Has there ever been a manga that broke big by shamelessly aping the biggest manga of its era? I’m going to guess not.

Today, the big manga is One Piece, and reportedly some editors want creators to make their strips more like Eiichiro Oda’s record breaking comic. In 1991, Shonen Jump had two behemoths of the medium on its pages, Dragonball and Slam Dunk. You could see their influence in both manga and anime of the day, but with Dodge Danpei you get two blockbuster series emulated for the price of one.

Based on a manga by Tetsuhiro Koshita, it feels like someone looked at Slam Dunk and said “well, another basketball manga would be too obvious, what’s another indoor ball game where you use your hands? Oh I know, dodgeball! And while you’re at it can you make it look like a poor man’s Akira Toriyama? Thanks.”

The end result is a hero who looks like a red headed Goku, a friend who’s a Krillin look alike and dodgeball uniforms that look like Toriyama designed body armour. Plus, other occasional Toriyama-esque touches like the shape of some characters eyes & eyebrows and silhouette hairstyles.

This first episode introduces us to hyperactive brat Danpei, and Danpei to the dodgeball team. This involves some nonsense with a dangerous loose dog and the thugs who own it being dealt with through the use of DODGEBALL SKILLS. I hope the rest of the show kept up this theme. Need to change a light bulb? Throw a dodgeball at it. Cooking a meal? Throw a dodgeball at it. Filling in tax returns? Throw a dodgeball at it.

We then get a scene where Danpei’s unnecessarily hot mother dresses up as a shark to scare her son, before being given the standard perverted camera pan up her swim-suited body. It’s not at a Gear Fighter Dendoh level in oddly Oedipal creative choices, but it does feel a little odd. Probably can’t blame the animators too much here, as a Google image search reveals that this is definitely Koshita’s thing.

Finally, this is all topped off a piece of lunacy that turned me around on this episode. Danpei visits his dad’s grave, and we get a superimposed shot of his dad in his dodgeball gear. Which has Games Workshop style SHOULDER SPIKES. Danpei then accidentally knocks the gravestone over, revealing a secret compartment containing a SPECIAL SECRET DODGEBALL. With a flame logo on it.

Outside of the irony-free gusto that the show has, there’s little to recommend here. Even more than Metaljack, this show feels like what I imagined all the early nineties TV anime that we didn’t get to see because we were too busy with OAVS to be like. As with many other shows of the era, the videogame spin-offs seem to be remembered better than the actual manga and anime that spawned them. As well it might, as Dodge Danpei had seven videogames based on it in the span of 1992-93.

Koshita had bigger hit with Lets&Go in the late nineties and more recently has been working on licenced strips such as Yatterman, Toy Story and Inazuma Eleven, a property that draws from the same well as Koshita’s own works did. Maybe even bit from Koshita himself.

Do you like music? Do you like anime? Do you like uninformed judgement cast down on anime music?

Then Anison Armageddon is for you!

We’ll take TEN anime songs from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s & today and, between our panel of “experts” and the audience, decide which is best. But these aren’t just any old anime songs thrown together, there is a THEME. A mystery theme that will entertain and inform.

We did a trial version on our podcast, Dynamite In The Brain, where we reviewed Xmas anime songs, so if you aren’t sure what this will be, check that out.

There is only one place you will see MADstravaganza this year, and that is at Kitacon! Not Minami. Not Amecon. This is it, people. This is all you are getting for 2012.

The sixth MADstravaganza proper, it will be the usual grab bag of nonsense, fun and happiness. After 5 years of this, I know what I’m doing, so put your brains in my hands and let me hit them with my audio/visual sticks.

(unlike seemingly every other event, there will be no actual quizzes, tournaments or contests)

(there will be dancing, possibly by cats.)

Does Earl and Fairy have a manga? Yes

hey does anyone know what a good harem show is? No, nobody knows.

does golgo 13 died? yes, he doesn’t.

what does harry hill look like? Like this, but a real human, not a drawing.

what does rumiko takahashi think of everest? She preferred the Ted Moult ads to the Craig Doyle ones.

what page in the story rascal by sterling north does rascal go into the neighbors farm? page 42

hulk red, spidey not married, what’s next for marvel? Stagnation

what did sterling north get sick from in the book the rascal? Raccoon Pox

what was the manga called with the big cat in 1993? Ushio and Tora

how to be my own batman? Keep attending the theatre with your parents until they are inevitably gunned down in a mugging gone wrong. It’s bound to happen eventually, law of averages.

how to see a ghost? Rent out the film Ghostbusters, it’s full of them!

who is audience for rock n rolla? Idiots

who killed monk’s wife trudy? Lieutenant Randy Disher

who sings the superjail theme song? Cheeseburger

Have they come up with a way yet to distinguish the arcs of Gundam AGE yet? Is this the Flit arc? The Ambat arc? Whatever it’s being called or will be called, I’m calling it the first fifteen episodes of Gundam AGE.

There’s a tendency when writing positive things about this series to try and defend it from its critics. I am going to try and avoid that, because it’s a waste of time. Gundam fans are the worst for creating a non-existent ideal in their heads of what their favourite show should be. I know this because I have my own non-existent ideal that the past three Gundam series have singularly failed to live up to.

So far though, Gundam AGE gets closer than most. And here’s why.

Different body types. This isn’t even a Gundam thing. There’s some difference in body types in the original series, but nothing approaching Gundam AGE‘s array of near spherical grandfathers, underclass manual labourers with tiny legs, pretty boy pilots with hair shaped like ears, and kids with out of control blue fringes. What it reminded me more of was Leiji Matsumoto’s character design work, but that might just be the sci-fi setting as Level 5 like this sort of variation in their other works like Professor Layton and Inazuma Eleven. It’s just a little more swish coming from Sunrise than when it comes from OLM.

Just one Gundam. Gundam variants are fun, and they sell more model kits, but I do like the idea of giving a Gundam a mythical quality by making there be only one. And in Gundam AGE, it literally has a mythical quality, with the idea of a Gundam lost in the past, and resurrected by the hero Flit. Plus the AGE system is a clever way to have variants, but still keep only one Gundam in the show.

Mystery. While the show hits a lot of beats  familiar to long time Gundam fans, it does something different in making the whole first 15 episodes essentially a mystery story. That mystery is who are the Unknown Enemy? By the fifteenth episode we have an answer, but more many more questions. The characters themselves though become so driven by revenge that by the time the reveal is made, they have arguably dehumanised the enemy in their minds that the answer is meaningless. Certainly it appears that way for one of the leads.

Big Dumb Sci-Fi Idea The show has a bunch of old Gundam concepts, sometimes dressed up in new names, but it also has the big dumb sci-fi idea of the show – the AGE system. It is essentially a 3D printer that creates modifications for the Gundam based on combat data. You know who else uses 3D printers? The designers at Bandai who work on Gundam model kits. Adding to the sense that the mecha design is going from Gunpla to Anime rather than vice-versa, is that the AGE system created modifications attach themselves to the Gundam frame as if they were pieces of a model kit.

The lessons of the last 15 years of anime designed to sell toys/games, is that you have to make the characters’ experiences with the “toys” in the show as close as humanly possible to the customers’ experiences in the real world. That’s a tall order for a show about pilotable robots (compare it to the LBX robots of Level 5′s Danball Senki), but this feels like an intelligent attempt to address it. Can it do it better than the shows that have shouldered out robot shows from the daytime schedules? Time, and money, will tell.

I’m looking forward to see how the generational gimmick makes a difference as we jump 26 years ahead in the story and join Flit’s son, Asemu as he becomes the hero of the series.

Over on dynamiteinthebrain.com we have a new episode about Ninja Scroll, with special guest Niall Flanagan from Secret of The Sailor Madness.

Download Dynamite In The Brain – Episode 37 – Ninja Scroll

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Over on dynamiteinthebrain.com we have a new episode about Genius Party Beyond. We also talk about some of the winter 2012 anime we’ve been watching.

Download Dynamite In The Brain – Episode 36 – Genius Party

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