Lost Universe #1: In Space It's Very, Very Dark ADV 100 minutes English/Japanese English Subtitles 09/12/2000

When I'm bored watching anime on my television, usually it's just the small matter of breaking out my laptop (which I'm already using to write notes anyway) and idly cruising the wonder of internet forums while I try to de-bore myself of whatever's going on in front of me. This usually falters when I get more interested in what's going on in the World Wide Web than what's happening on the screen (frequent). However, when I'm watching a DVD on my laptop while in the school library that's a different story. It's hard to ignore a show that's taking up a quarter of your rather impressive desktop resolution. Such is not the case with Lost Universe though. During the relatively short 80+ minute running time of this disc I somehow managed to completely phase out the show for rather long periods of time, only to realize five minutes later that I had not a single clue what was going on. This doesn't really matter to me because, frankly, I don't like Lost Universe. I had a single hair on the side of tolerance for Slayers and this show is basically just its space-bounty hunter counterpart and it's generally not funny, and spends most of its time sucking and having sucky dub performances.

So way to make a crappy show guys, I'm really thanking you for it here. Kain and Canal are interstellar Trouble Contractors, Trouble Consultants, or something that starts with a "C" anyway. When I think of "Trouble Contractors" I think of those people that'll put a potato in your ex-girlfriends exhaust pipe. When I think of a "Trouble Consultant" immediately the first thing that comes to mind is "Venture Capitalist". Thusly, I'll use the more appropriate term of "Bounty Hunters" because whatever self appropriated titles they give themselves are completely meaningless. Why do we need stupid buzzwords like this? What's wrong with 'Bounty Hunter'? Canal also happens to be a robot, or an AI, or a projection of the Kain's spaceship (The Swordbreaker) itself. I'm not too entirely clear on it, but I doubt it'd make much of a difference anyway. Canal is annoying. Jesus! Every character in this show is annoying. Canal whines entirely too much and is voiced positively awfully in the dub (To Canal's voice actress: I'm really sorry, I'm sure you're a fine person, but this performance is off so much that we'd need to create a race of animals with 20-fingered hands just to be able to count how wrong it was). And while we're on the subject of dubs, this one's hacked to pretty little pieces. Not to the extent of other ADV works, not even close, but I felt like this got a bit too loosey-goosey at times. Can you have a good dub script that doesn't adhere 100% to the dialogue? Yes. This is not one of them.

 

Speaking of annoying characters, here's Millie. Judging only by that stunning picture over there, you might imagine her to be some sort of latter-day Rally Vincent of Gunsmith Cats fame. This would not be a terrible assumption to make, right? I mean, she's packing some serious hardware and she's got kind of a 'Devil May Care' look to her. It sucks for us viewers that we're not so lucky though. Millie is a whiner just like everyone else in this show, constantly talking about how she desires to be the "World's Greatest!" in something new every episode. I don't know how they could screw up the idea of female detective but if anyone wants to clue me in, I'm listening. I want to put every character in this show in a giant pit and burn them all for wasting nearly two hours of my time. This is not to say that the show is wholly awful, but it's really bad and I'm angry for having to watch it a second time now. I hate the characters, I hate the blatantly obvious CG (which is required material for anything involving spaceships) and I positively loathe... well, everything else about this, especially the little "stroke" mark that the characters get on their heads whenever they're upset or confused. I would imagine the creators decided to try and herald in a new era of fame with this unsung hero of anime clichés. I don't think it worked.

I hope it didn't anyway, I hate that little thing almost as much as I hate the stupid "sweatdrop" concept. I remember when people could show emotions without the use of animation handicaps, and none of that "Character X rubs the back of their head" either, that's almost as annoying as the show itself, and from the horse's mouth... that's pretty annoying.  You know, ADV decided to put this series on six discs and it's pretty obvious why (Unless there's different episode counts. Then I just don't know). In fact, this may very well have been the first show to have a six disc release, which would be impressive, if it wasn't so damn depressing. Logically though, this means I owe a debt to Lost Universe. Without it, I might've had to be inordinately more for my beloved Bubblegum Crisis 2040 but that doesn't mean I have to bow down and worship crap like this. I suppose it's a good show for popping in when you don't really feel like bothering with anything else (if you like bad dubs and situations that subconsciously urge you to rip your eyeballs out) but think about it. If you buy Lost Universe that's anywhere between $17-30 a disc you could be spending on a worthy cause, like starving children in Africa or more pornography (freak). So buying Lost Universe is equivalent to letting a young child in Mozambique starve to death. I don't want to tell you how to live your life though... it's your call.