Judge

50 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 03/09/1999
Reviewed: 05/24/2005

To me, exposition is like well crafted "manual stimulation". It treats you just right and provides a little hint of what might be happening between the sheets in the near future. There's an old saying around this parts. "Over 121, not a lot of fun, under 75, not enough to thrive".

I'm not sure if anyone has actually ever said that. That probably not, since I just made it up. But since we have to attribute it to someone, let's give it to Joel. The meaning of the proverb should be explicitly clear. One should be wary of any DVD that contains more than 100 or less than 75 minutes of footage on it. More than two hours means the licensor probably didn't think the show was good enough to sell in a six DVD release and less than 75 minutes means that the creators on the Japanese side didn't have enough money to make more than a 50 minute movie or two 25-30 minute episodes. Whether the money flow was cut off pre or postproduction, the result is the same. They couldn't smack together an hour's worth of useful entertainment to save their lives.

If you're observant then you know which category Judge falls into. In the past you've heard me talking about things like the "OVA complex". The gist of it is that one shot OVAs like this never give you enough information to understand the world it takes place in.

Judge takes this affair one step further by giving you absolutely no information about the world they're in. There isn't in an opening narration in that too standard booming voice. You know, something to the tune of "In ancient times the Judges were a sacred order that were created to supplement the laws of mankind." Judge fires off pantloads of events without even the slightest wink in our direction about how stuff like this tends to come about. If a man has an evil parrot that transforms into an even more evil parrot then I want to know why he has such a thing! I don't figure that's too much to ask.

A man named Ohma works in an office building. He's a dork and a klutz, yet somehow he manages to bed the attractive (and hideously beetle-eyed) Nanase. That's the very first offense they cater our direction, but it isn't nearly the most egregious and it certainly isn't the last. I'm going to assume that Nanase is his girlfriend, but in the exciting three dialogues they have during the course of the feature she talks to him like they've never met. As long as he can "brown bag" that butt ugly face, maybe there's something to be said for being a dork!

Or IS he a dork? Ohma has a super secret identity as one of the legendary Judges of Darkness. If you hadn't read the back of the DVD like a good little boy, his transformation would come completely out of left field. If you're holding the Judge DVD in your hand them I'm going to assume you have not read the back of the DVD. If you did, you would not be holding the Judge DVD in your hand. As such, you had no idea that this unassuming salaryman is contracted by heaven (or maybe hell! You don't know!) to avenge the wrongs of the world that manage to go by unpunished by human hands.

More insane and annoying is that Ohma has a nemesis embodied in the juice box sipping gortex-clad man to the right. This man describes himself as the "Defense Attorney of Hell", or some similar nonsense. Like Ohma, no one sees fit to tell us why or how he came by these powers. His job is to charge exorbitant rates in order to protect murderers and criminals from the supernatural justice that Ohma dishes out. I find this patently ridiculous, but what I find more ridiculous is that the directors (or the animators) thought that "juice boxes" were an important enough character trait to include not once, but twice. Maybe that's where he gets his power!!

Stretched out as a 26 episode series, I could almost see Judge as something worth watching. The nasally voiced lawyer is someone you'd just love to hate if he was thrown in as a mid-season speed bump. As it is, I just normal-hate him. And I just normal-hate Judge too. Most short OVAs don't bother with more than enough exposition to blue ball you, but Judge doesn't even see fit to unzip your pants..