That Time a Bathing Ape Remembered Arale Existed

If you know who Arale is without Googling it, we’re probably around the same age and that’s fine. Dr. Slump is one of Akira Toriyama’s earlier works—predating Dragon Ball by a few years—centered on a mad scientist named Senbei Norimaki and the android girl he builds, who turns out to be basically indestructible, completely unhinged, and obsessed with poop. The show aired internationally around the turn of the millennium and then faded from the cultural memory of anyone outside Japan, where it remains legitimately beloved.

The world of Dr. Slump is one of those places that makes a certain kind of sense once you accept its premises: the most powerful being alive is a small girl who collects feces on a stick, fights Godzilla for fun, and hangs out with a guy who transforms into a tiger whenever a woman touches him. There’s a green-haired angel. There are sentient penguins. Nobody seems bothered by any of it.

A Bathing Ape has put out a full Dr. Slump collection—T-shirts, hoodies, long tees, the full retro-nerd arsenal. BAPE doing Arale makes a strange kind of sense: both occupy the space where something deeply weird gets elevated to icon status purely through force of personality. I’m not mad about it.