While reading the excellent
Dramabeans blog, I was delighted to see that there's going to be a K-drama adaptation of the cheese-tastic shojo manga
Hana Yori Dango. I enjoyed the recent Japanese version*, and I tried to watch the Taiwanese version, but I prefer Korean dramas. (Japanese dramas are too short, and Taiwanese ones are too long. K-dramas are just right.)
Hana Yori Dango, for the six or so manga fans out there who've never heard of it, is the story of Makino Tsukushi, a poor, hardworking girl who gets into an ultra-elite school on scholarship. She does her best to lay low, but when she angers an insanely wealthy, powerful classmate, she becomes the target of a school-wide attack. It doesn't take
too long for her chief tormentor to forgive her (and--shocker!--fall in love with her), but poor Makino still spends the next zillion volumes surviving physical attacks, thwarted admirers, and evil plots to steal her boyfriend/social position/maidenly virtue. The series is the soapiest story on God's green earth, and I'm totally excited to see what Korean TV will do with it.
*Well, I enjoyed the first season. I tried watching the second, but I was
really turned off by the scene where the heroine is threatened by a group of black guys in NYC.
Labels: dramas, Hana Yori Dango
And speaking of NPR, their ongoing "You Must Read This" segment recently featured Yoko Kamio's manga Boys Over Flowers. It's not the best written piece they've ever produced (the pun in the title isn't really that difficult to understand, and the phrase "a trenchant cliquey system" left us wanting to confiscate the author's thesaurus), but we certainly agree with the premise!
