In my typical half awake, middle of the night state I was looking through the listing of new fansubs over on AnimeNfo and ran across a show called Earth Defense Family. Upon looking at the description I decided I will have to try and snag at least one episode of it:
An ordinary family is chosen to become high-tech fighters to defend the earth from an invasion of horrible alien monsters. The family consists of 8 year old Daiichi, his 14 year old big sister, his 34 year old Mom and his 40 year old Dad. But this isnt your ordinary Japanese family after all.
First of all, everyone is involved in this, not just the kids. All four have their own power suits, special weapons and roles. Daiichi and his sister have flying surf boards, the Moms car transforms into a flying car and the Dads suit doubles as a rocket suit. Everyone is initially enthusiastic about this turn of events, but things start to wear thin pretty quickly when they find out that they are charged for each super weapon that they use to defeat an alien, and the bounties that they get are being swamped by an ever growing debt. And they can't resign because the unknown agency that has chosen them will throw them into debtors prison if they don't pay off their bills.
I like when they take a fairly typical genre and add interesting little twists to it.
