Dirty Pair Flash #1: Angels in Trouble ADV 160 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 03/20/2001

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One's quest for quality entertainment can be a fickle thing. There's not a lot of anime I can wholeheartedly say I trust. In fact, if you narrowed it down I could probably count it all on one hand. That's a pretty big statement coming from me. When I was twelve I lost six fingers during a freak thresher accident in my ancestral homeland of West Virginia. Of the few fingers that retain their (limited) movement capacity, Dirty Pair would likely take up one of those coveted spots. Now, dear reader, you know that I'm a man who believes in faith. When someone decides they're remaking a popular franchise I'll gladly smile and nod my head. I was excited about Dawn of the Dead. I sure as sugar wanted the new Manchurian Candidate to not totally suck. I keep a candle lit for the new Appleseed movie because the OVAs weren't really all that good anyway. And don't let me get started on Bubblegum Crisis 2040! We all know that's a rocky path that few men dare to follow me down.

So I want to believe that, at some point in my life, I had faith in Dirty Pair Flash too. No less than four years ago I spent a good portion of my time jamming out to the opening theme of this show, Endless Answer. I'll go to my grave attesting that the song is one of the best creations of the common man on this mortal plane. The machine-gun drums, the wailing bass line, the part where it gets really quiet and the chick keeps singing. There's nothing wrong with that. It's too bad that now every cigarette break or gym workout or ride on the bus that I listen to this song I'm going to have to be reminded that there's a giant evil lurking behind it somewhere. It's like finding out that the delectable Bavarian apple tort you just chowed down on was baked by Saddam Hussein using the bodies of a dozen gassed minorities. Sure, Endless Answer is a dessert treat that can't be matched, but was it really worth unleashing such an evil on the world for a relatively minor pleasure?

Dirty Pair Flash takes everything that precedes it out into the backyard and jumps up and down on it until all that remains is a bloody, disgusting paste. I'm serious. I don't have any more Dirty Pair DVDs now because this disc broke them. While it was at it, I think it may've killed my dog. I'd be hard pressed to find a redeeming feature in the entire two hours I spent with the show. Instead of the kind of aggressive simpatico that the original Lovely Angels shared, this set of Kei and Yuri spend more time bickering and trying to one-up each other than they do solving crimes or hanging out with giant space dogs. I imagine this is because of the apparent budget stress Dirty Pair Flash was under. Hardly a minute goes by before a pan or other nefarious deed is being enacted to try and fool us that there's actually something going on. This crap even manages to seep its way into the opening animation, an animation that looks like it cost about a dollar fifty to slap together. Skabs makes better doodles on my textbooks when he's drunk than the work the key animators of this show are paid to do.

I'll admit that I have a certain penchant for short haired girls, redheads and chicks with robot body parts. All of these things the show delivers in spades, but it doesn't really help its case when they spend most of their time acting annoying and whining about how their crazy partner is really cutting into their "me" time with their boyfriend. I can't be sexually attracted to a girl that whines, even a cartoon girl with a mechanical arm. A faint glimmer of hope comes midway through the disc when a sort of ÜBER-Yuri is introduced, an even more boycrazy twelve year old girl. But then Yuri has her introspective brainstorming session while naked in the shower. That kind of ruins the soul searching mood for me. This is not the Dirty Pair I prefer to spend my time with. The Dirty Pair I love doesn't spend its time make sure to abuse every cliché it can think of. It doesn't make the characters seventeen year old sex goddesses and get them naked at the drop of a hat (okay part of that is true). I sure as hell didn't have any CRAZY CHINAMEN speaking in CRAZY CHINAMEN ACCENTS while girls get TENTACLE RAPED in virtual reality simulators. Sunrise, what the hell happened to you, man?