The Fall 2011 anime season seems to have an unusual number of sequels, and of course it is not at all unusual for a good show to have a disappointing sequel. Still I have rarely seen anything as disappointing as the second season of Squid Girl (Shinryaku!? Ika Musume)

I called the first season one of the outstanding anime series of 2010. It was cute of course, but its main virtue was that it was fall-on-the-floor hilarious.

The second season is still cute but that’s nothing special. Anime studios can grind out cute in their sleep. Unfortunately it just isn’t funny. It isn’t just that the series has run out of fresh ideas. It’s more like someone kidnapped the crazy inspired subversive writers of the original series and replaced them with a bunch of talentless hacks who phone in the blandest sort of recycled material.

With nothing to laugh at I am left to wince at Crunchyroll’s attempts to translate the puns. The puns flow naturally in the original Japanese dialog. (It’s pretty easy to come up with a Japanese sentence containing the sequence “i ka” (squid). The translators try to jam words like “squiddle” and “squiddy” in every other sentence, which gets old very fast.

The first season is still available on Crunchyroll and is still recommended.