To be clear, I'm definitely not going to start reviewing different releases of the same titles because that would be nuts and there would be no end. And I feel like I'm opening a dangerous door just by setting the precedent, but there's no getting around the fact that there's a meaningful difference between reviewing all of the first run of Project A-Ko sequels together - as they were compiled on DVD under the banner of Project A-ko 2: Love and Robots - and reviewing them separately as they're now being put out on Blu-ray by our good friends at Discotek.
Or to put it another way, I justified double-dipping on the Project A-ko 2 Blu-ray by convincing myself it was okay because I'd cover it here, and don't think that means I'm necessarily going to pick up the other two when they arrive, Discotek! Frankly, compiling the three together was by far the more reasonable way to go, and who am I kidding, my money is basically yours at this point. Hold on, I'm pretty sure I still have a kidney left that I can hock. While I search, why don't we take a look at Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group, Super-Deformed Double Feature, You're Under Arrest: Mini Specials, and Riki Oh: The Wall of Death?
It's hard to say what the perfect sequel to Project A-ko would have looked like. But my instinct is that, at the very least, it would have needed to be ambitious in the ways the original was. And that immediately rules out all the usual avenues because if there's one thing that made Project A-ko stand out, it's the extent to which it did the unexpected. In a sense, that's all it does: what narrative there is ricochets from idea to idea based on little more than what will be funny or interesting in the moment, and its most arresting aspects, like that gloriously singular soundtrack, feel like conscious attempts to stand out from anything that was happening at the time. What sets A-ko apart is an impish inclination to rush off down any rabbit hole that takes its creators' fancy while giggling at the conventionality of its peers.
Ironically, the final A-ko entry, released under a dizzying number of titles but reviewed here as Project A-ko: Uncivil Wars, took a decent swing at doing the same by chucking out almost everything except the title and the barest bones of the characters, and I remember it as being pretty sucky and probably the worst of the bunch, so maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about. Or maybe you can only pull off that sort of trick the once, the more so since Project A-ko's moment was a brief one indeed: barely any time had passed before the market was heaving with anime that parodied other anime, many of them recycling exactly the same jokes in a fashion that must have rapidly made A-ko look a mite dated if you didn't know how many of them it had got to first.
Let's commend Project A-ko 2: Plot of the Daitokuji Financial Group for one thing, then: it sure did come out quickly, in less than a year in fact, and that was probably a wise move. Given that turnaround time, it's safe to say ambition was firmly off the table, and so all hope of a sequel that would push the envelope in the ways Project A-ko did, and with that being the case, what we got was hardly the worst-case scenario. A-ko 2 goes down a pointless route, but it's an earnest and faintly ingenious attempt to continue a narrative that had no need of being continued. Picking up a matter of days after A-ko's events, it finds that show's alien invaders now stuck in an immobilised spaceship and trying to make the best of a bad situation by selling themselves as the city's new hot tourist spot. Or is it all a cunning plan to kidnap the chirpily obnoxious C-ko, who they regard as their lost alien princess for reasons I can't remotely remember? Probably, but that's not enough to prevent our hero A-ko from agreeing to try and fix their ship in exchange for a free meal. And in the meantime, wealthy genius B-ko's latest scheming gets waylaid by her father's even schemier scheming, as he pilfers her latest design and convinces the authorities to let him use it in an attempt to loot the crashed ship for its neat alien technologies.
Writing it all down like that, A-ko 2 sounds both busy and nonsensical, much as the original A-ko was, and you'd think that might be a good thing. It does have a degree of the same energy, which is probably its biggest asset: there's not a lot that unquestionably, consistently works, but nothing doesn't work for long enough to become a drag. With the same production values as its predecessor, I think I'd go further: the big action climax is well-conceived enough that it might have been something quite special. But even with barely more than half the running time to be filled, A-ko 2 is a tremendous step down, and while that mostly just leaves it looking a bit cheap, there are moments when it looks really, really cheap*, with designs going wildly off-model and, for some reason, the absolutely worst lip-synching I can recall ever seeing in anime. Can we blame that on a diminished budget? How exactly did they get lip-synching so wrong that it's noticeable in scene after scene? Was it a joke?
Hey, at least the soundtrack's pretty good, which makes it another step down if you're as in love with what Zito and Carbone conjured up for the original A-ko as I am, but on its own merits it stands up well against anything else that was happening at the time. Can we say the same for Project A-ko 2, I wonder? Not when it comes to the animation, no, it really is objectionably sloppy at points, but for the rest... Sure, why not? Project A-ko 2 is a fun little time-waster that likely as not will leave you in a better mood than it found you, and that's fine and dandy, while also making for a crushing disappointment on just about every level.
I've never pretended to be writing these reviews for much besides my own amusement, but occasionally we come to a title where it really does feel like I'm talking to an audience of one. For a start, the compilation known to Western audiences as Super-Deformed Double Feature was only ever released on VHS, so far as I know, and while you can find its crucial portions on YouTube, that's not quite the same experience, for reasons we'll return to. At any rate, the difficulty of laying hands on a video tape from thirty years ago is barely half the battle. Of the two short animated features included, the first, Ten Little Gall Force, requires that you be a substantial fan of the first Gall Force series, while for the second, Scramble Wars, you'll also need a fair knowledge of the second wave of Gall Force entries plus Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, and Genesis Survivor Gaiarth of all things. I know there are plenty of Bubblegum Crisis fans still around, and Gall Force has its following, but Gaiarth? I'd be surprised if anyone who isn't me has watched that one in the past five years. All of which is a massive shame because, if you fall into the miniscule demographic that ticks all those boxes, Super-Deformed Double Feature is a blast.
Ten Little Gall Force is a comedic making-of of the first two Gall Force features, except that, outside of the recycled footage, all the cast and crew are represented by cutesy chibi versions of themselves, leaving the bizarre implication that what we call anime is actually the outpowering of some parallel cartoon universe striving for what we'd consider realism. At no point do the chibi actors comment on how bizarre their in-film counterparts look to them, but that's about the only comedic stone left unturned across a frantic 16-minute run time. There are clever gags, there are dumb gags, there are sight gags, there are surreal gags, and there are even quite a few rude gags, which begs the question of whether we truly needed to see the Gall Force gang both chibified and naked. And obviously we didn't, but it does feel in keeping with the Gall Force ethos of matching the most high-concept sci-fi with the most low-brow exploitation; I'd forgotten quite how seedy Eternal Story got amid its heady pacifist space opera musings, but Ten Little Gall Force wasted no time in reminding me! Then again, I ought to have expected fan service from something that couldn't possibly have been made more for a specific fanbase: this was unmistakeably made by people who loved Gall Force for people who loved Gall Force, with the caveat that if you truly love a property, it's OK to make fun of it in some fairly mean ways.
The same goes for Scramble Wars, if not more so, which is only appropriate for something that pits the casts of Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, Genesis Survivor Gaiarth, and other properties from studio Artmic against each other in a Wacky Races-style contest with an outrageously huge cash prize at the end of it. Scramble Wars takes up the lion's share of the tape and so gets to develop a bit more, which means it's that bit better for being able to set up jokes rather than rattling about like a pingpong ball in a spin dryer as Ten Little Gall Force did. Though requiring a wider breadth of knowledge in theory, it's also less reliant on in-jokes, though there's a truly joyous one for the Gall Force fans; but front and centre it's a Wacky Races rip-off, and I'm happy to call it the best of that plentiful subgenre. It's also probably technically superior, though a startling aspect of both is how well made they are, even if each cheats in its own ways, Ten Little Gall Force by pilfering footage from the Gall Force movies and Scramble Wars by setting the action on Gaiarth and so getting its background art for free.
Admittedly, I was always likely to say nice things about this one, since I love Gall Force and Bubblegum Crisis and and even have a soft spot for Genesis Survivor Gaiarth - which is why I'd argue that watching Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars back to back won't quite substitute the true Super-Deformed Double Feature experience. The reason being that AnimEigo saw fit to include a couple of short documentaries, and while the animations are the obvious stars, the live action stuff is charming in its own right. The first focuses on Kenichi Sonoda and is worth watching for his one-man anime movie alone, while the second follows the Gall Force cast as they record one of the songs for the soundtrack and is nearly as fun if you're the kind of person who'd consider watching that sort of thing. But put all four segments together and what you have is seventy minutes of vintage anime nerd nirvana.
I have an abiding hope that one day we'll get a Gall Force blu-ray set - it's crazy how ignored the franchise has been given some of the rubbish that's been rescued over the years - and if and when that magical day should come, it only makes sense that Super-Deformed Double Feature will make its welcome return as a bonus feature, that being more or less what it always was, albeit in an age when bonus features were another thing you were expected to splash out for. Should that not happen, I guess you can always go ahead and watch Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars on YouTube; just remember to feel slightly sad that you're not getting the whole of one of vintage anime's most charming, if phenomenally niche, experiences.
Here's how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: this was one of the very first DVDs I bought to review here, many a year ago, and I got most of the way through it before giving up in despair, since when it's been gathering dust on my shelf, taunting me with its grimy presence. This is also how bad the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials are: amid a collection of twenty stories of seven or so minutes, three of them pit our heroic traffic cop pair Natsumi and Miyuki up against panty thieves, and those three episodes occur one after the other. I can imagine the writer so devoid of imagination that they'd fall to so miserable a cliché of bad anime, and if I really stretch, I can imagine the writer who'd go back to that well not once but twice more, but to then tell those stories back to back? No, that beggars belief. And it's hardly the only idea that gets reused here, either, though I suppose "idea" is too strong a word for most of what's on offer.
By the law of averages, not all of those twenty mini-episodes are terrible, though the failure rate is impressively high. Nevertheless, they're practically all bad in a few basic ways: almost all the humour (and humour is definitely the goal here, for all that it's one more occasionally brushed against than hit) is broadly sex-based, in that the antagonists are creepy guys of one sort or another that Natsumi and Miyuki have to put in their places, generally through violence. But the whole thing is so leering that it feels far more on the side of the men than our heroes, who are generally treated with no real respect whatsoever; if I told you they spend ten minutes out of the two and a half hours of material here doing anything that resembles actual police work, I suspect I'd be exaggerating. There are also some strikingly nasty gags at the expense of trans character Aoi Futaba, who I'm fairly sure was treated with a heck of a lot more respect in both the OVAs and the film, and in general, none of the cast feel like they have much to do with their earlier incarnations: they're stock types plugged in to stock narratives, many of which could have wandered in from any show.
The better sections, then, tend to the be the ones that remember what You're Under Arrest is about and that the concept was never, "Oh my god! Women cops, whatever next?" Whenever Natsumi and Miyuki are behind the wheel of a car, proceedings pick up considerably, but that amounts to a minute of two, presumably because animating cars costs money and nobody wanted to spend more than the bare minimum on this: it's distressingly cheap-looking from start to finish and if there was ever a point where director Nishimura brought any flair to the proceedings, I must have blinked and missed it. Heck, even the music is actively dull, and I struggle to think of any anime from the period that couldn't muster at least one decent tune. Really, the whole business has the feeling of something made as an obligation by people with no affection for the source material and no sense of what to do with it; not that it was ever a good fit for these bite-sized episodes, but the eagerness to veer as far as possible from what the show was traditionally good at in favour of the most generic plotlines imaginable is truly baffling.
I'll say this much: by the end of what amounted to a second watch, the You're Under Arrest Mini Specials had worn my down from active dislike to surly indifference, and there were points, albeit brief ones, when I got caught up in a couple of the better stories. Aside from the nastiness toward Aoi, there's nothing here that's worthy of real anger or contempt, though that only makes it more frustrating from a reviewing perspective, since I'd always rather have a terrible title that I can merrily tear into over one I'm bored just thinking about. And it's conceivable that were this mess not dressed up in the ill-fitting clothes of one of my favourite anime franchises, I'd be a little more kindly disposed to it. But it is, and I'm not, and it's thoroughly depressing that this tacky, lifeless nonsense will be our last brush with You're Under Arrest after the highs of the OVA and movie.
As a prime example of the mission creep that's overtaken this review series, I offer the fact that once, very long ago, the plan was to cover only films and OVAs from the nineties that had been released in the UK and were readily available, and now here we are with something from the eighties that has seemingly never once had what you might call a "proper" release anywhere outside of Japan. The only physical copy of Riki-Oh: The Wall of Death you're likely to come across was, so far as I can tell from the shonkily produced inlay, distributed by a company called AVP, on whom the internet yields precisely no information. It looks awfully like a knock-off, yet you do occasionally see a new, sealed copy floating about, so maybe it's legitimate in some loose sense of that word?
Whatever the case, it's probably not the sort of thing we ought to be concerning ourselves with, any more that it would make sense to be reviewing, say, fansubs of shows videotaped off Japanese TV. Except for two things: one is that, against all the odds, this 45-minute OVA has managed to retain something of a reputation for itself, as perhaps the least known but still occasionally talked about member of the fraternity of video-nasty-style titles that were so many people's introduction to anime back in the day; and secondly because the wider world of Riki-Oh has left its own legacy, in the shape of the live-action film Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, a film prestigious enough to recently get the deluxe Blu-ray treatment - a fact that makes it all the weirder that no one in the West has seen fit to pick up this OVA and its sequel. (Media Blasters apparently did, but lost the rights before they could do anything with them.)
The Story of Ricky is a gleeful dive into violent excess on a par with any splatter movie you can name, at least as far as delivering maximal quantities of latex and stage blood to provide some ingeniously horrible gore effects goes. Whether it's a "good" film is perhaps besides the point, though it's certainly put together with a degree of craft that you mightn't expect from something that's aiming, above all, to be shocking and gross. Personally, I was exhausted well before its end, so the notion of the precise same story told in half the time had a definite appeal, the more so since that story is better fitted to 45 minutes than 90: our hero, Riki-Oh / Ricky, has been condemned to a privatised prison run by a hierarchy of increasingly monstrous tyrants, from gang leaders up to the warden and beyond, and while they're initially willing to leave him be due to his nigh-inhuman martial arts abilities and seeming obliviousness to pain, that status quo barely outlasts the first proper scene. With the prison's fragile totalitarianism at risk, the only way to go from there is a series of ever more over the top efforts to put our hero in his place, especially as it becomes evident that he didn't end up in this particular prison by accident and won't be done before he's settled some business of his own.
Both live action film and OVA tell a largely identical tale in superficially identical fashions, in that both are primarily vehicles for lots and lots of bloody violence. So nothing could have surprised me more than how The Wall of Death approaches that violence. It's certainly there, and it's certainly graphic, but what it isn't is fun in the manner that the movie's take on identical scenes tends to be. And here, of course, I'm referring to a very specific sort of fun, but there's an undeniable gleefulness to the movie's take on this material that's largely absent from The Wall of Death. The gore is off-putting and very much seems as though it was meant to be, even in its more absurd moments, of which there are considerably less this time around.
Is this a bad thing? Is it a good thing? Truly, I'm not sure. I can't say I enjoyed The Wall of Death less, but that's arguably just because it didn't outstay its welcome, and while I'd give both interpretations a similar score, here it would be averaging out a much narrower range of highs and lows. It's relatively well-made, though rarely strikingly so; the animation is resolutely fine and all that visually sets the title apart is some unusually nifty editing, which adds a punchy, unnerving rhythm that's a definite boon. And while would be easy to condemn the focus on plot over spectacle when surely no one would come to any version of Riki-Oh for the plot, it's hard to see how the narrative could have been trimmed back more without straying into incoherency. Still, the fact remains that the only reason anyone's likely to seek out The Wall of Death is for its place in the video nasty pantheon, and while it warrants inclusion, I suspect the measure of seriousness it applies to material that's arguably better suited to The Story of Ricky's gleeful excess will make it slightly unsatisfying for most.
-oOo-
My goodness, this is really getting to be an exercise in futility! Two recommendations for things that are nigh-impossible to watch (I mean, I guess I recommend Riki-Oh) and two titles that I hadn't much time for but that are easy to find - or, wait, no, a quick check suggests that the You're Under Arrest Mini-Specials are even getting a bit rare, and goodness knows that's not likely to ever get a rerelease because, as I think I may have mentioned in my review, it sucks goat nostrils.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* And for all the deservedly nice things I've said about Discotek, their Blu-ray print needed a fair bit more work or perhaps was from a source that was beyond entirely salvaging. At any rate, it's nowhere near on a par with what they delivered for the first A-ko.
