Looking back at my review of Chu Bra, I can’t help think that the Brian who wrote that would be disgusted with the Brian who’s about to write this. But you know what, that Brian thinks Puni Puni Poemi is one of the best anime of the 2000s, so he can shut his goddamn mouth. That’s right, the so called past, I’m taking you down. With this following outrageous claim.

Gokujyo was one of the funniest anime shows I’ve seen.

Of course, I’m going to have to qualify that. It couldn’t actually manage to be one of the funniest anime shows throughout the hour’s worth of material in its 12 five minute episodes, but its highs ilicited some of the biggest (and guiltiest) laughs I’ve had from anime.

Based on a gag strip by Maya Miyazaki, the show had a troubled run. Various episodes were decreed unsuitable for television broadcast, leading to suggestions it was some sort of publicity stunt to encourage later sales of “uncensored” DVDs or push people to the DMM site where it was streaming.

Having watched it now, I’m not sure that was the case, as there’s less nudity than the comic version and there’s not really much censoring there. If you knew you were never going to be on the telly from the get go, why didn’t you do some of the strips where everyone’s naked? What the pulled episodes seem to have been censored for is exceptionally filthy jokes rather than anything erotic.

The show revolves around Aya Akabane, who is a rich teenager sent to an all girls high school, her classmates, her biker gang member sister and the school nurse (the other member of said biker gang). Rampaging hormones, teenage stupidity and convenient plot device personality disorders result in frequently lewd slapstick and farcical situations over twelve five minute episodes. It’s the Three Stooges if they were Japanese teenage girls and their shorts had been about masturbation and lesbians.

There’s been a number of these tales of horrible teenage girls, written by women, for men (is there some ludicrous conjunction that otaku use to describe them?) that have made their way from comic to television since the late night anime boom kicked off. I want to say the early Bob Shirohata show Momoiro Sisters (1998) was the first to do this on late night TV, but I might be wrong.

Gokujyo was the first show in recent memory that brought to mind those early days of the late night anime boom and the Wonderful slot (where Momoiro Sisters aired) in particular. Like Wonderful, Gokujyo sat inside an bigger entertainment programme (In this case SKE48 no Sekai Seifuku Joshi). And like the Wonderful shows, it was at its best when it showed a complete disregard to the idea of making the characters likeable.

Of course this is 2012, and sometimes it can’t resist the lure of the sentimentality. The final episode is the worst for this. The characters get all soppy over a character leaving who has barely been in the show, and when she has, the other characters didn’t really care for her all that much. Given how short the series running time is, they could have used this time better.

At its best though, it is full of cruel monsters engaging in the most ridiculous sexual slapstick. Maya Miyazaki made her name on erotic comics and while the anime won’t fully embrace the near gynaecological physicality of some of her punchlines, it does often make for a refreshingly physical farce. There’s some good character-based and verbal gags in there too, though some of that is lost through self-censoring, resulting a couple of the characters barely having personalities in the anime. Not that they are anywhere approaching nuanced from what I’ve seen of the comic, but a few missing visual gags would have helped differentiate what can seem very similar “straight man” characters in the anime.

By the end of the series you’re left with a filthy minded show that occasionally reached some great, grotesque, heights with its gags, but never quite managed to stay there.

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Top Striker isn’t very good, yet it has its charms.

It often feels like a weird hybrid of World Masterpiece Theatre and a sports anime. A big part of this is due to it being a Nippon Animation production, but the design by Nobuhiro Okasako comes across as an odd choice. While, to my knowledge, he didn’t design any WMT shows he did do some design work on Adventures of Pepero the Andes Boy which we could kindly describe as a WMT peer. Given that he did the anime character design for the first Captain Tsubasa show, you’d think that he’d have been a good fit.

The difference is that in Tsubasa, Youichi Takahashi’s original designs still shine through in the anime whereas Top Striker is an original work. The irony is that if you put the giant heads of Top Striker‘s kid characters on the bodies of the adult Tsubasa characters, you might get something closer to a normal human being’s proportions.

As it is though, whatever good there is in the layout of some of the football scenes, it often feels like the character designs are scuppering it with their enormous bonces. 

The show also feels like it was a year late, being about a Japanese kid playing football in Italy, yet arriving on screens a year after Italia 90. Did Italia 90 kick start some sort of Japanese interest in Italy that made this show a good idea?

Storywise the first episode feels like it was generated by a checklist. Orphan? Check! Disapproving Aunt? Check! Kindly maid? Check! Avuncular older gentleman? Check! And so on. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s you’re likely to have seen this umpteen times before, both in and outside of anime. I suspect the same is true if you grew up in any decade after the Victorian era. That’s orphantainment!

The reason it still charms is it all that cliched stuff isn’t horribly written, and there’s tiny little touches that make you think they put a little more thought in than they probably needed to. For instance when the show’s avuncular older gentleman, Mr Bertini is due to meet the disapproving Aunt for the first time, we see he’s slicked his hair down to a ridiculous extent in some attempt to pull himself up to the aunt’s social standing. It’s a simple little character piece that tells us more about Mr Bertini just through the drawings on the screen.

Another neat trick it pulls is when we flashback to the town doctor’s earlier career as an ace striker, the show tries to give that scene a pseudo-sixties anime feel both with making the flashback black and white and to some degree in the way the action is shown. There’s just enough charm in the character work and the football scenes to get across the romance of football (and Italy) despite the technical shortcomings and the cliched plot.

It’s still not enough to make me want to watch more, but I can see why they thought people might have wanted to watch it in 1991. While it didn’t make it’s way to the UK, it did air on Franch, Italian and Spanish television. Next time, we will take a look at a 1991 show that did make to the UK airwaves.

Oh, and I almost forgot, a small child’s life is literally saved by the power of football in this first episode. In that someone kicks a football to stop something killing a child. And then an impromptu town celebration breaks out. That helped charm me too. I am a sucker for sports stories where the sports skills can be used to solve EVERYTHING. I blame Sport Billy.

After the Dodge Danpei post I thought I’d look a little closer into the career of Tetsuhiro Koshita. His early career seems a little problematic in putting a finger on. For starters, his wikipedia page doesn’t give dates or links for his earliest work. Luckily it does seem to all available on the Comic Park site.

His first work was 拝啓サラダボーイ (Dear Salad Boy?) in 1985. No idea what it was about, but it does have some curious set texts in the English lessons featured in the Comic Park preview pages.

This was followed by the similarly not talked about in English, パニック方程式 (Panic Equation?). Here you can start to see a Toriyama influence come through on the male lead’s character design. According to Comic Park both these strips ran in Special Edition Shonen Sunday as it was then.

Next we have the series that really sets the tone for Koshita’s career, ミニ四駆 RC伝説 燃えろ! アバンテ兄弟 (Which I’m guessing is something like Mini 4WD RC Burning Legend! Avante Brothers). It’s also the first series I could find real details on, but even then I don’t have publication dates for it. It was a strip in Shogakukan’s CoroCoro Comic Special designed to promote Tamiya’s Avante 2001 radio controlled (RC) car. As that came out in 1990, it would suggest the strip hit around that time too.

During the 80s, the RC hobby boomed and so did Tamiya’s fortunes. There were two prongs to this boom, the first was the launch of a non-RC range of battery powered mini four wheel drive (4WD) cars in 1982. By 1987, they had sold 10 million mini 4WD, leading to the launch of a mini 4WD themed manga in the pages of Monthly CoroCoro Comic, Dash! Yonkuro by the late Zaurus Tokuda. This was followed by a Dash! Yonkuro anime in 1989.

The other key to Tamiya’s boom was the release of their first four wheel drive RC car, the Hot Shot in 1985.

This meant you had a situation where kids would get started with the mini-4WD, then move onto the 4WD RC racers as they got older. If you don’t believe me, then check out the preview of ミニ四駆 RC伝説 燃えろ! アバンテ兄弟 on comicpark.net. It is a shameless instructional document on how to enjoy your Tamiya product.

The older brother has an RC Avante, so the kid brother goes to the shop and buys the Avante Jr, the mini 4WD brother of the Avante. There are even photos of the cars in the strip. And in case you don’t get the message, kid brother wears a top with 4WD on it, older brother a hat with Avante on it. BUY BUY BUY, RACE RACE RACE!

Let us also take the time to note the superb slogan of the Avante line of cars – BEING NUTS IS NEAT.

While we didn’t get the cartoons or comics, the RC & mini-4WD craze spread far and wide, our local model shop in Spalding, Lincolnshire did great business in selling mini-4WD cars to our year when I was at secondary school, with some moving onto RC as they got older. Even now I find the Tamiya logo sets off some nostalgic trigger in my brain.

Next from Tetsuhiro Koshita was Dodge Danpei, running from 1989 to 1995 in CoroCoro Comic, but we’ve covered this in its own post here.

Then, we get the big series where Koshita truely becomes Tamiya’s go to guy for selling their cars to kids, in the way Zaurus Tokuda had been in the 80s - Bakusō Kyōdai Let’s & Go!!

Much like his other Tamiya strip it involves two brothers who race Tamiya cars, cars that you could then go to the shops and buy, with little pictures of the anime characters in the corner. It ran in CoroCoro Comic from 1994 to 1999 and spawned three tv series that ran during 1996 to 1998. In retrospect it feels like these sort of series are the connective tissue between the robot model kit selling shows of the 80s and trading card game selling shows of the late 90s/00s.

They’ve got the elements of SD look that the robot shows started to move to with the popularity of console games, they’ve got the kit building element of Gundam and its followers, but they’ve also got the stronger protagonist identification that Pokemon and the shows that came in its wake have.

2000 for Koshita saw him return to strips that weren’t designed to sell toys, with Get the Goal!! 4v4 Arashi. It did still stick to the tried and tested formula of young boys and sports, this time focussing on 4v4 football, the Dutch coaching system that gained popularity in youth football. While it didn’t get the anime that Dodge Danpei and Lets & Go did, it did get a Gameboy Advance game.

And a pencil.

Such is the parcity of facts on this strip that the pencils are mentioned on the wikipedia page for the manga.

Then, it was back to working with Tamiya in 2004, with Kattobi Racer! Dangun Wolf. This was to tie in with the Dangun Racer line of models. Whereas the Mini 4WD race in seperate lanes, these are designed to run in the same lane and run each other off the course. Basically imagine if everyone in a bobsleight contest went at the same time and their bobsleighs had motors.

In effect you’re seeing the physical battling aspect of Pokemon work it’s way into the markets that it elbowed out of the hearts and minds of children.

Then, apparently there was something called STRONGEST WATCHDOG GAO, that I have no clue about. Anyone?

That was followed by another football manga, Goal Getter Yao, which only lasted one volume.

Then we get onto what seems to be the next part to Koshita’s career. Whereas before he’d been building characters and stories around Tamiya’s products, since 2008 there’s been a run of series based on other people’s characters. Firstly a Yatterman manga to tie into the very successful revival on television and the cinema. Then in 2010, he worked on a Toy Story series based on the Disney/Pixar property and an Inazuma Eleven series based on the Level 5 videogame. 

That last one is a natural fit, as it’s very much in the mould of both Koshita’s sports manga and the sports/rpg hybrid videogames that were often made from them.

Please do correct anything I’ve got wrong or add any obvious missing aspects in the comments. There’s very little in English about Koshita, so there’s plenty of room for me making mistakes here or overlooking the obvious. Never the less, I do feel like I’ve made some more connections in my mind about how we got from Gundam to Cardfight Vanguard.

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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.)

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.