I sure hope you're a fan of repetitive name calling. Cuz that's what you're going to get in the very first episode of Digimon.
Every character's name must be said at least three or four times and given that there are seven children and 7 Digimon that's a total of...... 42 Times!!
Okay all joking aside I don't think anybody's name individually get said that many times.
But it is a bit repetitive and it's a little bit of a pain in the butt given the Digimon evolve into new creatures at the very end and the evolved forms have different names from the previous.
However it's forgivable given that it's the first episode. We got to lay the foundations for all our different characters.
And don't say that they do a pretty decent job. We see that Tai is headstrong and charismatic. Sara is similar but with a slightly more controlled and cautious approach.
Joe is the perceived Authority who's kind of a wimp.
Then there's Mimi who's supposed to be the cute girl who's also kind of handy. But as of the moment undefined. Then I guess there's Lzzy who doesn't really have a character but he does on a computer which means he is a wizard.
finally there's the rest. All characters with their own unique Personalities in time but as of the moment they're just kind of blank slates. And I'm not bothered by that because it gives you more character development as time goes on. Which is something that the Digimon series desperately needs and its earlier episodes.
So the opening of the show is kind of brutal in a way. It's just global warming. Parts of the planet that are naturally hot or turning cold, cold parts of the planet are starting to turn on hot. Mass parts of Western Asia are being destroyed by tidal waves (which if I'm not mistaken means that hundreds of thousands of people are dead in the first minute of the show). And somehow all of this is linked to some sort of digital mishap which catches a bunch of kids at a summer camp Retreat and transports them away to a digital world not unlike the movie Tron. Except there's no funky laser to turn them into weird cubes.
We than spend a significant amount of time with each kid gradually finding each other accompanied by a blob fish creature known as a digimon. Each Digimon for some reason already having info on the respective kid.
The kids are underdeveloped characters at this point and the Digimon are even more so. Most of them just having a very Baseline personality which in some way is Loosely connected to the personality of the kids.
They're cute and silly, they jump around doing weird and stupid things. At some point they all end up having to fight this Giant Beetle monster which is trying to attack them all.
Which leads to everybody being thrown off of a cliff and plummeting toward the lake.
The second episode opens up with them plummeting to said Lake and then being saved by their digimons respective powers.
For at this point they've evolved a little bit and now they're not just a little blobs but individual and distinct monsters. This is where their default form will be.
And we end up with the characters as such:
Agumon, Gabumon, Biyomon, Tentomon, Palmon, Gomamon, and Patamon.
All of these creatures names ending with the same syllable makes it kind of annoying. And a bit difficult to remember just who's who.
But overall most them going to remain in this one state and everything else is just kind of secondary.
The second episode is kind of nice in that we finally get a bit more Intrigue and story development. The kids encountering the strange phone booths which kind of connect them to the real world but at the same time don't.
It leaves us a whole mystery of just what the hell it is that's going on. With a group of kids that still aren't entirely sure where they are at are gung-ho determines that they're still in the real world.
We also get to see a lot of setup for future episodes showing us just what it is that each kid has some of which possessing medical supplies others having camping supplies and our wizard kid having his technology which is completely useless as of the moment.
It's kind of nice to have a show like this actually have a bit of setup for its future episode. It doesn't just feel like I'm blind Adventure, where something weird and stupid is going to happen next episode that I'll have no connection to the next.
In this episode the only thing of note is that Tay's Digimon Agumon evolving again into Greymon to fight this even bigger Digimon that was attacking them earlier.
And this is where the power structure of these creatures really starts to ramp up.
They start out as cute baby and they evolve into standard young form which is defensible but not really all that powerful. Then the next round is literally just a T-Rex (with fire).
A hulking monstrosity that can beat the ever-living crap out of whatever is in its path. And given that they have even more stages after this it really shows you just how amped up the show plans to get with some of its creature battles. Once again leaving us with a lot of intrigue and a genuine reason to want to keep watching.
And peppered in between all the fighting is just genuine character development. As kids start to learn little tidbits about one another.
Overall it's not a start for what would become one of the most popular Japanese cartoons of the late 90s \ early 2000s. However I do have one confusing gripe.
And that is the theme song.
In the Japanese version it's this kind of generic Rock ballad that technically sound better than the American ''rap'' up version. But it just doesn't have any style.
You could hear it amongst a thousand other songs and you wouldn't be able to pick it out of a crowd.
Say what you will about the Americans silly rap but it sticks out and you know exactly what you're getting every time you hear it.
It's just such an odd thing when you're used to the English version. Subsequently I don't know how different the stories get between English and Japanese here.
I remember the English version having the occasional dark and strange moment. So I'm generally intrigued by just how much was actually altered.
Comments
Post a Comment