Hajime no Ippo is a show about a professional athlete making the mistake of training a petty bourgeois scion to fight. Rightly derided by his working class classmates, Makunouchi Ippo spends his days helping his mother grow their family's profits, isolated from the masses. His only encounters with his peers occur on the road home from school, when anti-fascist punks remind him with their fists that his family's economic aspirations run counter to the good of the people of the world. It is during one such encounter that he is saved by a boxer who looks a bit like the Kuso Miso Technique dude. This fateful meeting sets Ippo down the road toward becoming, in his words, "King of the Boxers!"
The animation's pretty good for the time, but the character designs are fugly and in the ending animation everyone looks the same (dumb faces, identical hairdos, shirtless, red boxing gloves). The soundtrack is distractingly bad. Ippo is lame. Boxing is terrible. I'd hella watch a show about a fishing boat business, but this testosterone-stuffed sports saga is a hard pass.
Recommend: No.