JOJO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE Pays Homage to Stephen King?

Look at that! Anne’s back. And it looks like my hunch about her
getting set up to be Jojo #3’s eventual love interest is actually panning out.
Though, there’s really no points in guessing on that. Nearly every woman
who gets introduced in this show winds up being a Joestar’s girlfriend.

(Although, the face
that they stress how Anne is still too young for Jojo #3 makes that one scene
on the freighter a lot… trickier. Eeesh. I suspect that’s going to be changed
in the dub).

Since we’ve been shotcalling all the horror flicks Araki has likely
been paying homage to throughout this arc, I’ll take another wild guess and propose
that he must’ve watched CHRISTINE just prior to plotting this. Though, the
tension and thrills are actually a lot scarier in this case than the “Honk-honk! The car honked its own horn!” freak-outs
from that book. Actually, it pleasantly reminded me of Spielberg’s DUEL at
points, really drawing a ton of personified terror out of vehicular combat.
There was some genuine white-knuckle tension here.

== TEASER ==

Now that Enyaba’s finally coming along, and Dio probably isn’t
that far behind, I ought to say that this has been, by far, the best
villain-of-the-week stretch I’ve seen in any anime outside of the gauntlet of
angels in EVANGELION. That’s actually one of the harder balancing in serials,
as far as I reckon. There are a lot of long-form sagas that could’ve honestly
used a self-contained episode or two to give some variety. And on the other
end, a lot of classic shows like FIST OF THE NORTH STAR and GALAXY EXPRESS 999 get a little old, really fast, when you see the same cool set-up get played out
every week. I guess the key to both ends of that is variety, and JOJO’s has done an
awesome job of making the fights with of these Stands feel drastically different from each other.

This episode, the good guys fight an evil car. Last episode,
they fought an evil wart. You can’t get a further spread than that...

Watch "Wheel of
Fortune" and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the previous episode.