released 29 apr 03 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* I am a fan of Koosuke Fujishima's OH MY GODDESS manga, and when I saw that he was the writer for the EX-DRIVER series, I was intrigued and picked it up. Fujishima is a "gearhead" and his stories often rotate around cars, motorbikes, and other vehicles; EX-DRIVER is completely focused on cars, imagining a near-future Japan where fuel-cell-powered cars are driven by robotic controls using GPS, sensors, and communications links. Occasionally one gets out of control and an elite group of "Ex-Drivers", at the wheel of superhot gasoline-powered cars, has to rope it in.
The three Ex-Drivers in the story are two girls named Lisa and Lorna and a boy named Souichi. They're all high-school students who dash off from class in their superhot cars when an emergency rises. Lisa is wild, noisy, and obnoxious; Lorna is serious, measured, and sweet; and Souichi is a boy genius, really junior-high age but several years ahead in his education.
On the plus side, EX-DRIVER is a shiny production job, with a particular and loving emphasis on the gleaming machines and their workings. It also has lots of screaming car-chase scenes on which a good deal of effort was expended.
On the minus side, the stories in EX-DRIVER range from "weak" to "embarrassing to watch". Partly it's the story concept. The whole idea of having to rope in renegade robot cars seems like a pure video-game contraption, since it be more likely a robotic car with a malfunction would either shut down or crash well before anyone would have time to worry about it. Worse, the idea that high-school kids are doubling as elite superstar drivers is a bit hard to swallow for anybody older than junior-high age. Even ignoring that, the stories are uninteresting and silly. Silliness wouldn't be so bad if EX-DRIVER were supposed to be silly, but it's really not being played for laughs.
It probably would have worked much better if it had been. Apparently EX-DRIVER is popular in Japan and there are EX-DRIVER models, toys, and a videogame. I don't know if the videogame came first or not, but this DVD feels like a video adaptation of a videogame, with a slapdash script thinly painted on top of the game concept. I have yet to hear of any video based on a video game that works. Usually it's more fun to watch someone play the game, and certainly less time-consuming.
It's puzzling as to why such good work was put into the package but nothing was really put inside. All I can think of is that it was specifically designed to appeal to its target market, adolescent boys who are car-crazy, with no particular interest in appealing to anybody else. I have to admit that the car artwork and the chase scenes are well-executed and striking. But if you're not into that sort of thing, there's not much else here of any interest.
Incidentally, the menu scheme for this DVD reinforces my suspicion that "cutesy" interfaces that are designed without any thought for usability are becoming more popular. I'm a technophile, I found it confusing, what would happen to someone who had no affinity for machines? "OK, you gave me this little stick-shift, with no explanation of what any of the shift positions are for, so I have to poke through them all, and every time I bring up the menu I have to sit through the lights going red-yellow-green and listen to someone gunning the engine." I think somebody needs to come up with a document titled "DVD Menus For Dummies".
