Gintama: Shinyaku Benizakura-hen

This is about a big announcement. A very big announcement, indeed. But, that is subjective, and the more energetic members of the Yorozuya can't possibly agree on the impact it would have, on either the audience or themselves. That is, of course, after the subjective appraisal of time passing, which, as they admit, is like a stuck record.

This effectively is an introduction to Gintama', but doesn't actually have anything to do with the Benizakura arc. It ends with trailers from the following episodes, but other than that the meta-reflection and ruminations permeate the narrative.

The trio happily conclude that their studio isn't, after all, ... ideal for their purposes...

Finding this special was stupid hard. So, thanks MAL for figuring it out. And congratulations to Gintama, now I can finally watch it full screen instead of getting these vertical bars on each side.

The episode starts with the reliable new year running gag. It's probably the first instance I've seen of a joke getting better the more its said, at least in anime. It's the 4th time, and I feel nostalgic watching it, even though I watched season 1 in a month. Then a good bit of the special was dedicated to the sequel. Can't wait amarite?

More seriously it actually gave me hype. A solid ... special overall.

This 11-minute short is basically just an ad for the second season of Gintama. There's several minutes of comedic buildup involving the usual trio to the eventual announcement, and then the remaining runtime is teaser trailers for future episodes. It wasn't awful; the comedy is what you'd expect from Gintama(references to running gags and some 4th wall breaks), but the actual amount of non-ad content was too minimal for me to get much entertainment out of it. Might have been better if I'd watched this back when it was released, but as of now, I'd recommend skipping this and starting to the second season.