Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - What is KochiKame?!
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mdo7
 Posts: 8208 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Well, if it's helping anime fan (younger one, including retro-loving/friendly Gen Z users/watchers) to discover older anime titles. Ranma 1/2 (2024) is probably helping people watching the 89/90's version of Ranma 1/2. I mean we can have both the classic Sailor Moon and Sailor Moon Crystal side by side, why not have both the original classic anime and the newer remake version alongside each other. Speaking of Gen Z (alongside millennials), I'm thankful for them to be the one bringing back retro revival in every aspect of today's pop culture like video game, older film, technologies (anyone familiar with Vinyl revival). I hope that can extend to anime/manga given that older anime has much wider appeal then today's anime when it comes to aesthetic and creativity. I'm a big fan of retro revival, and that's why seeing a lot of old stuff coming back now and then makes me happy and I shed tears for that. Last edited by mdo7 on Tue May 20, 2025 10:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Gilles Poitras
Posts: 497 Location: Oakland California |
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This is great. If you go the neighborhood where it is set there are statues and manhole covers at various locations.
Information on where the statues and manhole covers are: https://www.koyagi.com/TokyoStroll/TSKatsushikaku.html |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2991 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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The first Kochikame movie from 1999 actually did have an English subtitle track for its DVD release in Japan, but beyond that this is the first official English release for Kochikame outside of Japan.
I first saw various episodes of Kochikame a number of years ago via some themed DVDs that came out in the late 00s & early 10s, as well as both movies, and even without a translation (minus the first movie) I had a lot of fun watching that stuff. It's very much a sitcom, but it doesn't take too long for the series to introduce its more silly, wacky, & absurd elements, like an officer who's a blatant Golgo 13 parody (at least visually), a soft-spoken biker cop who becomes an utter badass once he gets on his motorcycle, a psychic officer who literally only wakes up every four years for the Olympics, and an entire "Special Detective Squad" made up a man who only wears a speedo (the TV special that introduces him even makes a joke about how loaded he is down there, complete with mosaic censoring!), a portly man obsessed with dolphins, & a pair of hairy dudes who are a Sailor Moon (& Venus) parody... and this is but a small portion of the gaggle of characters found in Kochikame. In essence, Kochikame is very similar to Gintama in that it's generally a silly comedy that occasionally can do the dramatic & serious, except that in Kochikame it's more or less strictly episodic fare & doesn't do long-form story arcs, unlike Gintama. In fact, the director who led the longest stretch of the Kochikame anime, Shinji Takamatsu (Eps 76 to 338, & both movies), would go on to be OG director of the Gintama anime, likely because of his work on Kochikame. Also, amusingly enough, Ryo-san is probably the most relatable today to modern-day elder Millennials, since he's a guy who lives paycheck to paycheck, loves playing video games & building plastic models in his spare time, & is constantly having money problems (though, admittedly, that's mostly due to him constantly owing people money for the collateral damage he does). To older generations he was mostly just a comedic foil for them to laugh at for his antics, but to some today he might be a bit too relatable (accidentally). |
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MFrontier
Posts: 20003 |
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I guess this is the end of miniskirt policewomen outside cosplay costumes.
It makes me wonder if Detective Conan is going to update Yumi and Naeko's uniforms so they start wearing pants. Will Sato still wear a skirt as a detective? |
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FishLion
 Crazy Fangirl Posts: 856 |
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Yeah, that is pretty relatable to many people I know (not that we're elder millennials), which is great for characters like him because it can humanize and make the struggle meaningful, like how Homer is honestly trying to be a supportive family man in between the cartoon antics and his schemes (though he often fails). Talking about girl failures is in but sitcom man failures who are relatable have been in style for a long time. As for the release schedule, I would love if more youtube accounts did that. Every time I hear hundreds of episodes of a classic anime have dropped I turn my brain off. I usually love them and have a bunch on backlog, but hearing an episode number in the hundreds tells me it's a project to get through it that I should not undertake lightly. I'm not even neurotic about finishing every series I watch, just knowing there are that many waiting for me makes it harder to start even when it is 100% not plot heavy like Kochikame or available freely. On the other hand, if I could subscribe to a bunch of Youtube channels that put out older anime like this and scroll through my subscriptions looking for what episodes were put out recently to find things that catch my eye, it would probably be easier for me to get pulled into classic shows that aren't on my radar. That might sound similar to simulcasting, but there is a mental difference between browsing ongoing series and trying to pick out one to start from the beginning versus browsing recently published videos and them trying to get you to watch a single episode. Throwing a single episode of the sit-cop anime that shows up on my recommended page is much less daunting then finding a series on dedicated SVOD, seeing that big number, and deciding to start a 370 episode anime. I do think that is one thing TV has always had over SVOD, turning Toonami on to see that an anime is halfway through season felt like the way things had to be due to broadcast schedules and you could catch up later after the random episode pulled you in. Now SVOD rules and you have to intentionally decide to start each series and make the time to try it out instead of organically stumbling on it and deciding to find more. Getting a little tangenty here so sorry for that, but I would honestly kind of love of SVODs made "channels" that were just sequences of shows playing on a schedule. Want magical girls but don't want to put in the attention to take something of the backlog and you can't decide which show to try out? Throw on the magical girl channel and you can hang out or game or work on some projects while shows are brought to you. Want to find a new action anime but all the title cards do nothing to help you decide? Throw on the action channel where they line up new and old action anime so you can have a little sampler. Then you could even have a skip option unlike cable! It honestly wouldn't be that different from suggested series coming up like we have now, I just wish suggested series on SVODs would recommend you first episodes and ask if you want to continue instead of starting another entire 12 episode series without you having any idea what you are getting into. I would use that every morning that I want anime but am too sleepy to make an intentional choice or get something off my backlog. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2557 Location: Online Terminal |
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To further contextualize the era Kochikame started in, Barney Miller (a sitcom about a NYC precinct) had started in the US a year prior. Andy Griffith (who was a sheriff) and its spinoffs had been off the air for a few years, but the era that replaced it was what gave you workplace comedies like Barney Miller, plus things like Mary Tyler Moore and all the Norman Lear shows. 1976 was past when the also-popular-in-Japan Columbo (as part of the NBC Mystery Movie) was past its prime, but still had a couple years to go.
Also, Japan has never been one to shy away from "Here's a guy who sucks" comedies. |
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Doubleclouder
 Posts: 153 |
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Of course not. You can draw whatever you want in fiction. Some schools in Japan have also phased out gym bloomers and school swimsuits over the years but but manga and anime still depicts them because they're so iconic. |
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Covnam
 Posts: 4366 |
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I haven't had the chance to try this yet, so I can't comment on it's content, but I do agree that releasing huge chunks of this all at once would have been worse since I think it would have kept more people away than a small steady output.
I do think that once a week is too far the opposite direction though when you have 7 years worth of releases that way though. At least twice a week would be a bit more reasonable. Last edited by Covnam on Wed May 21, 2025 2:28 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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kaiju3
Posts: 79 |
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Nah, unless it is a blatant "this only exists for fanservice" work - and most of those these days are isekai or fantasy and wouldn't take place in a school anyway - there hasn't been a show or major manga to depict sports bloomers in ages. Instead, the middle school (now rarely depicted outside of CDGCT) and high school girls now do PE and sports day in shorts just like the guys. The school swimsuit thing may be a bit more common, but the issue there is anime rarely doing the "school swimming outing" thing anymore anyway. Even the ones that still do the girls in swimsuit episode - most don't anymore - if it takes place at school it is going to be the one girl in the cast who is on the swimming team - while usually wearing the school swimming team uniform - not "all the ladies in the pool for PE/sports day" like in the past. Otherwise it is going to be an outing at a beach or public pool/swim park. So while this was definitely true in the 2000s and still hanging on a bit into the 2010s, the sports bloomers and school swim uniform things are long dead now. |
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SleepyBat
 Posts: 49 |
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It feels so refreshing to see some nice sentiment towards letting introductory releases of old shows breathe instead of dropping everything at once. I see people get really mad about "drip-feeding" or withholding non-simulcasts, but like, do you really want shows that have never released here (or even been fansubbed, anyways) to fall out of relevance so quickly?
Mostly speaking as having hang-ups with the binge model, anyways. Have always found gradual releases of anything, new or not, to be far more inviting than being served pure content on a platter and expected to find my own time/energy to burn through a long show in anything less than a dozen years. Consume, consume, consume... |
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Triltaison
 Posts: 937 |
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Some kinda do that, or have done it before. For instance, Pluto has a variety of anime streaming channels with themes that rotate. Right now, they have live channels for comedy titles, movies, random Lupin III episodes/specials/movies, spotlight series from Crunchyroll and Hidive, and a random general anime channel (it's playing Speed Racer at the moment). Sometimes it plays long blocks of the same thing and sometimes it has other themes like action or whatever, but sometimes they have a schedule. TokuShoutsu and RetroCrush used to be dedicated channels on Pluto with schedules, but they're not running at the moment. |
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vanfanel
 Posts: 1303 |
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Kochikame has a number of moods. Sometimes it's all-out wacky insane, sometimes it's a more low-key kind of comedy, and sometimes it's actually kind of heartwarming. One reason I got into the manga years ago is that there are so many little details about Japanese life -- specifically Tokyo life -- that the stories are often built around: odd little traditions, snippets of history specific to certain neighborhoods, cultural things, things kids used to do when Ryotsu was a child. Ryotsu is a walking encyclopedia of interesting trivia about Tokyo. He talks about or remembers his childhood periodically, remembering life before video games and cell phones. One story has him teaching the his coworkers a game he used to play with his friends growing up. Of course, overcompetitiveness ensues and things get wacky, but at the same time, that game was being introduced to a new generation of kids. When the manga hit its 40th anniversary of serialization, there was a TV program about the artist, Osamu Akimoto, and he said he deliberately likes to build stories around those things, because kids today just aren't aware of them; he saw it as doing his part to keep the things of his generation alive.
A few of my favorite Kochikame stories (I think these are all manga-only): * Ryotsu decides that Christmas is set up to make bachelors feel bad, and recruits a bunch of lonely guys to start a competing holiday, "Man Day," on Dec. 24. The festivities involve making a lot of noise and wearing loincloths while parading an o-mikoshi around Tokyo on a course chosen to go past all the most romantic dating spots, and systematically wreck the mood of each one. * The officers want to do an office trip, but they've only got about $100 budget; Ryotsu says not to worry; he knows where to find the deals, and starts googling. No one is expecting much, but he puts together a luxurious plan that involves flying to a resort area, eating caviar, and staying in a nice hotel. The nicer the trip becomes, the more worried all his co-workers get, as they wonder what's wrong with all this that he got such low prices. It's an ominous sign when they enter their hotel, and a Buddhist monk is stationed by the door sprinkling purification salts on people going in and out. * Ryotsu's boss wants to fix up his wife's old record player for their anniversary, but needs a hard-to-come-by old part to make it work. He remembers that Akihabara is a great place for finding stuff like that, and goes there for the first time in decades. While there, he encounters Ryotsu stocking up on plastic models, and Ryotsu leaps to the conclusion that his boss has been a closeted otaku all along. "I understand!" he insists, understanding nothing. * Ryotsu decides there are too many imported foreign words corrupting "real" Japanese, and challenges his coworkers to go one week without using any katakana loanwords. They all wear mics so they can hear each other, and they all have buttons that can deliver an electric shock if the others hear a loanword. Ryotsu is so confident he can avoid foreign loanwords that he places his electrodes where the sun don't shine (we already knew this wasn't ending well for him, but now...) There was a funny scene where Reiko has to teach an evening class on French cooking that she'd forgotten she'd already committed to when agreeing to Ryotsu's challenge. Seeing her performing verbal gymnastics to avoid any French words during her presentation was hilarious, and of course the audience is bewildered. I'm glad everyone can finally experience this series. |
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FireChick
Subscriber Posts: 2760 Location: United States |
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I know nothing of Kochikame, but all I know about REMOW is that the English dubs they make for all the shows they license are BAAAAAD. I'm not even exaggerating.
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Fluwm
Moderator
 Posts: 1609 |
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That's... that's not Ota, from Patlabor?
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2991 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Ota was more than likely designed to be an homage to Ryo-san, at least visually. Remember, Kochikame was already around 12 years old when Patlabor first debuted in 1988. |
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