Reviewed by: James Zhang
Ratings:
Genres: Comedy, Drama, School life
Year: 2000
Series Length: 43
Eikichi Onizuka joins the Seinan (or some such) high school because the headmistress wants him to do the seemingly impossible: turn a group of immature, conceited and rebellious kids into the disciplined group every loving parent wants to see.
And this he does. What's his secret?
Did he read Ron Clark's “The Essential 55 – Discovering the successful student in every child”? No, Onizuka is illiterate.
What?! He must have passed the teacher's exam in order to qualify right? No, he hired someone to sit the exam for him.
But being smart isn't everything! He must have a lot of heart for his students! Wrong again, Onizuka is a systematic idiot – his personality vacillates between spitting on his student's food so he can hog that as well, to becoming a subservient dog whenever a woman with the right looks (and bodily assets) comes along. To top things off, he doesn't attend half his lessons, and the lessons he does attend is spent wasting everyone else's time.
Worst of all, it's not even funny!
While GTO had its initial charm (I liked the way Onizuka smashed through a wall so that his student and her parents could communicate directly – 'breaking down' a communication breakdown), it quickly turns into a mosh pit of idiotic acts, idiotic responses, nonsensical consequences, and illogical encounters with dodgy teachers, pseudo-geniuses, and unbelievably naïve, superficial kids.
The Onizuka formula is simple:
- Onizuka does something incredibly stupid (like barging in onto a stage and announcing that he'll invite every student to an exotic trip that he has no means to afford)
- The other characters, being of the lowest order of intelligent beings in anime (which as a whole sets the industry standard for shallow characters), respond with cheers and cries of mirth
- Some bystander says: “That Onizuka is amazing. Only he can turn a crowd of raging beasts into a supportive group.”
GTO is a lot like the stereotypical rock star who sings at the top of his voice about love (extolling its virtues with single-word sentences) and then smashing his guitar on the stage, to the rapturous applause of the crowd at this extraordinary act of postmodernist expression. Every sane onlooker would see this as uncontrolled energy, and Onizuka is just such a ball of energy – doing lots of different things but never with any principles or consistency.
As an example of what GTO can teach you, consider the mentally backwards Tomoko. She doesn't have brains but she's got what matters in just about any anime show you watch: breasts the size of rock melons.
She follows the orders of Miyabi who has a visceral hatred of every new teacher who comes along, because her feelings have been hurt by a teacher in the past (though being the one-dimensional characters they are, no one's feelings in GTO actually mean anything). So Miyabi orders Tomoko to plant lots of girls' bras and panties in Onizuka's locker so they can kick him out for being a pervert.
Tomoko screws up the operation, and she even fraternizes with Onizuka by offering her breast for him to touch. Miyabi gets angry of course and kicks Tomoko outside her circle of friends. Any other person would see Miyabi for the cowardly and manipulative bitch she really is and stick her panties to her mouth to shut her up for good, but in GTO, characters have a habit of staying permanently stupid.
Wait, there's more: Tomoko later joins an idol contest where the agenda is apparently 'The Battle of the Bulging Breasts' and since Tomoko's breasts are prodigiously big, she gets a lot of support. Too bad Onizuka's filling out millions of votes for Tomoko backfired because the vote-counters were employed by the contest winner (of course). There you have it, a typical lesson in GTO.
GTO gets so bad down the line that I stopped watching – GTO makes you dumber with every subsequent episode, so I had to cut the line three quarters of the way through before my IQ turns into a single digit.
In summary, GTO gives me the shits, because it's full of it.
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