Today we will be talking about the Gemusetto Machu Picchu TV series. This 6-episode animated series premiered in 2019 and was created and produced by Max Simonet, who was also an actor in the series. Let’s see, surely you are eager to know a little more about this series, then here we go.
The series is based on the adventures of an athlete who goes to Machu Picchu and will eventually challenge certain gods in order to steal their treasures, while at the same time being chased by Interpol agents.
The Tittle!
The series was titled Gēmusetto Machu Picchu during the first season because Simonet Googled how to say “game set match” in Japanese. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was at that moment when he added the thing about Picchu simply to make a play on words and that gave him the idea of placing the action in Latin America and making the protagonist, Makasu, dedicate himself to challenging the Inca gods to steal from them. his relics and seize his powers. The battles invariably take place in surreal tennis matches.
About Gemusetto first season.
The first season parodies anime-style shows, intentionally using rather strange and amateurish animation, constantly shifting quality in drawing style, as well as rather off-beat and crass humor. The program also features several other segments in between “episodes” and parts such as alternate openings for each part, educational material regarding the different Inca Gods, flashback segments of past challenges Makasu has faced, and fake toy commercials promoting the program.
All six episodes of the first season were aired over the course of six hours on the early morning of April 1, 2019 as part of Adult Swim’s annual April Fools prank. The series’ existence had only been discussed on Adult Swim’s live streaming programs (mainly Bloodfeast, where the original shorts had debuted) and had not received any kind of official announcement prior to the debut. Adult Swim added each episode to their website the following day, and soon after to their YouTube channel in the form of a four-hour-and-fourteen-minute movie. The network has rerun the first season since, albeit split up into 11 half-hour episodes.
The series introduces practically everything that a script school would say should not be done: long flashbacks that interrupt the main plot, crazy internal monologues, didactic fragments with a rhythm and tone completely different from the rest… And along with that there are several sections non-animated: fake ads for action figures inspired by the characters, a fragment in which an old woman talks about what she has understood of the series and several passages in which Maxime Simonet addresses the viewers with his usual humor.
All this is done with a deliberately rudimentary, shabby and ugly aesthetic and animation; in fact, the characters constantly change their appearance, as if they were drawn by an inexperienced animator incapable of reproducing the same design twice.
Finally!
Of course, there will be those who consider that this is an ugly series without more. Those accustomed to the more experimental side of Adult Swim will surely find it brilliant. I belong to this second group, because it seems to me an example of what can be achieved when a creative mind does what it wants without worrying about what the executives of a chain think. So we have to thank Adult Swim, once again, for daring with oddities like this that are not exactly abundant on the television scene.
