I've been looking for something to help me through the hot 'n' humid summer months and what better way to beat the heat than to stay indoors watching questionable anime and playing questionable games based on said anime? For a rundown of this little project, check out the first episode.

The Property

Dr. Slump sees a slovenly and lecherous inventor, Dr. Senbei Norimaki, accidentally create a robot child while aiming to produce the perfect domestic maid gynoid. Naming the child Arale, he does his best as a new father despite how Arale's absurd physical strength and impulsiveness creates mayhem wherever she goes. The manga and its later anime and game adaptations typically have Senbei invent some new gadget only for things to quickly spiral out of control once Arale, her non-human baby stepbrother Gatchan, and/or her school friends Akane, Taro, and Peasuke get involved with it. The manga was an early project from famed mangaka Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and several others, and displays many of the quirks and tropes that would find their way into his later works. Quirks like naming characters after food—the alien Saiyans of DBZ are all named for vegetables, for instance, in much the same way as "Senbei Norimaki" is a rice cracker wrapped in seaweed—or filling up background crowds with random anthro animal characters.

Akira Toriyama passed away in March of last year, as I'm sure anyone who idly clicks on anything anime-related is probably well enough aware, but because of the limited half-season of Game OVA in 2024 I wasn't able to take on one of his several creations for a memorial episode. Dragon Ball, and its first sequel series Dragon Ball Z specifically, were off the table due to the vast amount of video game adaptations available for both of them—I'd implemented a rule when I started this series that I'd avoid anything too popular—but his preceding series Dr. Slump isn't quite as prolific in this corner of the entertainment media world. Still more than a few adaptations, mostly on early Japanese home computers of the 1980s, but a manageable enough number for a feature like this. Other Toriyama Game OVA candidates included Go! Go! Ackman, the bawdy demon comedy that received a trilogy of games for SFC, and of course the more recent Mad Max-inspired Sand Land which saw a lavish current-gen game released shortly after the mangaka passed. (I would've loved to try and pass off Chrono Trigger or any Dragon Quest as a "valid" Toriyama candidate for this series but that wasn't going to cut it.)

Dr. Slump began publication in 1980 in Weekly Shonen Jump, to this day still the most famous manga magazine, where it continued for four years to produce a total of 18 tankoubon/TPB collections' worth of strips. It then saw two TV adaptations, the first being a Toei Animation series that began while the comics were still active in the early '80s and lasted for an eyewatering 243 episodes across five years. The second, likewise from Toei, debuted towards the end of the '90s and had a much shorter run with 74 episodes (which is still pretty long by most anime standards). Since I'll be focusing on a game developed to be a tie-in for that '90s series I'll be following three episodes of that for this Game OVA entry. I have heard the original series was better though, so maybe I'll give that a whirl too someday.

Cast

• Arale Norimaki: A little girl robot built by Dr. Senbei Norimaki. Built to be a perfect domestic automaton, she has limited eyesight (requiring some thick glasses) and is deeply naive about the world. Her physical abilities are off the scale to compensate, however. Typically, adventures revolve around her misunderstanding something about the world and causing trouble for her hometown of Penguin Village.
• Dr. Senbei Norimaki: A bachelor inventor with a goofy and lecherous personality. Created Arale as well as several other inventions to save himself from doing his chores, most of which are as impressive as they are dangerous. Made the occasional crossover cameo in the Dragon Ball universe when they needed a seedy scientist archetype.
• Akane Kimidori: Arale's first friend, an opportunistic and rebellious tomboy that feels like a first draft of Bulma and her half-supportive/half-exploitative companionship with a young Goku. Outside of school Akane's usually shown driving her moped around or working at her adult sister Aoi's café, the Coffee Pot.
• Peasuke Soramame: Another classmate of Arale's who quickly becomes her friend. Peasuke is the only person in their class smaller than Arale (though he still makes fun of her for being short) and is mostly just a little troll. He's the brother of Taro.
• Taro Soramame: Another delinquent that Arale befriends after entering school. Taro's a little older than Akane and Peasuke and is usually depicted with shades and coiffed hair. Despite his rough appearance he's pretty laid-back.
• Gatchan: A baby found inside an egg acquired at the dawn of time after a time-travel mishap, and has characteristics of both an alien and an angel between his antennae, white feathery wings, and the capacity to eat anything including metal and wood. His real name is Gajira, a portmanteau of Gojira (Godzilla) and Gamera. As an infant he can't communicate too well and typically follows Arale around.
• Ms. Midori Yamabuki: The attractive teacher of Arale's class who Senbei is instantly smitten with, prompting him to pretend that Arale is the right age for seventh grade despite her size. Several episodes have Senbei conceiving plans to sweep her off her feet.

The Anime

As I mentioned above, we'll be talking about the 1997 TV show here. Rather than a sequel series that picked up where the first anime adaptation ended, this show was a full do-over that began right at the start with the first arc of the manga. In that sense it's akin to the two separate adaptations Hunter X Hunter received. In addition to some stylistic differences to character designs and the like it seems more was done in the 1997 show to tie the world of Dr. Slump to Toriyama's more popular Dragon Ball universe to emphasize their connection, since Dr. Slump characters had already made cameos in Dragon Ball. The first Dr. Slump anime was released concurrently with its manga and thus aired before Dragon Ball had taken off—in fact, the Dragon Ball anime adaptation began the week after Dr. Slump's original anime run ended, around the start of 1986—so I believe this was a way for Dr. Slump to piggyback (shout outs to Oolong) on the latter's success a little bit.

Dr. Slump (1997) was adapted by Toei Animation, with Shigeyasu Yamauchi as its director and Satoru Nishizono as its primary scriptwriter. Toei Animation is a branch of the Toei Company, a monolithic entertainment corporation best known for its anime and its tokusatsu shows: the latter including genre-defining works such as Kamen Rider and Super Sentai. On the anime side, Toei Animation has been producing shows and movies since the 1960s and has since racked up a prolific catalog of hits, many of which are still active. Their longest running show, and one of the longest in the world, is the stretchy pirate fantasy One Piece adapted from the Eiichiro Oda manga. They're also behind magical girl shoujo shows Pretty Cure (a.k.a. PreCure) and Sailor Moon, horror comedy (and possible Game OVA candidate) GeGeGe no Kitarou, the Zodiac-inspired fantasy brawler Saint Seiya, the post-apocalyptic gorefest Hokuto no Ken/Fist of the North Star, and last but certainly not least Dragon Ball and its many sequel series.

Shigeyasu Yamauchi worked as both a director and storyboard artist on several Toei shows including many of the above, primarily Saint Seiya and Dragon Ball Z where in both cases he directed a few of their movies too. He apparently also worked on the Transformers movie (the 1986 one, i.e. the only one worth mentioning) in the art department. In terms of video game-related content, he was behind the Street Fighter Alpha movie, the first Digimon movie, and (I'm just now learning this was a thing) two episodes of the Xenosaga adaptation. Satoru Nishizono has a similarly storied history as a screenwriter, having been behind the anime adaptations for chaotic preschooler comedy Crayon Shin-chan, the Harry-Potter-but-for-ninjas (but not Naruto, which is also that) Nintama Rantaro, the excellent teacher vs. delinquent dramedy Great Teacher Onizuka, and some video-game-to-anime tie-ins for Tales of Eternia (I might need to check that out), Star Ocean, .hack, and Zone of the Enders. (Really starting to build a list for a reverse Game OVA series, if I ever find the courage to make it happen. I guess that's just TANG though, but for anime. TANGime. Getting less enthused about it by the second NGL.)

Getting back to Dr. Slump, let's begin our watchalong:

Episode 1: "Arale is Born / Let's Go to School"

Surprising no-one after learning one iota of his characterization, Dr. Norimaki intended to build a sexy blonde maid robot but an errant bolt of lightning fried his hardware and instead had the auto-constructor build... Arale, a near-sighted "kusogaki" (brat) who seems very unimpressed with both the Doctor's scientific acumen and the state of his living quarters ("which is why I was building a maid robot," he retorts). Telling Arale to sit quietly while he buys her some clothes that fit—the auto-constructor already had designs for a maid costume with a generous chest area, but it's obviously too big for this Arale—she instead takes off on a devastating charge around the local countryside, upending vehicles and houses while also leaving craters in the hills and meadows that surround the picturesque Penguin Village. It's all very DBZ-coded, as you might expect, with many buildings built to resemble coffee pots and other foodstuffs. We're also sorta introduced to the rest of the teen cast here, but it wouldn't be until the second segment of this episode until we get names and a better idea of their personalities. This first segment is very light on plotting but ably serves to demonstrate the sort of visual slapstick that Toriyama would become known for, at least this early in his career before constant power battles took the spotlight (and one would argue DBZ still had plenty of physical comedy between the eight-episode arcs of Goku charging up his qi).

The second segment has Arale enrolled in school, since having a child wandering around his laboratory would probably raise too many awkward questions with the neighbors. Intending to enroll her in first grade, since she looks the part, Senbei pivots to seventh grade one he takes a glance at the seventh grade teacher, the comely Ms. Midori Yamabuki, in the hope that having Arale as her student would lead to more encounters in the future. Though the class is skeptical about this kindergartner in their midst, Arale is able to ace the math quiz they were given that day and then goes on to destroy every sports club with her physical prowess to the extent that Arale decides not to join any of them since they're too "boring" for her. Her manager throughout all this is the opportunistic Akane Kimidori, whom makes the classic mistake of asking for a high-five after her "pay Arale for tryouts" scheme nets her a hefty wad of dough and is likewise launched into the stratosphere. We're also introduced here to biker delinquent Taro Soramame and pint-sized troll Peasuke Soramame, Arale's other two schoolfriends.

Granted, I'm not the most well-versed DB/DBZ viewer—after this Game OVA, I'll have watched as much Dr. Slump as I have the original Dragon Ball—but I am more familiar with Toriyama through his contributions to Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger and there's distinct character design parallels that, I suppose given how linear time works, began here and spread to his later works. Lucca, for instance, feels like a version of Arale that was allowed to grow up given the similarly huge frames on their glasses and an introverted focus on science and inventions that maybe doesn't take safety into account. Both the OP "Kao Dekaai" (Big Face) and the ED "Hanage ga Chotto Tobidashiteiru" (Nose Hairs Are Sticking Out) of this show seem to be ragging on Dr. Senbei Noriyama's less than ideal physical qualities, so given he's the focus of those I'm imagining future episodes will split their time between the good Doctor's crude lasciviousness and his sassiest invention's innocently gleeful destruction. (It does make me curious what age group we're aiming for here; something about the dynamic so far reminds me of Home Movies, especially with Coach McGuirk as Senbei, though obviously this show is definitely less dialogue-heavy.)

Episode 2: "Time Slipper! / The Mysterious Baby"

We're still in the introduction phase of this show which is why we're immediately jumping into a time-travel story. Having nothing better to do and with a bunch of kids hanging around his place there to see Arale, who spends this episode in a dragon kigurumi for some reason (though I suspect that reason is, like most reasons Arale does anything, "because it's cute"), Senbei introduces his new "Time Slipper" device which has an anthropomorphic alarm clock, called Time-kun, send anyone who is sitting on a nearby transparent panel backwards chronologically. Senbei and Arale really wants to see dinosaurs (Akane, Taro, and Peasuke seem less enthused) so they all embark on the first voyage of this device and wind up inside a dark, fragrant cave with oddly squishy walls. It's the mouth of a T.rex—the group escapes but the T.rex is in pursuit and is gunning for Senbei specifically. Akane's not OK with this: if Senbei gets eaten, it's likely the T.rex will come after them next. Senbei manages to distract Arale, who has taken to flying around a traumatized pteranodon, to convince her to defeat the T.rex which she handily does, sending it blasting off into the sky in true Team Rocket style. Of course, it's at this moment that Senbei remembers that the Time Slipper is still inside its oral cavity. After looking around at more dinosaurs they eventually find the T.rex napping after its traumatic pummelling and Taro is volunteered into getting the Time Slipper back from inside its mouth: he almost manages to grab it when a sneeze from Arale startles it, and it awakes after smashing up the panel in its mouth (after Time-kun escapes). Turns out the plate wasn't that important: Senbei just needs something "slippery" to make TIme-kun literally slip, and his new bald spot provided by the hungry dinosaur is fit to purpose. The entire team is transported back to the modern day but just prior to that Arale was gifted a mysterious metal egg by the T.rex not looking for a round 2 of their boxing match, and upon getting back home the egg hatches to reveal a mysterious baby.

The second segment follows a short amount of time after the first, as Arale rushes home after school (which has an anthro acapella band performing the Westminster Chimes over the PA) to attend to this new baby that was just welcomed into the Norimaki family. The question arises as to how to feed him: neither of the Norimakis can produce breast milk so the Doctor heads for the store to buy some powdered kind, which is probably fine for some bizarre pod child from the prehistoric era. He briefly worries what Midori would think if she saw him buying baby milk and diapers and doesn't have to wonder too long about her reaction as she walks past as he's packing the groceries into his car; however, she already knows about the baby and, to assuage his concerns, knows that the baby was found in the prehistoric era after a time-travel trip gone awry since that's what a bunch of kids told her and she'd have no reason to doubt any of it. Fortunately, the baby proves easy to take care of since he'll eat almost anything, including a lamp and a television set, and after some roughhousing they decide he needs a bath and discovers he's been hiding a pair of wings under his onesie. Despite his angelic appearance Arale decides his name will be Gadzilla (Gajira), after Godzilla and Gamera, since he "eats everything"—or Gatchan for short. Creating more questions than answers, the second episode wraps up with Gatchan's happy cooing.

So I suppose the whole time-travel arc was to get Gatchan into the picture. I guess the cuteness quotient wasn't met with just Arale alone but I am getting slightly concerned about how a slobby bachelor like Senbei is going to be able to take care of two kids, even if neither requires much in the way of upkeep or maintenance. They're also as equally invincible as a child NPC in an Elder Scrolls game so I suppose that alleviates that worry also. So far this has been the chaotic, anything-goes sort of comedy I was expecting though the animation seems surprisingly cheap given how much Toei had invested in Toriyama up to this point: maybe it's more the case that a quirky comedy like this doesn't need the budget compared to the more action-focused DBZ, or perhaps they considered this remake a lesser concern overall since they still had the original kicking around. I will say the facial animations have been stellar; it's mostly when Arale is rushing around causing mayhem that it starts to look a bit budget-y.

Episode 3: "Arale's Missing Thing... / Dekachibi Ray Gun!"

In swim class, Arale discovered while changing around her schoolfriends that she is missing a certain part of her anatomy and decides to ask Senbei to build a realistic one for her while he starts to freak out in the middle of her sentence. Now, I sincerely hope most of you caught on that she's talking about her missing navel, but they extend this miscommunication bit for far longer than is comfortable to the point where Senbei admits he never installed one because he's never seen a real live one before (TMI, buddy). When Arale mentions that her teacher is coming over, Senbei realizes he might get to see hers if he plays his cards right (what the) and begins to role-play the conversation he has with her where he claims he needs to check out what she's got going on downstairs "in the interest of science" and I'm once again reminded that Dragon Ball was pretty much wall-to-wall this as soon as Master Roshi hit the scene. Since he knows she'd never agree to it in real life, he does the responsible thing and drops the subject builds some kind of toilet cam to peek on her once she comes over. I'm kidding of course; this is a kids' show and he's not that kind of degenerate. Instead, he builds a pair of X-ray specs that can see through any material that isn't alive. Um. So what follows next is him going outside to ogle female joggers and a woman waiting for the bus that he tries to sit uncomfortably close to and the ick is starting to rise up into my throat. That he then spends the next few moments trying to chase the cat off the passenger's lap so he can see more... it's really becoming less Dr. Slump and more Dr. Trump with all these overt sex crimes. Ms. Yamabuki is the ultimate goal here though, so Senbei rushes home for a last second clean before she shows up—once Arale announces her arrival, he rushes outside to meet her with his magic pervert glasses on and... gets run over by the car he didn't see her driving. Can't say he didn't deserve it. Arale then walks up to his mangled form and asks when he's going to get around to installing that belly button already, completing the joke. Hey, if I wanted creepy sex pest comedy I could've gone right back to City Hunter, you know.

Thankfully, the second segment isn't quite as criminally deviant. We're moving down the list of classic mad scientist gadgets so after X-ray specs and time travel we naturally land on a shrink ray next. We also find out that Senbei built an alarm clock that's designed to be rude to him about his habit of eating cheap instant ramen so I guess he decided a healthy dose of shame was in order after the last misadventure. He sent Arale and Gatchan to the grocery store but instead of buying negi (green onions) they bought yagi (a goat) so I guess they have a goat now. The opportunity arises to show Arale his new gadget: the dekachibi ("biggie smalls") ray gun! After enlarging a fly, Senbei shrinks Arale and pretends to swallow her: she escapes by kicking out an eyeball and leaving through the gap. I guess I should've figured from the Cronenberg fly that we were going full body horror this episode but I was still reeling from the sexual impropriety of the vagina skit that it didn't occur to me that this ostensible show for children could be disturbing on two entirely different levels. Recovering and inserting his eye (after accidently replacing it with a mikan) Senbei voices his gratitude that this is a gag anime where that shit like that can just happen and be fine the next scene. He then talks about all the ways his dekachibi ray gun will be useful to the world, like shrinking your car so you don't have to park it anywhere or enlarging a ramen bowl to solve world hunger. Arale wants to use it to give herself bigger boobs (I think she's taking after her dad a little too much) but Senbei is struck with an uncommon bout of responsibility and nixes the idea before going shopping for the groceries Arale failed to procure, livestock aside. Accidentally leaving the ray gun behind where the chaos twins can find it, Arale and Gatchan decide to enlarge some grasshoppers they were playing with and suddenly Penguin Village is beset by a budget version of Them. By the time Senbei gets home, the house and Gatchan are microscopic and a fifty-foot-tall Arale is digging up the yard. Arale promises afterwards that she didn't shoot anything else with the raygun as the Earth orbits a moon the size of Jupiter.

This episode really represents the full spectrum of what this show's about: sophomoric sexual slapstick and the cartoon chaos quotient of impossibly intricate inventions. Sure, most of the latter was probably borrowed from Doraemon at some point but Toriyama's in his element here between all the bawdiness and pandemonium that comes from the premise of having a mad scientist with absolutely no decency filter and an invincible little girl surrounded by all the greatest toys to play with. At any rate, this episode alone gave me a firm idea of what this property is all about so I think I can now jump right into the game adaptations and see how close they get to a version of Mega Man where Dr. Light isn't allowed within 200 feet of the womens' public baths.

The Game(s)

Dr. Slump (1999) is a PlayStation game developed by Natsume and published by Bandai, the former perhaps best known for colorful cartoon 'em ups like Pocky and Rocky, Wild Guns, and previous Game OVA subject GS Mikami: Joreishi wa Nice Body. It's a 3D polygonal action-adventure game that follows the events of the comics but using the art style of the anime reboot: some story details are a little different from the show as a result. Between the sharp and lo-poly graphics, broad sense of humor, and action-adventure structure it isn't actually too far off from the Mega Man Legends sub-series, both aesthetically and thematically.

It saw a fan translation in 2021 courtesy of team Hilltop, who turned it into their first project: they've since worked on several other PS1 games like Squaresoft's Racing Lagoon, the Disney-esque Harmful Park, and the Andean survival adventure game Aconcagua. (They all seem pretty cool actually; I might save a few of these for later if I ever decide to bring "May no Monogatari" back.) We'll be giving that translation a spin here:

Does it do right by the anime? Sure does. This game actually kicks ass, I'm going to keep playing it after this. Definitely a more low-key and kid-friendly The Misadventures of Tron Bonne vibe to it. The adventure game sections can be a bit on the slow side right now but I imagine that's because we're early in: they'll either get more involved as Arale gains new abilities or they'll get shorter as the introduction of new mechanics slows to a trickle. The action sequences can be inelegant with how it's hard to line up jumps sometimes but they're very accommodating with the instant retry feature to make up for it. Love the visuals, the humor's been well-localized, and I'm not really sure what else they could've done to treat this license better.

Dr. Slump also showed up on several other platforms too, though most require a level of Japanese literacy I fall far short of. Hell, I just ended a sentence with a preposition, so it's not like I can English all that good either. Between 1982-1985 Dr. Slump saw several dedicated LCD handheld games, a game for the Bandai Arcadia 2001—which only had four Japan region-specific games total, with the others being games based on Gundam, Doraemon, and Macross, which has to be some kind of Mt. Rushmore of mid-'80s anime properties—and another for the Sharp X1, the 8-bit predecessor to the Sharp X68000 (he said, expecting the latter to be more famous than the former). Those are all a bit awkward to dig up and I'm pretty lazy on top of that, so instead I'll share a few screengrabs of the Famicom (NES) Jump crossover action-RPG that Arale appears in:

There were plenty more Arale appearances in other Shounen Jump crossover fighters too, including one of the few to see a localization (J-Stars Victory VS+). I guess she could've been like the Kirby of that series? She's at least important enough to appear on most the games' box art, so I've included a few here:

Finally, I found one last Dr. Slump licensed game on Nintendo DS. Dr. Slump: Arale-chan, which was specifically based on the visuals of the original '80s anime, has Arale run around Penguin Village completing side-quests at a slightly top-down angle that makes the game vaguely resemble Animal Crossing. Fitting enough, given Penguin Village is home to various anthros in addition to its human inhabitants. It was released in October 30, 2008 and like the other Dr. Slump games was strictly a Japan-only affair. I hadn't heard of its developers Bitstep but it looks like they worked on a few other anime tie-ins on behalf of Bandai (their last being an Anpanman motion-controls party game for Wii that I sort of want to subject Ryckert to). Here's a few screenshots I "borrowed" from the internet:

That's going to do it for this kamehamehandy guide to a lesser-known Toriyama property and its few excursions into the video game medium. Nice to play a tie-in game actually worth the trouble, gotta say, but that's not really what this feature's about so be assured that we'll be right back to quickie tie-in territory for Episode 5, due sometime in early August. N'cha for now!