n most anime series, when Tokyo comes under attack by an evil genius whose super-mecha can throw police cars around like volleyballs, it's time to call in the good guys in the giant battlesuits. But in Assemble Insert, Tokyo doesn't have a team of heroes (or policemen) with their own mecha. All the city has is a hapless Special Forces unit, the members of which are obsessed with idol singers and anime porn and can't come up with a single good defensive idea. At least, not until their chief drunkenly submits a proposal that Tokyo hold Hero Auditions to find a cute, telegenic warrior—someone the public will admire no matter how much property gets damaged, or how many battles are lost, the next time the mysterious Demon Seed attacks.
The Hero Auditions go poorly, possibly since the Counter-Demon-Seed Special Forces didn't have time to hold regional competitions, and just snagged a bunch of people at random for a game-show-style heroism contest. But one contestant—Maron Namikaze, a shy, teen-age blonde who happens to have superstrength and a certain stammering, helpless charm—seems to be exactly what the Forces want. They quickly grab her, train her to sing and dance, shove her into a prototype superpower suit and plan her debut as a Demon Seed fighter/public-relations coup.
One battle later, Demon Seed's army (and everything else in sight) has been smashed, and the group's criminal mastermind, Dr. Demon, is broke and can't afford to build new mecha. Unfortunately, no Demon Seed means no need for a Counter-Demon-Seed budget, so the Special Forces find themselves mending their own shirts and bemoaning lost pay raises while sweltering in an un-air-conditioned office. Clearly it's time for phase two of the Hero Auditions project, in which the Special Forces remake their stuttering savior into a popular, profitable teen idol. But when Demon Seed receives some unexpected help and gets back into the evil biz on the same night as the national Idol Singer Awards, Maron faces the kind of tough choice that only comes to heroines in very silly satires.
Good-hearted goofiness
Assemble Insert follows in the tradition of one-shot jokes like Shinesman and Teramonya Voyagers in its broad mockery of anime and Japanese popular culture. Producer/character designer/story author Masami Yuuki brings over some of the look and feel of his Patlabor work, along with some pretty obvious Patlabor parodies, but these two half-hour OVAs also delve into general absurdism, as characters do ridiculous things "because it's in the script" and Dr. Demon brags (in the dub) that his line readings are so good because "the best actor always plays the villain."
The characters even stop at one point to plug an imaginary energy drink. Yuuki's animators play with their visuals, too—most noticeably, Demon Seed's eerie cyclopean hood-masks sweat and adopt expressions of anger or terror—but mostly, this is a pure situational comedy that pushes conventional anime tropes to ridiculous extremes. Even Maron's treacly pop-idol songs about summer love function as high-camp in-jokes.
Granted, Assemble Insert is no ground-breaker. Both the original project and Right Stuf's repackaging look distinctly low-budget. The animation is dated, minimalist and a bit jerky. (The fact that most of the characters don't have noses, and one of them almost never has a mouth, is certainly intended as a deliberate parody of anime style, but it still makes the characters look a bit unfinished.) The English dub is deliberately flat and cartoony, with actors nasally imitating Muppets or well-known cartoon characters. The DVD's only bonus is a live-action faux commercial/product placement excerpted from the OVA. It's a bit surprising to see The Right Stuf, which usually goes all-out with its releases, so clearly relegating this one to second-tier status.
But fans who loved Shinesman will find the same bold humor here. Assemble Insert falls distinctly short of the uninhibited hyperactivity of true parody classics like Project A-ko; it rarely rises far above "cute." But the good-hearted goofiness of a villain who sulkily calls off a planned attack because of rain, or a would-be hero who offers his rice-eating skills as proof of his power, makes this satire hard to dislike.
