatens to quit.
A paranormal plot complication will render everything in the above paragraph moot.
Director for this series is Kudo Susumu, fresh off the mess that was Momentary Lily. Scriptwriter Hiruta Naomi seems to be primarily a writer for television dramas with a penchant for paranormal narratives, as we see.
So, what did the Okazu Staff think about Turkey! Time To Strike?
Christian
I don’t think I’ve seen the ‘cute girls doing cute things’ genre take on bowling before, and I definitely haven’t seen a bowling anime launch into the twist that we get at the end of the first episode. In bowling parlance, a turkey is three strikes in a row, which is what Mai is capable of, but she always chokes afterwards. (If she’s choking because the turkey’s too dry, I suggest she drink some Ramune with it, which the cast were doing their absolute best to advertise mid-show). A golden turkey (nine strikes) later evolves into a dinosaur (perfect game), which I hope is where we’re headed, in case we get a new twist every episode or so; I could definitely see Sayuri getting eaten by a Brazilian Irritator later on to try and get the audience invested, as she doesn’t seem like she’ll get much character development at first glance.
Rina is the only one on the team who takes bowling very seriously, and is one of those characters who believes that someone’s bowling performance is an expression of their true feelings. I feel bad for her and her and her aspirations, as she is the literal embodiment of how “it’s hard to soar with the eagles when you’re surrounded by turkeys.”
Overall, this is a fine first episode; yes, it’s bad in the way that a lot of anime is bad, but not in a way that should stop anyone from continuing to watch.
Eleanor
Much like director Susumu Kodo’s previous effort and subject of our last Okazu Staff group review, the absolute trainwreck which was Momentary Lily, Turkey! seems to be a combination of two entirely different ideas mashed together because the studio only had enough budget to make one. At least it’s not GoHands this time. My favourite character by far was Nanase (the purple haired one), who during one of Mai’s main character monologues says something along the lines of “I can’t tell if that’s meant to be profound or not” followed a few minutes later by “…definitely not profound.” One could be forgiven for thinking this was in fact just a 24 minute advert for Ramune soda, but since it’s showing signs of possibly being self aware thanks to Nanase, (who coincidentally is the only character apart from Rina who isn’t a childhood friend of Mai) I’ll give it a couple more episodes and see what happens. In the meantime if you want to watch an actually good girls’ sports anime with an avian reference in the title, go watch Birdie Wing.
Erica
Merriam-Webster dictionary has, in recent years, become a force for good, on Twitter, especially. Using it’s platform to explain and educate, the folks there have kept their finger on the zeitgeist, with a clear eye to providing context. Today I will take a literal page from them and start with a definition of the word Turkey:
turkey (noun)
Pronunciation: tur·key ˈtər-kē
Plural: turkeys
1 a large North American gallinaceous bird (Meleagris gallopavo) that is domesticated in most parts of the world
2 failure, flop especially : a theatrical production that has failed
3: three successive strikes in bowling
4: a stupid, foolish, or inept person
There is a fifth definition: to speak truthfully, so let us talk turkey about Turkey! Time to Strike.
This anime has a heavy-handed and portentous beginning, that keeps us on edge throughout the generic set-up that both my wife and I named a couple of other anime that have similar set-ups in plot or subplot. So when the star threatens to quit, I was, likewise, one foot out the door, with intent to check back in when the story was almost over and we were at the big competition, with Mai and Rina competing against each other for different teams. I did not expect the different teams to be the Tokugawa clan versus the Toyotomi.
Turkey! is still both silly and somewhat boring with animation that occasionally rises from phoned in to entirely over the top. At least it’s not by Go Hands. (Despite that, their shadow lays heavily over this anime.)
Anyway, four of the above five definitions apply to Turkey! Time to Strike. And I don’t put it past this anime to squeeze in that last one somewhere.
Frank
Did you know that three high-tech executives once tried to take professional bowling, pigeonholed as a sport for nerdy guys, and turn it into mass-market entertainment? How’d that work out? Well, despite their best efforts to jazz it up, it looks like it’s still a sport for nerdy guys (albeit nerdy guys with tattoos). That shouldn’t stop anime creators though, as they can deploy the time-honored strategy of having nerdy activities be practiced by anime girls. However, the creators of Turkey! seem to lack faith in the power of the vanilla CGDCT playbook: the end of the first episode sees them resort to a second time-honored strategy to juice up nerdy pursuits, namely having their practitioners be isakai-ed somewhere else where they can teach the natives a thing or two.
Boring sports can be rendered palatable to the average anime viewer. Look no further than Birdie Wing, which did it by taking JoJo-esque characters and over-the-top plots and mixing in a heaping helping of yuri subtext. Whether Turkey! can duplicate that success remains to be seen. But it’s going to take more than having our girls instruct Oda Nobunaga in the finer points of converting the ten-pin spare.
Luce
Club members have friction all the time. Especially in sports clubs, there will be conflict between those who want to succeed at it, and those who just want to have fun. Honestly, neither is incorrect, but there has to be a way of managing that. In a club as small as five members, if you get one overly ambitious member, it can alienate everyone else. It did feel like we got thrown into episode 3, rather than 1, but it did a relatively decent, if clunky, job of getting the vibe of the club over. At least there’s no balloon boobs like Momentary Lily.
Oh, and I guess they get isekai’d via a lightning struck spherical object that psychically connects with Mai’s bowling ball? Here’s hoping they don’t just immediately die on the battlefield.
Matt
Turkey! lulls you into a false sense of normalcy. 80% of the episode is standard hobby anime fair, although it seems to begin in medias res as the Bowling Club teeters on disbandment with the serious first year, Rina, calling out the team’s inadequacies and quitting. The surprise doesn’t come until the end, where our heroines find themselves transported via magic bowling ball to the middle of a feudal battle.
To be honest, there isn’t anything terribly wrong with this first episode. OK, one of the characters making a pun swapping “bowling” with “boreholing” is a bit eye-rolly. The real test will be what happens next—will Mai finally embrace her desire to win by bowling over dozens of samurai? This may be the first piece of bowling media with a body count since There Will Be Blood.
If I were writing the script, I would have made Rina not just an underachieving prodigy, but a demigod/cosmic horror being that tears the fabric of reality if she bowls a hambone—that is, four consecutive strikes. The finale would pit her desire to win for her team against the threat that bowling a perfect 300 would end all existence, but she goes for it anyway Because She Believes In Her Friends. Could that still happen? Sure! Or maybe they’ll just all be clones again (spoilers for Momentary Lily).
Overall – It could be worse, you might as well watch it, because you have a Crunchyroll subscription and it wasn’t as bad as Momentary Lily, which gets 4 mentions here to 3 for Birdie Wing.
