Am I the only one appalled and fascinated by the choice of cover for the Essential Anime Classics release? Another point about Golden Boy being a master piece is that pretty much every episode starts out making you think that the girls play with Kintarou, but it always ends up being the other way round in the end. But since this is so obvious anyway, I forgive the people who chose that cover in the hope that they thought it was extra-clever on the people who hadn’t watched it yet.

Also, Lord of the Rings definitely got a weird twist in my mind with Kintarou and Frodo sharing the same voice actor over here.

Golden Boy was a major factor of starting my love for anime. This pervertedness without sexual explicity (or even implicity for that matter) is what keeps ecchi and fanservice anime interesting to this very day. Probably it is also one of the top three aspects of anime which the Western world, which all too often seperates strictly between Devilish hardcore and Christian innocence, still has some trouble understanding. It’s not just the use of suggestive imagery, the very concept of Kintarou leaving town just before he would “get any” is what kind of keeps the youth-like fascination one has for the other gender alive in him and the viewer. Girls in Kintarou never fully become sex objects, nor equal sex partners, they always have the attractiveness of being unreachable about them. Most of them start off despising him but end up falling for Kintarou, in this moment of weakness Kintarou disappears in order to not disrupt the natural beauty he observed in them. He makes himself unreachable in order to make them unreachable.

I’m usually not such a philosopher, but this concept is so awesome and so horribly absent in Western media that I suddenly get all manly-romantic mode, like Kintarou does at times. Despite what you said on pseudo-Lesbians and celibate heroes, I generally am of the opinion that sex should be kept off-limits at all times in non-ero anime. It actually enriches the sexual aspect without getting into the way of the non-sexual aspects, like when the pervertedness of characters lead to solid comedy that even little girls with no interest in getting off to anime could enjoy.

Also, I hate nothing more than the Western method of showing two people go into bed, panning onto the alarm clock, seeing half an hour pass in three seconds, and then panning back to show them lying on their backs smoking cigarettes so that you know they did “it”. Either make hentai or keep sex out of my anime. Just decide.

That’s why they made the first volume only, because the rest is garbage to be animated as an OVA,

Uno más, filler comment