To Be Hero

Name: To Be Hero
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2016-10-05

凸变英雄 BABA (Tu Bian Yingxiong Baba)

6.9(31,767)

MAL Score

Ranked #5341

Popularity #2945

Comedy
Super Power
Workplace

Episodes: 12
Duration: 13 min per ep
Aired: Oct 5, 2016 to Dec 21, 2016
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Uncle is a handsome yet shameless toilet designer who routinely shirks his responsibilities as a single father, preferring to chase women and brag about his so-called “superpower” of guessing a woman’s hip size at a glance. His ordinary day takes a bizarre turn when he’s pulled down into a toilet and recruited by the Space Peace Republic Alliance Hero Committee, which grants him genuine powers and appoints him Earth’s hero—at the cost of transforming him into an ugly, unrecognizable fat man.

Back home, his daughter Min-chan refuses to believe this crude stranger could be her father and throws him out. With nowhere to go, Uncle teams up with his equally eccentric neighbor Yamada-san, a small-time pervert with a habit of streaking, and sets out to prove his identity while stumbling into increasingly strange allies, enemies, and alien threats—all while trying to win back a place in Min-chan’s life.

Otaku Consensus

To Be Hero earns its cult affection by smuggling a surprisingly sincere emotional core into a short-form barrage of toilet humor, pervy gags, superhero parody, and workplace absurdity. Its best-reviewed strengths are its ruthless 10-minute pacing, veteran-anime in-jokes, and late-story payoff; its clearest liability is that the comedy can be too crude, scattered, or shallow for viewers who need cleaner plotting or fewer low-brow jokes.

Why You Should Watch

Watch To Be Hero if you want superhero comedy without the battle-shonen bloat: 12 compact episodes, roughly two hours total, built for hard cuts, tonal whiplash, and punchlines that do not wait for permission. It scratches the same irreverent itch as One-Punch Man or the sillier corners of Gintama, but with a much trashier, more bodily-function-obsessed sense of humor and a sharper dad-drama undercurrent than its first impression suggests. The ideal viewer is someone who can laugh at shameless perversion, parody references such as Dragon Ball-style escalation, and grotesque character design, while still being open to a final stretch that reframes the chaos with unexpected sentiment.

Key Characters

U
Uncle(VA: Kenjirou Tsuda)
Uncle is the show’s abrasive comic engine: a role fans remember less as a conventional hero and more as a test of how much vulgarity, insecurity, and wounded affection one protagonist can carry at once.
M
Min-chan
Min-chan gives the series its emotional pressure point, grounding the gag-anime chaos in a relationship that reviewers repeatedly cite as the reason the show becomes more memorable than its crude surface.
Y
Yamada-san
Yamada-san functions as the show’s proudly indecorous sidekick energy, amplifying its streaker-and-pervert comedy while keeping the short episodes moving at sketch-show speed.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
The series uses a short-form structure: 12 episodes at around 10 minutes each, making the full run close to a two-hour watch. That compressed format is central to its reputation for fast pacing rather than a minor scheduling detail.
2
LAN Studio’s production leans into deliberately grotesque contrast, especially in how the heroic fantasy is filtered through ugly bodies, embarrassing behavior, and exaggerated comic staging instead of polished wish fulfillment.
3
Its comedy is openly low-brow, with toilet jokes and perverted humor treated as core texture rather than occasional spice. The positive reviews are notable because they praise the show while still acknowledging that this exact crudeness is the main barrier to entry.
4
The series rewards long-time anime viewers with parody literacy, including jokes that land harder if the viewer recognizes Dragon Ball-style heroic escalation and genre posing.
5
Despite being categorized simply as Comedy with Super Power and Workplace themes, fan discussion often highlights the ending and emotional turn as the real hook, which is why the show is frequently described as more than a disposable gag anime.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: To Be Hero aired during the Fall 2016 season, running from October 5 to December 21, 2016, and finished with 12 episodes.
Fun fact 2: On MyAnimeList, it sits at a 6.91 average from 31,760 votes, with a rank of #5342 and popularity placement of #2943, reflecting a show with modest mainstream standing but unusually passionate defenders in user reviews.
Fun fact 3: Kenjirou Tsuda is credited as the Japanese voice of Uncle, a notable fit because the role asks for both sleazy comic bravado and enough gravitas to sell the show’s later emotional beats.
Fun fact 4: Several user reviews emphasize that the humor was not what kept them watching; they single out the late reveal, emotional payoff, and surprisingly cohesive final impression as the reason the series stuck with them.
Fun fact 5: The To Be Hero name later reappeared in discussion around To Be Hero X, a 2025 action-oriented superhero entry praised in web commentary for having a defined worldview, showing how the original gag-comedy concept became part of a broader superhero-anime conversation.