YMMV / Genji Tsuushin Agedama

• Adorkable: Kensaku-sensei easily fills the role here. For starters, he's the only person in Morisoba City who exclusively wears nothing but a traditional kendo outfit regardless of where he is, he's extremely passionate about in the role in the field of animation, and his crush on Hitomi-sensei exposes his timid, honest, and awkward personality thoroughly.
• Awesome Music: The music was composed by Toshihiko Sahashi, better known as the composer of Ghost Sweeper Mikami, Full Metal Panic!, Hunter X Hunter '99, and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. With that in mind, Sahashi does a good job providing whimsical and (at the time) futuristic background tunes using electric keyboards, and phenomenal orchestral tracks.
  • All of the opening and closing themes are pretty damn catchy.
  • Also the insert song, "Chikyuu wo Todokeyou".
• Foe Yay Shipping: Despite being mortal enemies, it's not too surprising to see Agedama and Rei shipped together. Agedama tries to be friendly and caring towards her a few times, and even Rei eventually reveals a soft spot for Agedama and isn't too happy when he has to go back home to Planet Hero.
• Growing the Beard: Much like the Lamune & 40 series, the series began as pretty standard fare for kids' shows at the time, as the series progressed it became well worth the attention of older audiences.
• Jerkass Woobie: Despite her cold treatment towards most people, Rei feels isolated as a result of her parents working overseas. She has no friends outside a small fan club, and it's later made clear that only one of her cares for her as a person and not for her wealth and power. Her only company outside of her school is her grandfather and her incompetent butlers.
• Moe: Ibuki is a nice girl who enters the series as a friendly but timid young girl who often needs encouragement from Agedama. While she's plain compared to Rei, she makes up for it by being pure, innocent, and fairly cute.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Despite its strange character and concept departures from the anime series, the PC Engine tie-in game is often regarded as a hidden gem within the console's library.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Even though both voice actors portrayed the two lead heroes, both Nozomu Sasaki and Kotono Mitsuishi would go on to respectively portray Yuusuke Urameshi and Usagi Tsukino, arguably considered to be the biggest roles of their careers, throughout the following year. Given the Shout-Out directed towards the latter series, it didn't go unnoticed.
  • Ikue Ohtani was still in the infancy of her career when she took over as the voice of Kodama. Immediately following this series, she would later become the main star of the timeslot with her role as Himeko Nonohara (and for that matter, her magical kingdom counterpart Erika) in Hime-chan's Ribbon. And that was still five years away from voicing Pikachu, quite possibly the biggest Japanese-created character in the world.
• Signature Scene: Arguably Ibuki's initial transformation into Wonder Ibuki.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character
  • Uroncha spends most of the series incognito as a neutral entity in Agedama's classroom. When his true origins are revealed and he's able to be useful for the heroes, he's mostly put on the sidelines.
  • Hikari Yumenokouji was built up as The Ace and a backup rival for Agedama, someone who's less of a threat than Rei but more trouble for Agedama concerning Ibuki's affections. Despite this, he only has four appearances throughout the series, with one of them having him captured and fused into a synthetic beast, and the last of which being merely a short cameo.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Rei, despite having money and power, genuinely becomes less popular in-universe, while Ibuki becomes universally more likable. Within the show's fandom, she's regularly considered the highlight of the series, so much that her prominence rivals that of Agedama. Even though the show began and ended over 30+ years ago, Rei gets loads fanart on other websites like pixiv, even if some of it pornographic.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Outside of his design, Agedama is pretty tame and bland when compared to Rei (The arrogant Rich Bitch who proves that Evil Is Hammy), Ibuki (A sweet girl with a host of quirks who slowly becomes her school's Class Princess), and much of the quirky supporting cast. While he has the benefit of having strong personality traits (friendly but hotheaded, brave but cocky, skilled but not too bright, righteous but slightly perverted), he gets far too overshadowed by the other characters' stronger eccentricities and doesn't offer anything new to the table that other kid protagonists his age hadn't already done or weren't already doing better at the time (Wataru, Jin, Lamune, Seiji, and even Honmaru, for example). He also doesn't get a lot of character growth, instead leaving that for both Ibuki, who goes from insecure to confident as the series progresses, and to some extent, Rei, who while never completely turning over a new leaf, does soften up a bit while regularly stealing the spotlight.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Despite both being in the fourth grade, Ibuki and Rei are prone to several moments of fanservice, whether they be forced panty shots or full-on nudity. Heck, even Onyomiko's very Stripperiffic outfit would raise a lot of eyebrows in this day and age.
  • Given the rise of domestic and global terrorism, Rei and her grandfather are a lot harder to forgive to an adult viewing this in the twenty-first century than to a kid viewing it in the '90s, and it doesn't help that they had to toe the line between making them effective villains and not letting them cross the Moral Event Horizon.
  • If it wasn't at the time, it's safe to say that Suzuki's lolicon tendencies, specifically his chronic sock fetish, would be raked over the coals in modern years.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Later episodes tend to push the limits on how much fanservice and nudity the show can get away with, containing a bunch of shower scenes that were clearly meant for fanservice and some scenes where Ibuki and Rei are shown bare-chested.

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