Baud Attitude

I’ve been watching quite a lot of anime lately. This shouldn’t, in itself, be all THAT surprising – I got sucked down that particular rabbit hole back in 1990, a major concern when plotting a move is “how do I deal with all of these DVDs?”, and my home office is decorated in Maid.

Thing is, though, I’m not often in the mood to just sit down and watch something, as opposed to playing a game, so I very rarely commit to sitting on the couch for the 6-to-12 hours it takes to watch a series. So… I have a ton of DVDs to WATCH, which makes it even harder to decide what I want to watch and the whole thing gets sort of circular at that point.

On the other hand, I’ve been doing an awful lot of time on our exercise bike in the last couple of months – as much as two hours a day. Result: Plenty of time where I can’t do anything EXCEPT watch stuff.

At first, I went on a bit of a nostalgia kick, so I watched all of the Bubblegum Crisis and Crash OVAs, the AD Police OVA series and Gunsmith Cats.

Then I went for stuff I hadn’t seen before. I’ve gotten through all of Android Ana Maico 2010, Wandering Son, The Enemy’s The Pirates, Noir, and Infinite Ryvius. I made a little detour into british sci-fi for Day of the Triffids and my wife and I have been working through “Sanctuary” wherein Captain Carter from “Stargate” inexplicably has a British accent.

I’ve had a couple of false starts – Azumanga Daioh, while an excellent show, just wasn’t keeping the pedals turning and I need to track down a new version of Lyrical Nanoha because the quality of the one I had was pretty bad and I gave up on it after four episodes. I was also having some troubling getting into Working!! (Which is, yes, the sequel to Working!) which was quite odd as Working! was a personal favorite.

I haven’t done anything insane like tackling an entire Takahashi series. That way lies madness.

I am working through the mid-90s Studio Pierrot catgirl-cop series “Hyper Police” right now and it’s proving to be silly fun. I remember trying to watch it a few years ago and giving up on it as being just TOO goofy, but it is precisely what I need after the back-to-back angst fests of Noir and Infinite Ryvius.

So I’m getting exercise in AND getting titles off my “watch this someday” list all at once. It’s been a pretty good couple of months.

My most recent video fare has been a big plate of nineties anime nostalgia called The Enemy’s The Pirates!, a six-episode OVA series from 1990 based on a series of books that I’ve never read.  My interest in the series, therefore, comes entirely from having seen the name of the series on various tape traders’ lists of anime way back when – it’s just one of those names that stands out in a list.

I never did get a chance to watch it back then, of course, because you had to be terribly careful in the numer of tapes you were asking for and other stuff always took priority.  The USPS could only get packages of VHS tapes through the mail so fast, after all, and you were usually bugging someone who had a real life that didn’t involve copying tapes 24 hours a day.

So, when I found a nice modern digital version of it for download, I figured that I would finally get to satisfy my curiosity.

An anime series based on a series of books does, unfortunately, inherit all the issues that implies, such as being expected to know the characters and their backstory before you start watching.  After all, who would be dropping a couple hundred bucks on the three LDs that made up this series if they weren’t already a fan?

Not knowing the characters or situations, therefore, I really had trouble getting into the show.  The first couple of episodes introduce the main characters – two pirate-hunting detectives, one a girl-chasing gun-crazy loon and the other a cat-shaped walking stomach, their boss who hates them, a ditzy sidekick who wants to become a detective, a couple of pirates who majored in Dramatic Posturing and a perpetually-annoyed ship’s AI.

People shout a lot and the main character just randomly shoots things while he and his partner yell at each other.  It’s like every bad cop show parody ever rolled into one, with the schtick being that they’re supposed to be hunting pirates… who aren’t really doing anything all that piratical.  For the “bad guys”, they don’t ever really give you any reason to hate them except that they would presumably stop the Dramatic Posturing if they were dead.

Fortunately, in the third and following episodes, the series takes a quick exit from the Highway of Sanity and enters full-on Crazy Town, with a live-fire “baseball” game, where baseball has been resurrected as a sort of combat drill, a supercomputer who is turning everyone into cats, and, well, the problems that occur when your Horribly Beweaponed Space Battlecruiser’s AI gets hit by the same mutation and turns from this:

…into this, complete with an internal coal-fired boiler for propulsion

After the series gives up any pretense of sanity, it gets a lot more fun – even if the story never really reaches any real resolution.  A couple of the pirates get caught or killed, one of the Bigger and Badder Pirates gets away to posture another day which is probably much more significant if you’ve read the books and overall it’s not a great way to spend three hours of your life.  It did finally satisfy a couple of decades worth of vague curiosity, though, and I got a nice extra hit of nostalgia from seeing a credit given to SV2 for the translation script.  Dave Fleming’s Nadia and 3×3 Eyes fansubs were some of the first I watched back when, and seeing “SV2” again was entirely unexpected on something I was watching in 2013.