Mix Juice finally make it to the moon and give their concert!  Will this be the end of their journey to become pop idols, or just the beginning?  The story wraps up, but there are still a lot of surprises in store in this final volume of Wandaba Style.

'Mix Juice' are a quartet to ambitious young girls who are determined to make it as pop singers.  The group consists of Sakura ( a former singer of nursery rhymes), Himawari who is fit and trim and likes traditional Japanese songs, Ayame a folk singer who sees imaginary fairies, and Yuri, the rocker of the group.  They'll do anything to make it to the top, which is good because their manager, Michael Hanagata, will do anything for money.

Hanagata comes up with a brilliant gimmick to make Mix Juice famous: They'll be the first group to give a concert on the moon!  The only problem is getting there.  To help them, they've teamed up with a young, rich, boy-genius, Dr. Tsukumo, who is working on a way to get to the moon, with help from his robot assistant Kiku 8.  The only catch is that he wants an environmentally friendly method, and that means no rockets.  Tsukumo's mother, Furoko, is also trying to get to the moon, but she wants to get there first.  She'll use any means possible get there, no matter how underhanded.

As the volume begins, Hanagata and Mix Juice are on board Furoku's rocket which miraculosly gets our heroines to the moon.  While the girls are sad that Dr. Tsukumo wasn't the one to get them there, they manage to get ready for their history making show.

Hanagata shouldn't have trusted Furoku though.  There was one thing that she forgot to tell the group: the trip was one way!  Her ship was only designed to go to the moon, not return, so now she, along with Hanagata and the four singers are trapped on the moon for the rest of their short life.

When they do get back to Earth (you didn't really expect them to die a horrible death of asphyxiation on the moon did you?) it's discovered that Hanagata has brought back a cute little alien...and alien that grows when you put it in water.  Unfortunately he leaves it in the ocean while he goes to a party, with disastrous results.

The series ends with an episode about the pressures of stardom.  Now that Mix Juice are the pop idols that they dreamed of being, can they keep the group together?

I enjoyed this volume a little bit more than I did the second one, but it still wasn't a great show.  It's supposed to be a comedy show, but it isn't that funny.  Instead of actual jokes, the show has a lot of hectic action that passes for humor.  People running around waving their arms in the air is a good reaction to a joke, but it isn't a joke by itself.  I would have thought that this show was aimed at a younger audience who might enjoy the hyper-kinetic pace of the show, but there are a lot of sexual jokes tossed in that really wouldn't be appropriate for the eight and nine year old set.

When all was said and done, there wasn't a lot to this series.  The plot was ripe with comic possibilities, but it was never as funny as it could have been.

Audio:

Like most ADV titles being released, this disc comes with the original Japanese audio track in stereo and a 5.1 English dub.  I alternated between the different language tracks while watching the show, and thought they were both good.  The girls voices in the English dub were a little too high pitched and sweet sounding for my tastes, but the actors did a good job with their performance.  I really liked the English voice for Hanagata, his gruff yet energy filled voice was one of the best parts of the show.  This is a recent program and both tracks had a good amount of range, but there was only minimal use made of the soundstage.  Overall an average sounding disc.

Video:

The full frame image looked fairly average for an anime show.  The colors were bright and the lines were tight, but there was some minor aliasing present.  Nothing great, but nothing really bad either.

Extras:

This disc includes a clean opening and closing animations, a gallery of production sketches, and a series of previews.  There are also nealy nine minutes of English dub outtakes that were more humorous than the show itself.

The biggest extra is a 25 minute conversation with the voice actors and other people that worked on the show.  Basically they filmed the wrap party which was at a restaurant in Houston.  The cast had a really good time, and it was nice seeing what some of the English voice actors looked like. Honestly, I wasn't that interested in which character were the actor's favorites, which takes up a large part of this featurette, but I still enjoyed watching this.

Final Thoughts:

This show had some amusing moments, mainly involving Dr. Tsukumo's inventions, but these were too few and far between.  The series used people running around in panic as a source of humor instead of actual jokes, and this got old rather fast.  There are a lot of comic anime shows that are batter than this one.  (Excel Saga and The Daichi's come to mind.)  Pick one of those instead.  Skip it.