Digimon Adventure V-Tamer 01 28.5: Double Tamer!! The Great Super Dimension Battle!!
I used to be super into Digimon, and now that there’s word of a new series bringing back the characters from Adventure, it’s got me going back to the series again..
Davis/Daisuke was my favorite character from 02. He was set up to be the main character, he was the kid with the goggles who took Tai’s role as team leader.. but really, TK and Kari were the lead characters, they were returning players from the original series and had much more experience than Davis. That made Davis a really interesting character to me - a character with all the classic signs of being a protagonist, yet who struggled to live up to that role. The show itself didn’t develop his character that much, but it was still pretty endearing.
I’ve never read V-tamer before, I might have to now, but this chapter is apparantly a one-off special where Davis is transported to the comic world (where Tai is his age and living a whole different adventure than he did in the show). It surprised me that it sums up the emotional core of Davis’ character.. that while he tries to be a leader, he feels isolated from his friends, and doesn’t think that they listen or care about him. I don’t think the show ever went into it that much, but it was implied by the way that TK and Kari were so much more prominent in the story and how Davis was too often just an annoyance or comic relief.
So this was a real treat to read. I love the art style, the goofy expressions and heavily stylized 90s character designs. I love how Davis gets to meet younger Tai, since Tai was his hero and role model. Despite Davis inheriting his goggles, the show didn’t have much interaction between them from what I remember.
What I’d really like to seek out next is the movies. The show got a pretty good dub (I’ve never seen the original with subtitles), the movies were edited into one embarassing mess of a thing. The animation for the movies is especially cool- a loose free flowing style with warm earthy colors. The same director did my favorite One Piece movie, Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island.
I’ve also, shockingly, never seen more than the first few episodes of Digimon Tamers, the Star Trek DS9 of Digimon. I must have gone into Digimon fatigue by that point, but now that popular opinion holds it as the best of the Digimon shows by far, I might have to go watch the whole thing.
