Dr. Slump

[Digimon_Sommelier]

A work which launched the career of Akira Toriyama (famous for creating the Dragonball series), Dr. Slump takes place in Penguin Village, where humans communicate with talking animals and objects. In this tale, there is an inventor, Senbei Norimaki, who creates a girl robot, Arale Norimaki, who has massive strength and is in need of eyeglasses. She brings home a bear, which she thinks is a pet.

Later on, a villain by the name of Dr. Mashirito appears in the series as a rival to Senbei.

Q: What are your thoughts on this anime? Have you seen it?

[La Féline]

Definitely see the base for some DB characters lol. Havent seen it, but ill look it up. Seems very cute though.

OT: I read the thread name as Dr.Trump, was flabbergasted that they made him a doc and a whole anime series on him.

[PictureGuy]

I found this:



It does have a Dragonball look to it, but seems geared to a younger audience.

[shiteaterbubibinman]

Hey there, I've seen all 243 episodes of the original series. I'm currently subtitling the series in English from French subs. I just finished episode 53 of 54 from that source and I have another 15 to work on from another source. I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about that stuff here, though. I won't mention my site or anything, it's easy enough to find.

As far as I'm concerned, Dr. Slump is the holy grail of anime for me. I'm a fan of fast paced comedy and parody, stuff like Blazing Saddles and Airplane. Dr. Slump is a miraculous combination of the whimsical action oriented anime I love like Dragon Ball and fast paced, kinda raunchy Zucker Bros. / Mel Brooks style parody-comedy. There's no other anime I've come across that has the style Dr. Slump does. It was so popular in Japan, it ran a full year after the manga ended and, this is important because it shows how much Toei Animation put behind this show, it's 243 episodes and not a single episode is a recap episode. That's pretty impressive for an anime from 1981. The year after the manga ended, they allowed the writing staff to create around 50 non-canon episodes to fill out the order because the demand for this show was still really high. It spawned 11 movies, numerous OVAs and holiday specials, and it has some of the best, top notch hand drawn animation the studio ever put out, rivaling anime like Urusei Yatsura as true works of art. During the course of its run, it lampoons an amazing amount of Western movies including Star Wars, National Lampoon's Vacation, Ghostbusters, The Toy, Airplane!, Taxi Driver, 1942, E. T., The Blues Brothers, Saturday Night Fever, the list goes on and on. For Western audiences the show is a treasure trove of references to media from the time period.

I could spout on and on about this show. If the humor doesn't do it for you and you like action, it has multiple "Wacky Races" type competitions as arcs, it has two baseball tournament arcs, and a major fighting tournament. These things are sprinkled among the course of the show, because most episodes are self-contained stories where the people of Penguin Village take turns being major characters while Senbei, Arale, and Gatchan (the main characters) are relegated to being background characters that chew the scenery. If you've ever seen an MGM released Marx Brothers movie where there's two attractive leads that the movie focuses on and the Marx Brothers just run around doing crazy s**t in the background, you'll know sort of what I'm talking about. This show was incredibly ahead of its time and has aged amazingly well.

[PictureGuy]

^ You make Dr. Slump sound interesting. Then it is a dumb, but fun anime.

BUT 243 EPISODES? That's more than Inuyasha or Bleach. How does it keep from getting repetitive? That is the problem with long anime series. They become redundant.

[shiteaterbubibinman]

That's the cool thing with Dr. Slump, it doesn't follow conventional rules like you'd think and it doesn't roll out like a normal anime. After the first couple of episodes where the characters are introduced the story kinda does what it wants and progresses the characters as it pleases. The episodes are generally self contained, which to me affords the show some freedom to be able to change gears on a dime. For example, when the story isn't about Arale's societal tone-deafness and extreme power, or one of Senbei's crazy inventions, or the story isn't following around townsfolk and telling their stories (even the sun has a featured episode), it parodies other sources for story lines. It has episodes where all of a sudden, the characters are cops, and the episode plays like a cop show. Or they become a gang of thieves, or they're working in an airport. Then the next episode, it's back to Penguin Village and some new adventure. This show even cares about weather cycles and seasonal changes. When an episode aired in the summer, it's summer in the show. On Christmas, every Christmas this show aired, there was a Christmas special. This was like the must see show on at the time it aired. It had major merchandising going on, and it was a big deal in Japan at the time, so the studio was just throwing money at it, and all that money is on screen.