s anime dream teams go, World Welfare and Works Agency troubleshooters Kei and Yuri--known as "The Lovely Angels" to their faces and "The Dirty Pair" behind their backs--certainly top the list. The gun-happy, accident-prone, creature-comfort-obsessed duo is as ubiquitous in Japanese fan circles as Kirk and Spock are in America, and command the same sort of all-media-spanning attention. Some of their incarnations make them out to be competent detectives, while in others they're just lightning rods for destruction, but whether in prose novels or comic books, on TV or the big screen, they're still prone to causing large-scale mayhem.
In this particular version, a DVD that includes five episodes of a 10-episode 1989 original video animation series, the Pair is more sloppy than unlucky; they have a tendency to get impatient and walk in with guns blazing, but they are at least capable of looking and thinking before they leap. In the disc's first episode, the Pair has to put down a rebellion staged by well-armed convicts on a space-station prison above a molten planet. In episode 2, they're chasing a prototype battle robot with a timed attack sequence that will cause it to erupt into cataclysmic violence if they don't shut it down in time.
Episode 3 takes a particularly interesting slant--it takes place on a religious commune world, where believers are forced to have "baptism surgery" and heretics have a habit of falling over dead. The Pair is called in to investigate after a mining city is destroyed by fire from above; the locals attribute the calamity to their deity, leading the Pair to proclaim that God's been framed for murder. In Episode 4, six heavily armed little boys, the sons of various political bigwigs, take over an experimental military station for fun and begin issuing demands such as "There should be nothing on television but cartoons from now on!" And in Episode 5, Kei and Yuri are sent to retrieve a top World Welfare and Works agent, a super martial artist who's apparently become addicted to a planet-sized game of chance.
A dated duo, but still amusing
The main attraction to this few-frills DVD is that it packs two and a half of ADV's VHS-tape releases of Original Dirty Pair onto a single disc, so it's more bang for the buck. (Which is plenty of bang, considering the Pair's habit of dealing with problems by detonating them.) That certainly makes the dated material a bit more appealing. Original Dirty Pair is no visual wonderland; the animation's flat and simple, with little relative motion and some obvious shortcuts, and the coloring is fairly basic. Apart from hair design and coloration, the characters mostly look alike, with big eyes and snub noses as the rule of the day. ADV's dub is curiously atonal, and sounds as if it was recorded in a closet somewhere; the actors sound forced and a bit amateurish, but the sound quality is also lacking. The dub script is weirdly colloquial, and replaces the sub's somewhat repetitive clothes-food-and-handsome-men jokes with broader but clumsier humor.
The real fun of the series is in the action-packed stories, which almost all end messily, but often go through some decently clever plot points along the way. Long-time science fiction fans will have little problem figuring out the "mystery" behind the God-murders in Episode 3, but it's still convincingly eerie to see a worshipper who's just privately expressed his doubts about his God suddenly die horribly as his head twists around 180 degrees, Exorcist-style. Similarly, there's no complex hidden agenda behind the hacker-kids in Episode 4; they're just joyriding in on an unusually grand scale, which may disappoint viewers looking for more meaning to the story. But the kids' spontaneous decisions about what to do with their newfound power are pretty amusing, and the characters sometimes seem surprisingly real, especially when they face the possible consequences of their actions.
And of course, there's Kei and Yuri themselves: unending sources of cheesecake, trash-talk, competitive overreactions and good-natured silliness. Original Dirty Pair may not be on a par with more recent competitors, but as one of the pioneering series that helped chart the course of modern anime, it's worth a look both for historical value and for a bit of classic sci-fi fun.
