Summer of Steven - Kiki's Pizza Delivery Service Review

This is perhaps the shortest episode review of a Steven Universe episode I have ever done. This is because the best way to describe the episode "Kiki's Pizza Delivery Service" is "We're just gonna make an episode that references all our favorite anime and not care too much about the plot".

There IS a plot in the episode, though. The short version is that Jenny takes advantage of Kiki's kindness and lets the latter fill in for her delivery job while she goes do stuff lasting several weeks. Kiki then suffers from a recurring nightmare that is a metaphor of her refusing to say 'no' to her sister. Steven, by communicating with Kiki through their dreams, persuades her to draw the line to end the nightmare.

On that note, either I never knew or forget that Kiki and Jenny are actually twins. I always saw Kiki as the older sister. Well, that does explain why both are played by the same voice actress - The Cleveland Show's Reagan Gomez-Preston.

The rest of the episode is just one Anime reference after another. If you're an Anime enthusiast, you can easily spot them. However, this is the third episode in a row that the show references to Anime and, in the words of Johnny Bravo "It's gotten really old, really fast".

It's fine to reference things once in awhile, or if you're gonna do it frequently, do it in the name of comedy. But otherwise, you have to be really good in making the narrative entertaining with all these references. To the best of my memory, the only series that does reference things a lot without sacrificing quality is JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. The franchise has references many famous people, music, film and art, yet didn't suffer in terms of the narrative and remains popular to this day. I'm betting this is just a coincidence and the staff just wants to express their love of Anime. But if they are trying to emulate what JoJo has done, well, they flunked.

Some people may like this episode because of those references, but for me, this one is even worse than The New Lars episode.