Naruto madness

File footage: Dewey.
Dewey likes Naruto,
ball games
and chicken.

A shout out to my nephew, Dewey, who patiently filled me in on the main characters and salient plot features of Naruto, a manga-anime-cartoon-movie-computer game hybrid. After about an hour of intense dissection, powerpoint slides, multiple-choice quizzes, short answer essay questions and one 15,000 words mini-thesis I started to realise two things. It's Japanese; it's terribly important to Dewey.

At the risk of losing the preferred-uncle status and being hated forever, I will characterise Naruto, just between you and me, as being like Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon. In other words, nothing like the He-Man, Ninja Turtles or Transformers I grew up with, or the Phineas and Ferb I currently adore. This is faaar more complicated, interwoven and trans-media.

Finally, they, despite being ninja's, didnt sound like the ninja's I grew up with either. I'm thinking, American Ninja this ain't.

Naruto - totally ninja!

 

Michael Dudikoff - totally ninja? 

He was in the early 1990s:

What the hell were we thinking back then?