ROOKIES

 


I picked to marathon this drama for Chinese New Year holiday. It's just a short 11 episode with first and final episode running 1.5-2 hours each. ROOKIES is a 2008 drama which I didn't bother to watch because I thought it'll be just another Gokuzen type drama and I'm a bit tired of dramas involving over-passionate teacher and bunch of yankees (Gokuzen, Yankee-kun to megane-chan, etc etc), so forgive me for my ignorance. I just started to get curious about this drama because I've been listening to GreeeeN's Kiseki lately without knowing that it's an OST, and when I read the cast line up, well well, isn't it another ikemen drama? It's not as brutally abusive ikemen paradise like HanaKimi, PuriTeni (Prince of Tennis) (trivia: both HanaKimi and PuriTeni have Shirota Yu in them) or Mei-chan no Shitsuji to name a few, but you get the point when you see the pin up. It's not really on the face (only some of cast), it's all in the muscles haha...

Well, shall we move on to the drama itself now. This drama is based on the manga with same title, and it's a shounen manga, so don't expect any lovey-dovey moments though the potential is everywhere. As expected from a shounen manga with sports themed, this drama is about baseball and how passionate Japanese are on baseball. For me, the baseball ignorance, even after watching the whole 11 episodes plus the SP, my baseball knowledge is still 0. What can you expect from this girl if I even snoozed off when Ichirou hit a home-run live in front of my eyes when I watched Seattle Mariners play-off? But, there are tons of things that this drama shows you about life that I find this drama very inspiring. Why is that? It's all start with the first episode.

The first episode starts very rough with lots of fighting and yelling. Well, the yelling will keep on going, but in here what you see is all brutal violence. You have a new home-room teacher (Sato Ryuta) and the whole delinquent of baseball team who has nothing good going on except for sex, drinking, smoking and beating up people. So what makes the first episode turns out great? It's because one of those bunch actually wants to change and with the help of the teacher, he starts the journey that he left off a year ago, passion for baseball. Off course building up a baseball team from a bunch of hooligans is no joke and with all the never ending challenges from the school, rival, other delinquents, etc not to mention the criticisms, harsh comments and everything, it takes lots of courage and motivation to keep on going. And what wonderful about this drama is that it shows you that you dream and you work hard toward the dream. The result may not be as what you want, but you've worked hard and you don't have regrets. Well, isn't that what life is about?

Set the heavy topic aside, though heartwarming, the drama is actually quite heavy with all the beating and bashing. Violence are everywhere and though you're rooting the boys (Mikoshiba and Aniya especially), you'll feel like you want to scold the rest for being too easy to be provoked. And even seeing the pretty boy Shirota Yu is not helping at all because his character is one of the most violent. So what makes me stay through the drama till the end? It's because I'm rooting for the baseball team's hard work in overcoming their pasts, and the obstacles afterwards to be a good baseball team, even to take promise to themselves not to fight and smoke (that's gotta be hard for a delinquent, right?), and off course when they keep playing the piano version of Kiseki at those touchy moments, I can feel my tears just ready to burst.

Overall, it's a good drama to watch, and the high rating during its airing time is the prove of it. My complain will be on the SP, which is a waste of time. This SP is the same as SP's (Okada Junichi's drama) SP. I was hoping for a touching drama like this, the least they can do is making an SP that's like Code Blue, but apparently not. But they have a movie which I should be starting to search now.