ene Starwind seems to live a fairly comfortable life. As the brawn of
Starwind & Hawking, a small troubleshooting shop ("we fix everything from
tractors to relationships"), he plays cards, fights, picks up women at
night, then sleeps in and waits for his kid partner, Jim Hawking, to do the
work in the morning. Jim is clearly the shop's go-getter and brains of
the outfit, but Gene's the one with local celebrity status. He's also the
less satisfied of the pair--secretly he watches ships arrive and take off
from the local spaceport and longs to be on one of them.
Gene gets his chance when a classic femme fatale calls Starwind &
Hawking to request some expensive, esoteric nanotech equipment and a
bodyguard. Gene decides he likes her body, volunteers to guard it himself,
and promptly finds himself fighting off a cadre of vicious attack robots
and weird magic-slingers who shrug off bullets. Once the woman drops her
pretenses, Gene and Jim discover she's a lone thief in deep trouble. They
also learn--a little too late to back out--that she has her own
spaceship, and a pressing need for a crew to help with it.
Unfortunately, would-be spacer supreme Gene had a horrible experience
in space during his childhood, and he gets violently nauseous the instant he's in
her ship. But intermittent fainting and Jim's constant raw mockery are the
least of Gene's problems. The universe is divided into three factions: the
Space Forces, the Pirate Guild who prey on them, and the freedom-obsessed
Outlaws, who disdain alliances with either side. Gene's new captain, Hilda,
is an Outlaw who's managed to earn the rabid wrath of the other two groups by
stealing a powerful ship that comprises both their technologies. Which
means she's being attacked by phenomenally powerful forces roughly every
five minutes or so. Now if Gene could just stop throwing up long enough to
help her fight back....
Another day, another Han Solo clone
Outlaw Star struggles against itself from the moment it
starts, thanks to a stereotyped cast seemingly made up of moonlighting
characters from other series. The tough lunk, the smart-mouthed, precocious
kid, the emotionless female pirate, the screeching cat-girl, even the
mysterious naked preserved woman (Kimera, anyone? Or Armored
Trooper VOTOMS?)
all appear as unreconstituted stereotypes with little to distinguish
them from a long line of anime alter egos. The most unique thing
about Gene is his engagingly human space phobia, and it's apparent from the
flash-forwarded first moments of the first episode that he'll get over that
as soon as the plot finds it inconvenient.
The villains of the piece, the exaggeratedly inhuman Pirate Guild
representatives, are much more interesting. Like the heroes they're
fighting, they're undercharacterized, but their caricatured bodies are
distorted enough to evade familiarity. In addition, their appearance always
seems to herald a monumental leap in the quality and ambition of the
animation. A pair of backstabbing Outlaw brothers, similarly, add a few
unique twists and have a tendency to steal their scenes. But they have an
uphill battle to fight against the bland, cookie-cutter heroes and their
bland, familiar quest for the good old Unique Item Of Power.
Outlaw Star has its shining moments, mostly in the Pirate Guild's
impressive use of magic and Gene's use of phenomenal amounts of
ammunition. The universe's political background, while glossed over, is
intriguing, and the snippets of history that appear between episodes
indicate that someone put more thought into the backstory than they did
into the characters. The downbeat end of episode four, which puts the
story in the hands of some of the least interesting characters, is
admirably offbeat but still not very promising.
