Welcome to the NHK is my favorite example to use of shows where Gonzo screws up everything. It’s not a complete trainwreck where you wonder what the hell was going through their minds, or where they completely sabotage the source material, but rather where the constant accumulation of little, possibly even unnecessary changes build up to cause problems with the material later on.
you fap to this
The first change, almost immediately, is that it’s not apparent that Sato is a drug addict. In the manga, this is explicit, with him getting drugs from Kashiwa, who steals them from her job as a medical assistant. Instead of making it appear that Sato has hit rock bottom (and that Kashiwa is pretty scummy, rather than just kind of emo), he’s just a kind of weirdo who thinks that everyone is out to get him.
Then, Sato’s interest in lolicon is replaced with simply liking porn. The whole point of having him have that lolicon obsession early on is to make him seem really creepy as he scours the innertubes for lolicon (and I believe it implies child pornography) to the point where he ends up deleting the system files on his computer to fit in even more porn. But with the emphasis now just being on regular porn, he’s simply a red-blooded male. And hell, “filling up ones hard drive” goes from being a sign of obsession to a sign of banality when he could probably have done that by downloading a couple dozen porn DVD ISOs.
So ultimately, rather than being really fucked up, he’s kind of just weird and socially maladjusted. With that characterization in mind, when Sato and Yamazaki try to make their game, it almost seems like a good entrepreneurial idea that can give him some direction, rather than another sign of his descent into fucked uppery. Again, the filing down of the lolicon edge hurts here since it makes the whole thing sound way less creepy.
Weirdly, however, this almost makes the more upbeat ending kind of work. I have to say “almost” though because I do think that the show wants you to think that Sato is really fucked up even though it doesn’t really do a good job of portraying this.
Would I watch it even if I weren’t forced? I got about 1/3 of the way in originally until I got wary of the changes and stopped.
I still LOL @ the sight of moe mashup machine… Never have read the original manga, so this wasnt much factor to me. Perhaps they were afraid to get the whole loli-addict-crazy stuff on TV?
Lolicon would get the show cancelled that’s why. >_>
I remember I only originally watched this cause Yoshitoshi ABe contributed to like, a few of the light novel covers lol
I didn’t finish either.
I still have the OP on my MP3 though.
I thought the “upbeat” ness of the anime was much better than the psychotics in the manga. But that’s just me. I think this is one of Gonzo’s good shows vs shitty shit like Kiddy grade and dragontits for example
I agree, this is one of three Gonzo shows in the past five years that I enjoyed. Personally, I don’t mind that they made Saito moderately-drastically less creepy, it hurts from a storytelling perspective but it makes it much more watchable.
Gonzo’s shitty shit is SO shitty (Dragonaut, Glass Fleet, Real Bout…) that below par shows (like NHK) can’t really compare to them, so I guess you do need to be very specific when you say that a show isn’t good.
When I read the manga after watching some of the anime and I realized that drugs were involved, all of the crazy things he sees talking about conspiracies made a lot more sense!
It is a conspiracy by Gonzo, to hide true nature of the show! It is a conspiracy I say!!!!
sorry, couldn’t resist…
If you think the manga was better than the anime, try reading the novel (which was the original form) – Tokyopop released this in their totally mismarketed attempt to bring Japanese light novels over to an English-reading audience and I think it’s now out of print, but if you manage to find a copy well worth it, as it’s much darker than the manga or anime versions.
The novel is CRAZY EXPENSIVE
http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1427802564/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&qid=1272806046&sr=8-6&condition=new
Uh, why were you forced to watch this, though? It’s not bad, but I didn’t realize it’s a must. Am I that outta touch with otaku-wave-length?
The same reason I’m forced to watch all of these: it was sitting on a CD-R
I never got the impression that he was obsessed with regular porn and that it was all lolicon/child porn when I watched the series. I haven’t read the manga or the novel (I wanted the novel, but missed that window).
I’ve read through the manga, and while it’s horribly harsh, I’m finding it harder to get through the anime, which I bought unwatched & have been slowly, slowly dragging my way through like a cripple crawling on broken glass. It’s just more horrible when you can’t just look up from the comic & go do something else – to a certain extent, you’re trapped with the characters when it’s a DVD playing on the TV.
Although I may be projecting the more concentrated nastiness of the manga onto the less-intense TV show. I kept cringing in anticipation of Sato’s full-on nervous breakdown & absolute nadir as an actual, clinical hikkikomori caught jerking off in a back bedroom in his parents apartment.
I come from the opposite direction where I watched the manga after watching the anime. I found the anime more watchable because it was less cringe-inducing. But the sheer nastiness of the manga was strangely relaxing because of its novelty.
The NHK manga goes down well with Marilyn Manson music.