 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...
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...
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 most of the series, 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 early in the series, 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 common 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 respective 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 Kosuzu, aka Tanpopo, 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 which 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, at time, it does.
It's around the mid-point of the series that the show gets around to showing that it also has a heart. Episode 7 is different enough from the rest of the series that it deserves a special mention, and focusses on Marronflower's "grand-daughter", Kurika. Kurika is an unusual character, especially by this show's standards - she's shy and reserved in a world full of characters that are so over-the-top that no wall could contain them. That means that, under normal circumstances, she doesn't get any chance to shine as she's just outdone by anyone else who happens to be on-screen. How, then, do you give her a chance to be herself? By giving her an episode of her own, with the show's usual frenetics packed away in favour of something with the pacing of ARIA. While that means that it's very out-of-keeping with the rest of the series, it's also a damned good episode.
Good as that episode is, though, there's better around it, it least when it comes to raising a smirk. The other midseason episodes do the usual Dokkoida thang of playing to established ideas - how many times have you seen impoverished college students go begging for part-time jobs? Or a boy and his harem heading for the swimming pool? These are ideas that have been done 1,001 times before in many different shows, and Dokkoida revisits the idea and puts its own spin on them. They're far from earth-shattering stories, but perfectly enjoyable.
It was episode 8 that really go me, though. I can remember back in 2002 when the series was first released in Japan, when Sister Princess (both eroge and anime) was also on the go and when Onegai Teacher was pulling in fanboys in droves - both shows dealt with 'forbidden' relationships (incest in SisPri, student-teacher in OneTei), and this episode picks up on that theme - and makes it work oh-so-much better than it should have by giving cameo roles to characters from both properties. A real top-priority idea, if I may say so - and made all the funnier by the way the Cosmos House characters deal with the Suzuo / Kosuzu relationship that only exists in their own fevered imaginations. Classic stuff.
Interestingly, the midseason fun also sees the 'powered suit trials' and the Galaxy Federation Police pretty much forgotten about for a while (Mogumuggle - or whatever his name is - and his aide are seen just once, lying on the beach), but in its way that's no bad thing. Instead, we get to see that Dokkoida can actually do 'serious' when it needs to, while still pulling off the comedy as well as ever in the other episodes.
Which brings us on to the show's conclusion. I've watched the full series of Dokkoida?! several times now, and I'm still undecided about the final two episodes, where all trace of parody goes out of the window in favour of a straight powered-suit-hero story. On the one hand, UFOTable do a pretty good job of recreating the sort of show that Dokkoida!? took a lot of its inspiration from, but at the same time it isn't really the sort of story this series has been about. Sure, the characters do bring their quirkiness to the conclusion, but compared to some of the episodes that went before, it just doesn't feel quite right.
Still, that's not a huge criticism, and it's certainly not enough to spoil the series as a whole. As the saying goes, "Always leave them wanting more", and that's something that Dokkoida!? has managed brilliantly. Very highly recommended.
For full episode summaries and screenshots, check out the reviews of the individual releases:
» Volume 1: Ultra Diaper Man
» Volume 2: Mega Mania Attack
» Volume 3: The Lost Action Hero
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