BEST SHOW EVER! (and esotaric ideas about names)

GTO- Great Teacher Onizuka, is a Japanese TV show that you've probably never heard of. But you might. It was the most watched TV show ever in Japan, and it is undoubtedly a show that should go down in the annals of great dramas, not only from Japan but from any country ever. It is a fantastic drama about a punk who graduated from a third rate collage and took 7 years to do so. While he is working as a window washer, he gets an offer to fulfill his dream: becoming a "kyoshin" or high school teacher. He gets the job through a backdoor deal with the director and is put in charge of class 2-4, which is chock full of misfits and bullies. They hate him and constantly try to get him fired. Slowly, although he seems like a total buffoon, he begins to change the people around him for the better. The drama basically covers how he converts the school from a place completely devoid of spirit into a place with enthusiastic teachers and happy students. In other words, he gives the school back its soul. (While that wasn't the best description of the show, its good, believe me.) The show is ingeniously structured, with every character getting their comeuppance or reward exactly as the viewer thinks they deserve, and the conclusion is nothing short of the quality of a Zen koan in its paradoxical genius. While its a bit sappy at times it holds together mostly on the spunkiness of the lead actor, which carries through the language barrier, no small feat indeed.

The thing that stuck me the most, second only to enjoying the show itself, was one part at the end where Teshigawara, the math teacher, notices that if you take the first character of Onizuka, and put one character before it, it changes the meaning to soul. I love things like that in stories because it gives great incite into the symbolism of the character when you know the meaning of their name. In this case, Onizuka represents the soul being restored to those around him. And if you watch the show, this becomes quite obvious. The thing is, if a show or book, anything actually is good, I mean real good, then invariably, the characters, and places will have names that are extremely descriptive of the purpose that they fulfill in the story. Take Harry Potter: The Mirror of Erised, which sounds like some mysterious magic name is a simple palindrome; it is desire backwards. Or the best of all, Lord of the Rings, where every name is a multi-lingual pun. Baggins, an English name with its own coat of arms (http://www.houseofnames.com/xq/asp.c/qx/baggins-coat-arms.htm) with the motto "we trust in god" and also meaning thief, or something to do with bags. There are lots of other meanings, but I lost the book. Even great computer games, e.g., Final Fantasy 10, have great names. The name of the world, spira, means spiral in latin, and is representative of the "spiral of death" that surrounds the main enemy, Sin. (they say so in the game)

Another thing: have you noticed that sequals always suck? Probably. I think this is because after a story is finnished, that is, brought to complete resolution, anything added on is superflous and will be crap. I mean would you want to spend an evening with your date watching Lion King 2, or Lion King 1/2 for that matter?

On a closing note: Dubya, as in George W. Bush, is one of the many conjugations in latin of the word dubium, which means doubt. Take THAT biznitch! (You can download Onizuka [search GTO] with bittorrent at http://japan-tv.afraid.org:6969/)