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R1 DVD Reviews
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 00:00 |
 Parody. It's a difficult thing to take right, but Dokkoida!? is a series, originally given its English-language release by Geneon in 2004, that manages to be just about perfect. Visually taking a lot of cues from the likes of Ultraman, there's plenty else it takes pot-shots at along the way...
1 - Enter Dokkoida!
Tanpopo, hard-working employee of Otankonasu Corporation, is on the lookout for someone to trial her company's latest product: Powered Suit Dokkoida, one of the lead runners for the new powered suit contract for the Galaxy Federation Police. Some major toy revenue will be up for grabs if they get the contract, so it's a big deal for her and the company, and her unwilling / unwitting guineapig is going to be young man Suzuo Sakurazaki - he's been having a hard time getting a part-time job, and he's just the right size for the suit. He's more than a bit dubious about taking on the job, though - until Dr Marronflower, Class-A Space Criminal, appears & quickly destroys every place that poor Suzuo had been due to call with about a job. With Tanpopo's the only job left on offer, he finally agrees to wear her transformation belt - and so begins his life as superhero Dokkoida, with Tanpopo taking on the role of his fictional little sister, Kosuzu. Tanpopo's company isn't the only one bidding for the contract, though, and they're soon joined by a rival - Emerald Company's Neruloid Girl...
2 - Purple Hair, How Hip Can Ya Get?
With their first challenge having been disposed of fairly easily, it's time for Suzuo to face his next challenge - Kosuzu's cooking. Being alien, she hasn't really managed the art of edible food yet. After that, the GFP's next challenge seems set to be harder than the last - with the new powered suits intended to cover for the force's severe lack of manpower, a serious challenge is needed for Dokkoida and Neruloid Girl, and so there are two Class-A Space Criminals for them to take care of this time - bondage queen Hyacinth with her trademark hentai attack, and butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth cutie Edelweiss, expert in the art of Golem-making. But taking them on would be so much easier for the good guys if they would just stop fighting each other...
3 - Dokkoida Versus Edelweiss
Suzuo's lamenting his low pay & contemplating asking Kosuzu for a raise when he meets young girl Ruri (Edelwiess's alter-ego), who has just moved into Cosmos-sou with her family. Ruri seems to have a mission in life - to properly peel an apple, without cutting herself. Suzuo would be quite happy to show her how (in return for a bite of said apple...), but Ruri's not the most approachable little girl. One thing she is good at, though, is creating her Golems, so she takes out her frustrations with a little Golem-fuelled rampage through town. Naturally, it's the rival powered suits, Neruloid Girl & Dokkoida, who have to stop her...
4 - The Strange Neighbor, Sayuri
Cosmos-sou has another new resident, Sayuri (better known to her victims as Hayacinth) - not that the other residents initially realise that she's moved in. All they know is that there are some very strange sounds coming from an apartment that's meant to be empty, and it's making a few of them believe that they've been put up in a haunted house. Except for Asaka, who's too hungover to notice the noises. Later, though, Suzuo gets to meet Sayuri, and discovers her even more terrifying appetite.
Kurinohana, meanwhile, has a personal crisis when his copy of Petite Princess is sold off, and resorts to drastic measures to retrieve it from its new owner - except everyone else seems to want to join in the fight as well...
A little backstory, first. The Galaxy Federation Police is an organisation in trouble - they just can't get the staff, and the galaxy's criminal fraternity is kicking its ass at every turn. The powered suit contract is their last, best hope - not only will powered suits make the jobs of their officers so much easier, but the selection process is being broadcast as a reality TV show, to help boost the force's image. This is all the brainchild of Mogumuggle (or something like that - it's a running gag in the series that no-one can get his name right), and his own career rests on the success or failure of the competition. No pressure there, then.
The rules are simple: two candidate suits, in the form of Dokkoida and Neruloid Girl, and an array of Class-A villains who have the carrot of amnesty being dangled in front of them if they can unmask the humans inside the suits - which of course would also eliminate that suit from the process. Good guys and bad guys all live together in Cosmos House, an apartment block provided by the GFP for the duration of the contest, where everyone has a human identity separate from their fighting persona - and where no-one seems to realise that yes, they do all know each other from somewhere else.
The lack of attention that Dokkoida!? has had since it first appeared on the fansub circuit borders on the criminal, if you ask me. There are only a few recent comedy or parody shows that have been able to consistently make me laugh, and this is the best of them - a particular achievement given how hit and miss parody can be, depending on how much you know about what they're poking fun at.
For these episodes, there is an ongoing plot of sorts, but you really don't need to pay much attention to it - the fun is with the dysfunctional characters, the situations they find themselves in, and the ways they interact with each other, both in their 'human' forms (where the show also manages to display a surprising knack at pulling at the heartstrings), and in their transformed supervillain / superhero personas (which is where most of the comedy comes from). The full set of villains are introduced here, first with a battle showing their villainous prowess, then with a more down-to-earth tale showing how different they are in their day-to-day lives. Dr Kurinohana is a dirty old man who loves his eroge games; Ruri is a lonely, abandoned child who probably counts as an early example of moe~, long before the term came into use; and Sayuri is a bottomless pit where food is concerned, and not against using her killer bod to get her way (especially with Suzuo). In their villain personas, Marronflower is a big fan of destructive mecha; Edelweiss is adept at creating enormous clay golems that can be used to terrify the town; and former zookeeper Hyacinth has quite literally got a zoo's worth of animals somehow locked away inside the body of her bondage slave, ready to released on demand by a few licks of her heavy-duty whip. This is not a series for the politically-correct - but it's got just the sort of wicked sense of humour that I love.
Add in Asaka, aka Neruloid Girl, a heavy-drinking college student who seems to rely heavily on the Misato stereotype, and Tanpopo, aka Kosuzu, Suzuo's controller and creator of Dokkoida who's a short-tempered genius in the body of a young girl, and you get a cast when covers all the major archetypes that you'd find in anime. Put them in an apartment block with Suzuo, and hey! You've also got the makings of a harem setting, should the show want to poke fun at that too. And it will.
With this volume forced to focus so heavily on character introductions, it's not as heavy on the funny stuff as later volumes will be (from memory, volume two is particularly good), but there's still plenty here to work with. Suzuo may be a bit of a wimp, but he's just a building block for the series to be built around - it's the rest of the cast that make the series work and give it most of its sense of fun, and make it easily worth watching. Bright, brash, occasionally offensive, and great fun throughout.
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