Search - Golden Boy - Essential Anime Collection (Vols. 1 & 2) on DVD

WITH A HEART AS GOOD AS GOLD

Sesho | Pasadena, TX USA | 06/28/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The suggested age for this dvd is 17+ for a good reason. Kintaro Oe is 25 and dropped out of law school not because he couldn't hack it, but because he had already mastered the curriculum and wasn't learning anything. So now he bicycles from place to place, getting any part-time job that suits his fancy, writing and drawing in notebooks. He still studies, but his major is now life itself. Kintaro usually thinks with his libido. For example, when he sees a beautiful woman who turns out to be a swimming instructor, he gets a job as an instructor, even though he doesn't know how to swim. After he is exposed, he tells her he will beat her in a swimming race if she will give him a job while he's training. He fantasizes about her, and as in other episodes, he especially has a fetish for the toilets beautiful women sit on. She thinks Kintaro is a scumbag. The interesting thing is that he improves the training program at the school and actually revolutionizes their methods. In the end, the swimming instructor falls in love with him, but he disappears, on to another adventure even as she realizes her mistake about him. Most of other 5 episodes follow a similar pattern. He gets a job around beautiful women, they think he's scum, until at the end he has changed their life. Just like GTO, even though the character seems perverted, in the end there is no sex. He helps out a sofware company, becomes an anime gopher, chases a motorcycle chick, saves a virgin from her caddish fiance, and has to deal with a yakuza mob boss. This dvd was really funny. The voice actor doing Kintaro overacted as needed and the women were drawn in ways that actual humans could never be proportioned. Some people probably couldn't deal with the sexual humor on display here, but at least Kintaro is honest with his urges, and in the end knows exactly what he is doing. The real Kintaro has a heart of gold. This is a good price for 2 dvds."

Very Funny I say, but also perverted.

Nakomiah | New Orleans, LA | 11/26/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"I had no idea how funny it was, I couldn't stop laughing. I like episode 2 and 3. The others are just [...]. Kintaro has the perfect english voice over. Even though he yells too much and has a nasty mind. Some of the women he runs into are just crazy. whats the deal with the chick and her beamo? ( motorcycle) or what ever she calls it. I think kintaro needed to put her in check. Other than that its good."

It's a good show, you should watch it

Avery | Springfield, VA | 04/23/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

""Goldenboy" is a really funny show.

I don't mean funny in an "anime" way; I mean that it's ACTUALLY funny. By now, most people in the U.S. and Canada view anime and anything that comes out of Japan as sort of a quirky niche interest that a few people take far too seriously. And while I do happen to be one of those Nipponophile, Japan-crazy types, I can certainly respect that not everyone "gets" what I get about Japanese pop culture.

That being said, even those outside of the niche should still try "Goldenboy". It's more accessible to non believers than most other anime, thanks mostly to its universal appeal and the archetypal character that everyone across the globe can immediately recognize--and laugh at--the second that he bounds onscreen: the hopelessly horny man.

The horny man in question is named Kintaro Oe, a 25-year-old law school drop out who uses his youthful vigor to bicycle across Japan and take temp jobs where he'll probably be unappreciated and beat up several times by female co-workers. These episodes were originally rated X here at Amazon.com for some strange reason, and though that is perhaps a bit too extreme, I could certainly tell where they were going with a rating like that. The concept of the show is dedicated to the phenomenon of "fan service", which is an anime term that basically means that the show is pandering to the lusts of the, well, fans. You know what I mean, it's like whenever one of those dewey eyed schoolgirl types squeals girlishly while a big gust of wind blows her skirt up to reveal her ruffly pink panties. Welcome to the definition of fan service, my friend. Usually, artists will try to work the gratuitous display of its (usually female) characters into the plot somehow, but it's almost always just a thinly-veiled excuse to show excessive flashes of skin.

"Goldenboy" makes no such excuses. The women in this show are scantily clad because the show KNOWS that they're only there to make the main character lust after them, not because that's how women actually dress. It's an over-the-top display of the male imagination, and the series recognizes that about itself. It's something weirdly respectable, and it's a clever and self-depricating route that I wish more anime would take. Instead of pretending that Kintaro's fantasy women are innocent maidens who just happen to show a lot of cleavage, this is the first anime that I've seen where you get the sense that they're showing that much to serve as a comedy device rather than a voyeuristic exercise.

Anime fans will understand this much about the show. Regular people will simply enjoy the show for its quick humor and abundant sexual escapades. I'm a feminist, by the way, so I tend to shy away from hormone comedies, because they almost always come across to me as being more mean-spirited than funny. And honestly, if Kintaro had ever actually landed one of these women in bed, I would have been immediately turned off and unamused. But the fact that he's got such conflicting passions for life and for women that lead him to run off right before the heroine in every episode has figured out that she wants to have sex with him makes it so that I can't possibly stay mad at the guy just because he was a raging pervert throughout the first half of the episode. He's just too darn endearing! He's a genius pervert (virgin?) with a heart of gold.

All in all, it's a great show to watch, regardless of whether or not you enjoy Japanimation. It's hilarious and titillating with just the right amount of sincerity to prevent it from being mean. Watch it only if you like that sort of thing. (Also, it doesn't hurt to be over the age of 14.)"

Fan-Service Fun-Fest

Antonio D. Paolucci | Beaver Falls, PA | 02/23/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Golden Boy is one of those shameless anime more out to titillate than anything else, but this is one of the few that does it right. While enjoyable to look at, it's also hilariously exaggerated. It's as if the fan-service in Golden Boy is making fun of fan-service in general. This is mainly because the story, though centering around the more carnal side, has some heart, and the main character, Kintaro Oe, is one of the most fleshed-out characters I've seen in anime of this type.

Kintaro Oe is a free-spirit who hops from job to job in order to gain life-experience and to meet beautiful women. More often than not he leaves without the women, he still does gain his experience and leaves behind his memory in the minds of the people with whom he had associated himself with. Though a ladies' man, Kintaro also has a lot of heart, and wants nothing more than to make the women in his life happy and to prove to them that it is possible to learn a new way of living. All he takes with him to these jobs is his trusty journal, where he shows his skill at art, his mountain bike, and the clothing on his back, and that's all he needs to make his difference in the world.

Golden Boy does suffer from the same problems a lot of earlier anime reversions had, that being washed animation, over-exaggerated voice acting, and echos (those are generally because of inferior sound equipment when recording the voice track). It doesn't take much away, but it's still noticeable. Two of these problems are easily solved by watching Golden Boy in the Japanese audio track.

I'd recommend Golden Boy to anyone who enjoys Go Nagia anime (Cutey Honey, Kekko Kamen), or for fans of fan-service anime like Divergence Eve, Tenjho Tenge, or Ghost Talker's Daydream. I'd also recommend this edition of Golden Boy Essential Anime Collection to anyone who enjoys good anime but doesn't have a lot of money. You get three hours of decent anime for less than twenty bucks. Word of warning, this is definitely a series for those 17+, as it deals with sex-related humor and imagery in every episode."