GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka Is Netflix’s Weirdest Anime Addition

I have a soft spot for retro anime. Something about the charm of analog animation techniques enhances the experience for me, which is why I was happy to jump into the first episode of Netflix’s latest addition, GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka. A 6/10 anime from 1999 is always going to win me over more than a 6/10 modern Netflix original, like The Great Pretender, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

Before we dive right in, I want to say that I am no prude. I’ve seen plenty of anime with egregious fanservice, and I’m a die-hard Dragon Ball fan, so I have a pre-prepared list of defenses ready to use against anyone that brings up a young Goku investigating why his new friend doesn’t have a penis. I know exactly what to expect when jumping into an older series, and despite that fact, GTO’s approach towards sexuality took me aback – and that’s with a radically different introduction to what we see in the manga.

Courtesy of Wikipedia , GTO’s manga begins when Onizuka (22 years old) meets a schoolgirl who agrees to go on a date with him, and her boyfriend (and teacher) interrupts them in a love hotel. If it wasn’t bad enough, the “old and ugly” teacher’s influence over the girl is so strong that she leaps from a second-story window – luckily, she is caught in Onizuka’s arms.

What is the takeaway from this introduction? Is it that Onizuka really shouldn’t be dating teenage girls? Or is it that a dangerous culture has developed with these unchecked power dynamics between teachers and students? Well, it’s neither of those – actually, this is Onizuka’s impetus to become a teacher. So he can enjoy that same power dynamic and court 16-year-old girls.

In the anime, Onizuka looks up a schoolgirl’s skirt in a mall (which also happens in the manga) before riding off with his fellow former gang member friend – who, unlike Onizuka, is now on the straight-and-narrow with a respectable job. Onizuka then briefly recaps that he’s becoming a teacher now, and his reason is to date young girls.

So much of this first 50-minute episode is Onizuka perving on girls and thinking about how he’d love to come home to a teenage wife. It’s really, truly obnoxious. And it seems like Onizuka will get his wish when the only cute girl in his class – Mizuki – asks for private lessons. This, however, is a ruse – she’s tempting Onizuka into a compromising position so her hoodlum classmates can take pictures to use as blackmail.

Onizuka proceeds to torture the hoodlums in a park with another group of gang members to solve the blackmail problem, but Mizuki doesn’t leave him alone, continually tempting him into doing whatever she wants by offering up her panties. We then take a deeper dive into what’s going on with Mizuki and it’s plainly revealed that she is a child, acting out because of the devolving relationship between her parents and herself. This is not a problem that adults usually run into, and that’s because Mizuki is not an adult, making the fact that the show – and Onizuka – constantly sexualizes her incredibly weird.

But as it turns out, Onizuka is actually a pretty good guy – or at least, I think that’s supposed to be the implication. They never go through with anything – although it’s never a good look – and when the show infantilizes her, it doesn’t also attempt to sexualize her. However, these moments are often a minute apart at the most.

When Onizuka learns of Mizuki’s issues, he decides to break down the literal wall between Mizuki’s parents’ separate bedrooms. Her parents were pretty freaked out by the half-naked man with a giant hammer bursting into their home claiming to be a teacher, but Onizuka’s outburst did have the family sit down together to talk, which is progress.

It’s so strange how hard this anime tries to make Onizuka look like a good guy, while also constantly acknowledging that he’s not. The episode ends with his term as a student-teacher coming to a close, and as he walks out of the school gates for the last time, Mizuki throws her underwear from a balcony, before jumping up and putting herself on full display for her teacher. It couldn’t even go out on a wholesome note, it had to remind us what Onizuka is here for.

From my brief research into the later plot – I have only watched one of 48 episodes, after all – it seems like Onizuka focuses on helping his students, but it’s not clear if he ever stops looking at their panties. GTO clearly has a lot of heart, but Onizuka’s perverted nature – combined with the age of the girls he’s leering at – makes it almost unbearable to watch.

So, why has Netflix decided to pick up an anime that’s more than two decades old, even when the subject matter is… what it is? Well, thanks to that aforementioned browse of a single Wikipedia page, I discovered that the new J-drama, GTO Revival, began airing early this month, April 2024. I’m going to use my powers of intuition here to say that Netflix quickly licensed the GTO anime to usurp search terms for people looking for a new GTO series. Alternatively, this could just be a precursor to Netflix localizing the new GTO Revival drama. It’s almost certainly one of the two, but only time will tell which.

All told, I liked Great Teacher Onizuka more than I expected to, but every time it showed a bit of heart and made me like Onizuka, it also decided to make him seem like a stupid scumbag. He might just manage to overcome himself and develop into a better person, but the bad taste that this first episode left in my mouth means I won’t be coming back for more.