JoJo's Bizarre Adventure S02E27 Review: The Comedy Duo

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Stardust Crusaders, Episode 27: Oingo's Divine Khnum and Boingo's Divine Tohth

Unlike some people, I actually don't mind the Oingo Boingo brothers. Sure, they kind of overstay their welcome and Boingo has one hell of an annoying laugh, but I've always found them more charmingly pathetic than actually annoying. It also allows the anime to animate the bizarre artistic style used by Boingo's comic-book stand, Tohth, which I thought was a neat treat.

The actual episode ends up following Oingo and Boingo more than our protagonists, who are tied up with the group stuck in this city while Avdol and Kakyoin recuperate from their injuries in the hospital. In fact, the next couple of arcs are going to take place at around the same time while waiting for Kakyoin's eyes in particular to recover. In this particular case, mind you, Oingo and Boingo end up wanting to do some assassination and kill the Stardust Crusaders, with the aid of Bongo's Stand Tohth, a manga that will predict with full accuracy the future, as we see in the final scene of  the previous episode and various parts of this one. The problem is, while Tohth is never wrong, it also tends to not show the entire picture, leading to a bit of a dark comedy as Oingo (who has the ability to change his appearance with his stand, Khnum) gets trapped in all sorts of wacky hijinks. 

First up, their attempt to serve poisoned tea to the Crusaders, despite fate eerily moving in the way that Tohth predicted (the cigarette dropping to point at the cafe they infiltrated, the next-door cafe catching fire, and the refrigerator being broken causing them to not order colas) all the Crusaders did was to drink the tea... and then spit-take it out when Iggy shows up to disturb some patrons. 

Also love the hilarious "ehh? What a moron!" reaction Polnareff has when the cafe next door catches on fire due to someone's cigarette butt, obliviously unaware that it's his cigarette butt that did that.

The next plan is for them to sneak a bomb hidden as an orange into the Crusaders's car, with the prediction that "Jotaro blows up!" It's an unambiguous death, but when Oingo is forced to disguise himself as Jotaro and shoved into the buggy, and ends up being forced to keep up the charade... poor Oingo ends up realizing that the fact that he has Jotaro's appearance means that the prediction by Tohth might be about him, disguised as Jotaro. The actual scenes of Polnareff trolling Jotaro!Oingo, especially when it's revealed that he and Joseph actually were completely in the dark, ran on for waaaaay too long, though I do appreciate Oingo's bizarre lines coming out of Jotaro's normally stern voice actor. 

Anyway, the two end up getting a karmic fate as the escaped Oingo ends up getting blown up when Polnareff tosses the 'bad' orange out of the car, and then the dude that Oingo punched randomly earlier in the episode comes in with a band of thugs to beat them up. Overall, the episode actually felt like it worked better in animation than in the original manga, due to the sheer hilarity of the voice actors that carried this episode and the not-insubstantional contribution of the animation and background music. It's undoubtedly a filler episode, but at least we knock out two of the mini-bosses before we get to Dio. 

The JoJo Playlist:

• The Oingo Boingo brothers are named after the Oingo Boingo new wave band, which features a mixture of rock, pop and world music, with one of the Oingo Boingo's band being the insanely iconic songwriter Danny Elfman, responsible for, among others, the original Batman theme, music for the Spider-Man trilogy, multiple Disney pictures, and multiple collaborations with Tim Burton. 
• In a neat little oddity, this episode features a unique ending theme sung and animated in the style of Boingo's comic. 
• Not an actual song, but Oingo's fall is the first use of the [RETIRED] cutaway in the anime, as far as I can tell.