To tell you the truth, I was going to give The Slayers four crazy old men, but then, starting with the fourteenth episode, it just got better.  I'll explain that in a little bit, so keep your ass stapled to your... ass... bone... or something.  Hmm... The Slayers is about the adventures of Lina Inverse and Gourry (I can't remember his last name).  As the story gets going, more people join these two and they all have lots of crazy whacked out party cake!  The story is surprisingly good, considering all the insanity incorporated into this anime.  There are a lot of cool characters and what not.  Something that they did that I really liked is that, even though The Slayers is a TV show, they didn't really make it episodic, everything picks up pretty much right were the last episode ended.  Going along with this, the animation is pretty good for a TV show.  That is actually, kind of, one of the reasons I was going to give it  four crazy old men instead of five.  While the animation was nice and smooth, the detail was pretty forking basic.  Luckily, and for some reason that I don't know, starting with the 14th episode, both the already smooth animation and the detail improved noticeably.  That improvement made me bump it up to five crazy old men.

          From what I had heard, The Slayers was supposed to be hilarious, unfortunately, I didn't really think that was the case.  While there were a few times that I laughed pretty hard, that was only a few times.  Again, for some odd reason, the show got a lot funnier after the 13th episode.  Don't get me wrong, The Slayers is funny, especially considering some the the whacky shit that goes on, it's just not as funny as I thought it would be.

          As I mentioned before, the detail was a bit low in the first half, but this did not affect the 'special effects' at all.  Every spell that was cast looked forking awesome!  It was like getting three kicks to the face and then realizing that you could stop kicking yourself at any time, a good idea.  Bottom line, the spells and fight scenes kicked all ass, and there were a lot of fights.  Another thing, let's go back to Record of Lodoss War for a minute.  Something that I really didn't like about that one was that anyone who could cast any spells seemed to know only two at the most, and they all said the same damn thing to cast 'em!  Not in The Slayers baby!  There are a whole crap load of different spells whipping around everywhere, and none of them use the same words to cast.  Good shit.

          Something else good is that The Slayers makes fun of Dungeons & Dragons type stuff.  For instance, when our heroes are being hunted by random bands of heroes who think that they are the bad guys, we get treated to some funny shit, like The Three Heroes of Gondor and stuff like that.  Actually, now that I look back at how much stuff that I liked about The Sayers and all the cool stuff that I'm thinking about now that I didn't type down, I probably should've given it five crazy old men even without the boost in detail that it got.

Genre - fantasy/adventure/comedy

Animation - Like I said before, the animation is real good for a TV series and the detail got a lot better after the thirteenth episode.

Sub vs. Dub - sub is better

the Good - Zelgadis, Zangulus, Phil, most of the others, but to a lesser degree, it was reasonably funny, good story, good music, great special effects and fight scenes, at least once a stupid bad guy became a cool good guy... probably more stuff too...

the Bad - The not-quite-so-good detail problem I've been complaining about, some of the characters got a little annoying after a bit

Overall - Good stuff, everything blends into a miasma of fruit goodness that overwhelms the senses and brings you to a land where you can eat poppy seeds and grass without fear of watermelons ambushing you from the road.  (26 episodes)