Digimon

Digimon is the sort of show that breaks all traditional concepts of what children’s entertainment should be like.  Over 200 episodes spanning four seasons, Digimon broke all sorts of sales records outside of the television programming.  That’s because Digimon isn’t just a TV show.  It’s branched out into a full-length movie, a ridiculously popular card game, and an entire section of the toy industry.  Not bad for a simple children’s anime show, right?

The show brings many technological concepts to the forefront of children’s television.  As the story goes, many ages ago the digital world was fraught with conflict as beast digimons fought against human digimons.  The war continued for many years until the all-powerful Lucemon brought peace to the realm.  Since absolute power corrupts absolutely, Lucemon eventually became tainted with cruelty and tyranny.  He ruled the digimon world with an iron fist.  Thinking that enough was enough, the 10 legendary Ancient Warrior digimons rose up and laid the smack down on Lucemon and brought the world back into unity.

Unfortunately the brave Warriors died in the battle with Lucemon so three celestial digimons took over the Digital World and maintained the peace.  They were called Seraphimon, Ophanimon, and Cherubimon.  Things were looking pretty good until Cherubimon decided to take a bigger piece of the pie and revolted.  The Digital World was once more thrown into chaos and this time five children were summoned from Earth into the Digital World to help bring back the peace.

Every fight in the Digimon series takes place between digimons, who are essentially warrior avatars for their owners.  The children in the story don’t actually own any digimons but can call upon the spirits of the Legendary Warrior Digimon to ’digivolve’ into their powerful forms.

The crazy thing about the series is just how involved kids can get with it.  Digimon was revolutionary in that it could effectively dominate a child’s life through television, card games, and action figures.  Not to take away from the stunning accomplishment of creating 200 episodes of work, but there is a certain distastefulness in the way Digimon is marketed to kids.

But who am I to judge?  Kids love it.  Most of the fans are boys with a taste for fantasy violence and cool battle scenes, but the show does have a solid female audience.

If you’re too old for this sort of thing, there’s probably nothing of value to you in the Digimon series.  It’s strictly marketed to young children and there’s nothing terribly clever about the writing.  Trying to tear away your kids or siblings from the show may be your greatest challenge!