Green Legend Ran

140 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
03/31/1998

You might call me a hypocrite, but it's not as if I'm getting paid to make these opinions, or that anyone's even reading them except for the rare person who stumbles upon this site via a Google Image Search involving naked cyborg robots (I swear it was all in good taste). What I'm saying is, even though I like this short collection of OVAs, which one of my all time favorite series just HAPPENS to resemble in certain aspects, doesn't mean that I'm a bad person. It just means I can tolerate something that borrows themes from something else when it's actually something worth watching.
So yeah, similarities are there. Lalaru of Now and Then bears a certain resemblance to the silver haired Aira and both are pretty integral in bringing back life to a dying planet, but that doesn't mean that I hate Now and Then now, or that I feel like a tool because I've owned Green Legend Ran for nearly five years and the first time I watch it is when Kyle decides that I need to see it at three in the morning on a school night. Now, fair's fair and I'm no wussy, but two and a half hours of anime is a lot to watch, regardless of how much of a proto-BEST SERIES EVER it is.

It's not fair to compare Green Legend Ran to Now and Then when it should be going in the other direction, I know, but it just happens that this show is a victim of circumstances. Imagine, if you will, that I invented a time machine in 1992 and flew into the future with no knowledge of the incumbent 'save the world' show. In 2001 I would watch Now and Then, Here and There and return to my proper time before anything was found to be amiss in the time stream. Now, with this "future knowledge" I would be able to make my comparisons guilt free. How a ten year old got his hands on (much less invented) a time machine I'll leave up to you. Let's just say I built the prototype using only the box of a large kitchen appliance and a box of crayons.

It would be irresponsible for me to talk about that right now, there are other things to consider. Ran is a young boy in a nowhere town in a world that's, stop me if you've heard this before, on the brink of destruction. He's also like, twelve, but he's allowed to smoke. This makes me guess that Ran is set sometime in the 1920s, but I don't remember learning about any boats sailing through deserts of sand when I was in my high school history classes... so I can't exactly be sure about this.

What I AM sure about, conversely, is that I am very very unsure how much I like the usage of giant breasted plant women (seen prior) and strange glam rock soldiers following the orders of giant heads who walk around in two tiny little legs. Ran is certainly exemplar when it comes to the usage of outrageous early 90s character designs. Aside from that though, it's really got something going for it. You might be tired of the scrappy young lad having a part in saving the world but, you know, I'm really not. It might also have to do with Ran's majority cast being over the age of twenty. That does something for me downstairs that I'm not comfortable talking about in a public forum.

What it boils down to is the Glam-inspired Rodoists duking it out with the angry-for-no-apparent-reason Hazzard. What the Rodoists don't realize is that Rodo is really only interested in making the whole earth green and choking out all life. Between them is this other clutch of guys that really just seem to want to get by, and live life like a couple of normal joes. My summation might be a little off, but I'm pretty confident that it's as good as I could be expected to give considering the circumstances (i.e.: Me being the one that wrote it).

This all billows into a giant climax involving, as Kyle was quick to tell us, leaves that tear your major arteries out when you try to mess with them and bonds of friendship that can't be broken even though the dude in question totally killed your wife. A little bit on the crazy side, yeah, but if you haven't seen something that's much worse then Green Legend Ran is undoubtably the first animated program you've ever seen in your entire life.

Unsurprisingly, Ran does a lot of things I like and very little that I hate. There is an inexplicable line about "coffee for three" in a burlesque house that I'm pretty sure could be taken in a sexual way and the obligatory "Woman surprised while in the bathroom" scene, but otherwise Ran is pretty much as clean as anime gets nowadays (or... ten years ago, whatever). It's one of those features that you can actually enjoy instead of scrutinizing if there's going to be a moment that makes you feel like even more of a social reject than you already are. Green Legend Ran might not have had a time machine to go see how its spiritual successor put things together, but it somehow managed to get it mostly right anyway.