Akira Toriyama would like a word with South Korea.
Super Kid is a 1994 South Korean science fiction animated film by the production company UM Productions and distributed by Korean International in South Korea. Despite taking three years to make with many people working on it, people know it for its poor animation, plenty of inconsistencies and for copying Dragon Ball — the English dub was even done by Ocean Productions, using the same voice actors as for the first English dub of Dragon Ball Z.
It follows the plot of the 199-year old Gokdari and his superhero group known as "Super Kids" or "Gokdari Group" as they travel through space in the year 2023 to save planet Delta from the space criminal Judogwi.
This movie contains examples of:
- Abusive Alien Parents: It's mentioned during the police chief's breakdown of Judogwi's crimes that the alien is so ruthless he sold his entire family into slavery for a box of gold. Admittedly, we don't know if the ones sold were Judogwi's ancestors and siblings, or his children, or even a combination thereof.
- Animesque: This is a South Korean movie looking like a certain Japanese work of animation.
- Bishōnen Line: Played with. Judogwi spends most of the movie as an enormous creature resembling a Kaiju-sized mixture of dinosaur and elephant. When this form fails to defeat the Super Kids, he returns to his original form, which looks like a cross between a humanoid and a gnarled tree, with tentacles on his head, hands and feet as well as suppurating orifices dotting his body. In this body, he puts up more of a fight.
- Breath Of Fire: Wang Do Chi has the ability to spew fire from his mouth, and uses this to deliver a rather painful surprise to Gokdari.
- Card-Carrying Villain: Judogwi is an unrepentant monster who revels in his crimes, which range from selling his own family into slavery to demanding a regular sacrifice of an alien maiden as his meal.
- Combat Tentacles: Judogwi is able to extend his fingers in his true form and use them as tentacles that can seize, crush, stab and electrocute his victims.
- Extendable Arms: Samachi (the green, vaguely Piccolo-esque alien) has the ability to extend his arms to attack.
- Fartillery: Invoked for toilet humor with Wang Do Chi's "secret weapon"; a perfectly normal, if really foul-smelling fart, which is so disgusting he manages to momentarily repulse the Super Kids.
- Gentle Giant: Big Boy weighs 160kg and is 170cm tall, and he's described as a gentle person in his bio.
- Heel–Face Turn: Maoi, a henchman of the main antagonist Judowgi, becomes unable to aid Judogwi against Gokdari's group after seeing Gokdari and how he reminds him of his lost son. He first tries to dissuade the Super Kids from fighting Judogwi, and when that fails, he intervenes during the final battle to rip out Judgowi's power bead and crush it at the cost of his own life.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Destroying Judogwi's power bead exhausts the monster and leaves him too weak to fight Gokdari anymore, but causes an explosion that has fatal results for Maoi.
- Intrepid Reporter: Joo Eun Joo, who is determined to become the first reporter to ever truly interview the Super Kids, sneaks into their ship to watch their battles.
- Irony:
- The Super Kids are supposed to be a secret group, but as they fight villains as a job, they also live in an office that everyone knows the location of.
- Gokdari's group is called "Super Kids", yet all of the members are adults (except for Big Boy and Gokji who are 13 and 11 years old respectively), with senior citizens and one 97-year old alien called Samachi. Gokdari himself is much Older Than He Looks.
- Look Ma, No Plane!: Some members of the Gokdari Group, including the titular leader, can fly without effort.
- Magic Staff: Gokdari carries an explicitly magical staff made of a golden, metallic substance with a green bead on top. It provides him with an unspecified portion of his own powers, can extend (in an obvious Monkey King's Staff homage), makes a solid whacking implement, and the bead contains a sort of prison-realm it can suck criminals into, which is how Gokdari immobilizes his foes for transportation to the proper authorities after beating them into submission.
- Monstrous Cannibalism: When they find the planet where Judogwi is hiding, an encounter with the native aliens reveals that they are forced to sacrifice one of their women to the alien pirate as a meal every few days.
- Naked Freak-Out: Played for Laughs when Bazooka Joe accidentally blows his own suit off when using his explosive weapon. Joo Eun Joo even records it.
- Never Trust a Title: Despite what the title tells you, you aren't looking at a group of kids.
- Older Than They Look: Gokdari looks like a kid, yet he's 199 years old, overlapping with Really 700 Years Old.
- Palate Propping: In the beginning of the movie, Gokdari uses his magic staff like this on Wang Do Chi, a green alien, when Wang Do Chi attempts to devour him with an enormous bite.
- Scilicon Based Life: Rockpile is an alien of living stone who seems to be more a psionic energy entity using stone as a physical medium. He can assume a humanoid form and interact with the world, or disassemble and reassemble himself into varying-sized clouds of stones, which he can telekinetically launch at his opponents.
- Sizeshifter: Gokdari can make himself grow, an ability that he doesn't use until the end of the movie.
- The Tooth Hurts:
- Wang Do Chi's teeth end up shattering when he tries to bite Gokdari, only for Gokdari to zoom out of the way at the last moment. Luckily(?) they turn out to be dentures anyway, and at one point they go flying out of his mouth.
- Cacuruse breaks his own teeth when he gets one of Rockpile's stones jammed in his mouth during his fight and he makes the foolish mistake to bite it into rubble to show off how tough he is.
- Villainous Breakdown: All of the villains in this OAV end up going through breakdowns at some point or another as they find themselves on the losing ends of their battles. Wang Do Chi and Cacuruse throw outright temper tantrums of pain and frustration before finally being captured.
