Daiguard #1: Hostile Takeover ADV 125 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 09/24/2002

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Sometimes a mood just strikes you. Last Friday I had an oven stuffer-roaster in the fridge, but the mood struck Jerry to buy fried chicken from the Arab merchants below the EL[evated Train]. Fine, whatever... we went to get our chicken and our "fixin's" and we had a good meal. The tone of the evening, I thought, was perfect for Millennium Actress. This is a film I've been wanting to see now for, I don't know... LIKE A MILLION YEARS. I thought it'd be a good night for it. With the crowd being limited to Jerry, Bare and myself there would be less noise and less distractions. I might be able to actually pay a good amount of attention to the movie. Unfortunately Disney, in their superior wisdom, did not see fit to include a dubbed track for Millennium Actress. Normally I don't like to watch subtitles, but I'll still do it. What I will not do is watch subtitles in a crowd unless absolutely necessary. Too much work, too much of a chance to miss something. It's not fair, yeah, but. Disney's never really been heralded as some messiah of anime production.

Thus, we instead decided to watch Daiguard, which is kind of like an irony (or something) in itself, seeing as how many of ADV's dubs as of late contain more than a fair amount of editing. That wouldn't be enough to discourage us. While I placed the disk in my decrepit, ancient DVD player I explained to Jerry that I had basically heard it was a similar concept to Shinesman, a robot version of the parody that wonderful show heaped upon us. Was Daiguard good? Sure, pretty good... but was I right? I'm still not entirely sure. Akagi, Aoyama and Ibuki are employees of the 21st Century Defense Corporation, whose major goal in life a few years ago was the construction of a giant robot (Daiguard) to fight off the invading Heterodynes, a group of evil, destructive creatures who more than slightly resemble the stranger designed angels of Neon Genesis Evangelion. The group of three mentioned are, obviously, pilots. But due to the 'unfortunate' circumstance of there being no actual monsters to kill they're relegated more to duties like prancing around in giant bird suits and handing out balloons to children.

This is striking to me because, yeah, that kind of seems like what would happen if you DID try out to be a robot pilot, something like that. Though I'm sure it's unintentional and I'm sure I'm reading too much into it, Daiguard presents a not-to-pretty picture of what office politics are like today (sans robots, which kind of blows). You get hired for something but, whoops, they don't need you! Now you're stuck changing light bulbs for the rest of your career, you know, unless you just get outright fired. Things get better for the pilots of the giant robot, Daiguard, don't you worry! Soon after the start of the first episode the troops find themselves entrenched in battle with one of the evil Heterodynes that has managed to crawl its way out of the sea. Akagi, the impetuous young leader, forces Aoyama, the cool headed one, and Ibuki, the spunky girl, into battle positions and with a swipe of their magnetic cards, Daiguard is off to save the day! Displaying an uncharacteristic amount of real life politics, though, much more of team Daiguard's time is spent filling out accident verification reports and damage claims than anything else. If anything, it seems that Daiguard is always a last result, most often being launched behind the board member's backs while they're distracted with something else.

Yeah, the swipecard bit was pretty funny. I don't like to laugh at anime too often, or rather, I don't laugh at anime often, but Daiguard certainly has more than its fair share of moments, especially considering these early episodes commit a heavy focus to Daiguard losing a hand in some fashion or another. Despite a weird obsession with baseball, including baseball monsters (pictured right, though they don't describe it as such) Daiguard can be pretty creative when it wants to. There's a surprising lack of anything bad here. It's heartening that you can go through five episodes of a new show and not see a single panty shot. However, Daiguard's problem is that it doesn't go as far as it should. While watching it I often had ideas for jokes/sight gags that would've been better than the ones actually contained in the show. And I'm not even really THAT funny of a guy, think what someone experienced with this stuff could do. Daiguard obviously isn't trying for anything serious, which is good, because if there's one thing I hate it's an anime with eighty foot robots that tries to be serious. So if it's not trying to be serious, why not push it to the absolute limit while you're at it? Obviously these first few episodes could've been better... but I think there's hope for the next ones. Millennium Actress, though, forget that... you'll be on the shelf awhile longer Satoshi Kon!