Baseline

My usual baseline for bad is Battle Fairy Yukikaze. I watched it fairly recent, and it managed to leave an impressively bad taste in my mouth with weak characterization, random plot elements and an unfathomable man-man-machine love triangle. Even more incomprehensible was the remake, which changed some of the planes to women, as if the audience wasn't bludgeoned numb by the mecha-sexual symbolism already present in the unfortunate anime. In the credits, I was horrified to find out that the half-assed storyboarding was a second look based on a manga.

One particular scene compared unfavorably with the GI Joe episode when Shipwreck believed that he had returned home from the war. The main character in Yukikaze thought that he was being treated at a friendly base, which had actually been taken over by the JAM. The aliens tried to seduce him having the mannequin-like nurse shove his face into her chest. I had a hard time figuring out which was worse. That scene or that the wooden nurse was not out of place with the rest of the cast. BTW, I watched that scene in Japanese and English, and writer didn't give either versions much of a fighting chance.

There are works that are worse than Yukikaze. Princess Army Wedding Combat comes to mind, as well as the middle of the drawn out Tenchi TV series. However, Yukikaze establishes a sharp baseline for barely watchable. Some kitsch is simply so bad that it goes so far that it hyperspatially warps from bad to mockably good, kind of like an Atari enemy going off the screen. Yukikaze manages to avoid this and just remains plain bad.