Generator Gawl #1 ADV 75 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles Released: 02/01/2005 Reviewed: 03/21/2006

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During one of ADV's very popular super sales I picked up quite a few anime DVDs I felt like I was missing out on. They too foreeeeeeeeever to arrive (about a month and a half), but I didn't really mind because I'm not usually in a rush to watch cartoons anyway and the company promised a free gift with every purchase. Given that I spent about $200 in one go I figured I'd probably in for one heck of a free gift. If I was lucky it wouldn't be something creepy like a seal plushie. Obviously if I'm going to get a plushie I'd much prefer something made to resemble a steaming pile of doggy feces. Well, I was fortunate enough not to get a seal plushie... but my end result wasn't all that much better. I got a copy of Generator Gawl. Oh boy, oh boy!! It is my sincerest hope that this show sucks as much as when I watched it four years ago!! Can you taste the enthusiasm in my voice? It's dripping, positively dripping.

A long time ago there was a joke between me and Joel. Every time the trailer for this show came on, he would ask "Hey Dave, what is this?" And I would reply "I don't know, I think it's Orphen." That's what we said every time the Generator Gawl trailer came up, which was quite frequently back in the day. That was the joke. You might think that sounds stupid. It was. But the fact of the matter is that's what we said every time, you know, except for the few times we'd replace Orphen with Arc the Lad. I wasn't going to detail the whole joke for you, but then I thought some people might get mad. I know I hate it when a writer references some inside joke and never elaborates on it. Now that I have, you probably wish I hadn't. But it makes point. The trailer was this show was so underwhelming that it probably took 10+ times for us to even remember what it was trying to tell us to watch, and these was the days before I knew how to skip ADV's front end trailers, so you can bet your sweet fanny that we watched it more than our fair share of times. What's even more sad than the fact that we could never remember Gawl is probably that the trailer is infinitely more interested than the show itself.

Gawl's hyper-original story goes something like this "We're a bunch of kids who got sent back from the future to stop some great crisis, hey wait, how come they don't just send some adults back with guns? Oh, because the people who are going to be causing this crisis is a SCHOOL. Well, that makes more sense than usua... HOLY CRAP THERE'S A GIANT ROBOT MANTIS FROM THE GUYVER ATTACKING US, TRANSFORM! Okay, now that he's dead let's go get same hamburgers and run into a girl that gets us arrested because apparently we're all 'perverts' and this girl is all 'dateless' even though she's not a terrible looker by anime standards. Now the cop lets us out and feeds us (for some reason) and we're going to our boarding house. But it's run by the burger girl's mom and the burger girl calls us perverts again!" "Now we're going to school, and the school's crazy high tech! And hey, there's a cute, shy girl with pink hair who inevitably acts as the voice of reason to the burger girl's (who has a really stupid hat, by the way) insane stalker-nessHOYLCRAP!!!! NOW THERE'S A GIANT MANTA ROBOT COMING AFTER US AND THE PINK GIRL'S STUCK UNDER SOME PILLARS OR SOMETHING! BUT GAWL SAVED HER! And the burger girl is still acting like she's unimpressed, but she's totally hiding her emotions under a veil so that Gawl doesn't learn he's warming up to her.

And that's how the first two episodes of Gawl goes. It's basically just a mishmash of a whole bunch of things you've seen in a whole bunch of other shows and you didn't like there, but now they've put them all together into one! Plus it has a really annoying dub script that's full of a bunch of rewrites and not too stellar performances anyway, so that's two strikes against it right there, plus they use the line "For three months I could live with Marilyn Manson, Johnny Depp, and Motley Crue on a bender". Even better, they manage to throw a few jokes about the size of some robot-insect-guy's member, and inexplicably refer to one of the main characters, Ryo, as "Ro". I don't know why, or if they were trying to give him some sort of cutesy Americanized nickname or what, but it's not working for me. With that being considered, I'm willing to say that there's no real reason to watch the dub. But to be fair, there's really no reason to what the show proper either! In fact, if you want to experience the "best" parts of Generator Gawl, feel free to buy any anime DVD made in 2000/2001 and check out the trailer. I would suggest you'd leave it at that, because it's really not worth wasting 75 minutes of your life on a show that doesn't offer you anything new, and what's worse, doesn't even do the old stuff well. Generator Gawl is an exercise in mediocrity that seems to end up being worse than a show that's just all out crappy. Oh well, at least it tried I guess.