Lucky Star

Overall Rating: A
Summary: an anime series based on the manga series of the same name by Kagami Yoshimizu. Lucky Star follows the lives of four high school girls (they look really young, but they're supposed to be in their second year) who have a very...interesting sense of humor. The main character is Konata Izumi, who is athletic, but doesn't belong to a sports team because it would interfere with her primetime anime shows. She does poorly in school, because she only cares about watching anime, reading manga and playing video games.

Lucky Star is very meta, and references a lot of popular manga and anime. For example, in one scene, the characters are playing a beat matching game in an arcade (using drums) and the song they are playing is "Hare Hare Yukai" from "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya", and apparently at some point they actually perform the dance from that song. They also have a segment at the end of each episode called Lucky Channel. The segment is co-hosted by an "idol" named Akira Kogami, and her assistant Minoru Shiraishi. Akira spends about half the segment in her idol personality (cute, bubbly, etc.) and half being cynical and mature. Supposedly, the segment is to give more information on Lucky Star, but it skims over the characters in the anime and focuses on the increasingly abusive work-relationship between Akira and Minoru.

I love this show so far. It's humor is weird and geeky like mine, and it's a lot of fun to watch. Especially if you're a big geek/otaku. There were a bunch of references I didn't quite catch, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. If you like geeky humor, cute animation, and slice-of-life stories, then I highly recommend it.