released 17 jul 05 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the outset of GENERATOR GAWL, a anime video series in 12 half-hour episodes, three time travelers from a later century arrive in our near future in hopes of heading off a disaster. They include Ryo, an aloof and somewhat arrogant genius; the pleasant and charming Koji, a computer expert; and the loud, impulsive Gawl, who seems to be a chow hound and a loose cannon. Their presence is quickly detected by an enemy, Ryuko, who sends "generators" -- humanlike creatures who can "generate" at will into monsters -- to kill the three young men, only to be foiled repeatedly by Gawl, who is a generator himself and can turn into a brutal fighting machine.
Ryo, Koji, and Gawl take up residence in a local home, where the daughter of the house, the mouthy and pushy Megumi, is suspicious of them in general, and particularly suspicious of the "perverted" (as she sees him) Gawl, until he rescues her shy friend Natsumi.
I got about three episodes into GENERATOR GAWL and gave up on it. This item appears, from its production quality and style, to have been made in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and is clearly targeted at a middle-school audience. The artwork, music, and soundwork are uninspired and uninteresting, the characters are predictable and dull, and the scriptwork is tedious -- instead of making a determined effort to kill off the three time-travelers, Ryuko sends a generator against them every now and then, apparently just to make sure Gawl gets a combat workout in each episode.
This is the sort of thing that might get some play on the Cartoon Network TOONAMI show, and in fact it comes across as something of a Japanese SCOOBY-DOO series -- Megumi actually walks around with a spyglass when she's trying to figure out what the three heroes are up to, and the "pesky kids" keep foiling the bad guys on a regular basis. GENERATOR GAWL is of precisely no interest to older anime fans, though it is fast-paced and middle-schoolers might enjoy it.