The time has come my friends to once more pour forth my ill informed opinions upon the pages of the internet. In this weeks thrilling installment I shall be taking as my subject The Ancient Dogu Girl (Kodai Shōjo Doguchan).
Why? Because it's fucking ace, thats why. And I'm not talking about some sort of Showa Ultraman/Dogu-Chan slash fiction here.
Anyway, by now you should already no at least something of the show. Like the fact that it exists for example. If you don't then what on earth have you been doing with your life? Seriously, at least go look up the trailer on youtube or something. We'll wait for you.
Right, is he gone? Good. That's got rid of him.
So yeah, it looks like a funny sort of show. Light hearted comedy tokusatsu with a girl who tends to not wear much and jump about in a jiggly fashion. And to an extent, yes it is. But It's also a lot more than that. This is a high quality production all around, though not necessarily a high budget one. It's very funny, yes, at least at first. But it also has some very dark and serious episodes. Indeed, the ending to the series is (without giving too much away) rather downbeat. And these serious touches are quite powerful simply because they're simply not what I was expecting. The only problem here was that it was as these more serious elements appeared that the subtitles on my copy began to take a turn for the worse, a subject that I have already discussed previously. Bizzarely enough there are several episodes with more than a shade of GARO influence. Which may sound kind of bizarre, and may even just be me. But when you think about Dogu-Chan IS kind of a comedy fanservice version of Garo, so who knows.
Anyway, we have a really solid series here. It's well written, imaginative and original. And, I can't state this clearly enough, really well acted. For a show that's very much concerned with the physical charms of it's leading lady you may not expect acting to be that high up on thelist of requirements. Indeed I've seen other shows (not mentioning that first Onechanbara film at all here) where the actress has clearly been hired for looks over any other concerns. But Dogu-Chan has real character and personality. She even does good in the fight scenes, another plus. The other leads are also well played, and I wouldn't say there's a duff note in the whole production. What we have is people trying their hardest to make the best show they can within the constraints of the budget.
Now, I'm obviously not the only one to notice how good this series is, since they're making a film version using some existing episodes and some new footage, which is great as more Dogu-Chan can only be a good thing, and it gets the word out beyond those few who got to see it on it's original run. As ever, the real question is if the show will ever get a proper release outside of Japan. I think it has a fair chance. I mean, they released Akiballion even if they haven't released Garo or the thousand other actually good drama and Tokusatsu shows. So I guess the sexy element and Machine Girl connection should help a bit.
In the fianl analysis, this is a show I'd recomend without much hesitation to anyone. It has pretty much all the hallmarks of a good series. Including huge wobbly knockers.
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