Outlaw Star #1

Bandai

225 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
10/03/2000

Sometimes a show with reveal something to you that you would have never imagined could've been possibly true. And sure, maybe you'll deny it to y our friends, but the foreboding eye of whatever animated entertainment brought along such a revelation will always be staring at you with disdain. Maybe you've discovered you're very enamored with giant robots, and there's nothing wrong with that, plenty of people are. Or maybe you've found out that you want to sleep with girls five or six years younger than you. That's a bit more weird and instead of acting on such gut instincts I might suggest the helpful advice of calling your local FBI branch office and telling them all about it. I'm sure they'll be very interested, be sure to go into depth otherwise they won't be able to hook you up with the cutie you've so lustily envisioned while checking around on those Russian porn sites. Likely though, your cutie will be named Bubba and have a problem with copious back hair. But you never know until you try, so go out there and be all you can be!

In a way, mine is more mundane. Watching Outlaw Star I've been shown something that had only previously been adumbrated by my subconcious. I want to have sex with a pirate. Not like, a normal pirate who sails around the world suffering from skurvy and buggery while looking for treasure on islands and Spanish galleons. No, I want to sleep with a SPACE pirate. Maybe it's the spaceship, or the loose fitting sports bra, I'm not really sure...though I think it might have something to do with the eyepatch. I realize now that an eyepatch can be a very sexy thing and for what could possibly be the first (and last) time in my entire life I actually agree with the characters in the show that someone's attractive. Like I said, it's probably the eyepatch or the messy hair, or how she tasers everyone she meets...but Space Pirate Hilda is my kind of lady, and if she didn't exist in a pretend world set a couple of hundred years in the future then I'd spare no expense to try and finagle a phone number out of her. Probably with the business end of a stun gun, because she seems to like that kind of kinky stuff. Hot Ice Hilda is my kind of woman.

Unfortunately though, it's a bit too late for me. See, whoever made this show decided to throw the audience a curveball and blow Hilda up during the fourth episode. All I have to say is she went out like a total champ, and any girl who blows herself and a bunch of magicans up with a grenade because falling into a SUN isn't good enough for her is alright with me. You can be sure that when I die I'll be looking Hilda up for some postmortem horizontal action, likely to the hard-nosed gaze of St. Peter. But that's neither here nor there, for the moment anyway. Hilda's dead and gone and it sucks, because she was probably the best thing about the show. To the contrary of my opinions, chicks with eyepatches probably aren't viewed as too attractive by the general public and so, having a character like that in a show like this is like people reciting Richard III during Big Butt Blasters 9...it doesn't often happen and you know it's not gonna last. But like I said, it's a shame, usually unattractive characters are relegated to providing thoughtful wisdom or unwanted flirtations with the lead.
It's a shame because without Hilda this show is about as clichéd as it could be. I mean, I hate to be so mundane as to list its unoriginalities, but I can think of no better way to get my point across. Brash young bounter (with scars that look ungodly painful!) hunter, precocious youth, no less than TWO girls with mysterious pasts! On top of that we've got a catgirl thrown in for good measure. This is stuff you could look up in a manual it's been done so many times, and while Outlaw Star does have its share of originality I don't know if it's necessarily the kind of stuff you'd call "good". More like "so freakin' weird that only the Japanese could think it up".

And you can tell that those people from the land of the rising sun created this because of all the rampant hate going on for the Chinese. I think maybe -everyone- in the show is supposed to be of the most populated country in our little world, but if they're not then this is a really offensive thing that they've created. Chinese people are pirates, Chinese people are evil magicians, Chinese people are stealing naked bio-robots chicks in suitcases from the Intergalatic Space Police. Japan, you got your asses handed to you like a thousand years ago, get over it. Now China's like one of the worst place to live in in the world so why can't we all just be happy that we won and take our victories like big boys and girls?
Chinese people also seem to be the reason why the most absolutely ridiculous thing I have ever seen exists in this show. Seems sometime in the Outlaw Star universe the Chinese started using grappling arms on their spaceships to fight. Not only that, but it worked...and OTHER PEOPLE STARTED DOING IT. That's like throwing paper airplanes at a guy with a nuclear bomb! Think about this for a second, if you don't mind. Most of the ships out there have shit like lasers and missles and whatever else and you're going to go after them with grabby hands that look like they came right off a robot toy from 1983? Good call space pirates, I can't imagine why you're always in trouble with the law. It must be because in 2143 the galaxy space police delcared that STUPIDITY was illegal. Which means a lot of anime fans out there can probably label themselves as outlaws. But not you guys, by reading this site you've shown that you're attractted to a higher echelon of anime.**

The animation is a bit uninspired too. Maybe it's an artistic style, but I'm willing to guess that the budget wasn't the best that it could've been. It's not painful to look at, but the broad shots look like something I could've done with Microsoft Paint more often than not. Certainly not a show killer, but it makes me kind of sad when you can see the fight choreography is moving at a speed that the animation really can't keep up with. This gets especially noticable when the "Hello I've been used in like thirty thousand other forms of entertainment" Japanese female samurai assasin comes in. This show has a slick, cowboy kind of style too it and I like it. And you can't really beat the fact that you've got nine episodes of it right here. That's awesome for the majority of the anime watching population but it sucks for me because it means I have to watch nearly four hours or something all at once. No, no, I don't want you people to pity me. I've brought this hell upon myself and there's no one else to blame for it.
So don't think that I absolutely hate the show, because I don't, and it's better than a lot of stuff that's out there...it's just that some of the stuff could stand to be a little more original and the stuff that IS original could stand to be a little less insane. Basically, less of the stuff that'll make the broader market like you and more of the things that'll improve your show as a whole. I understand that sometimes things like this have to appeal to the lowest common denominator but it really pisses me off. We need more ultra-badass space pirates and less prissy wuss-robot chicks who are "trying to find themselves"...because lord knows it'd be too much to ask to have the crazy spaceship flying robot show an ounce of confidence before the main character "teaches her how to love".

**But unfortnately, a lower quality of writing.