t's not clear how Justy Ueki Tylor made it to the age of 20 in one piece. He's lazy, silly and lecherous, and he has an attention span of only nanoseconds. He certainly doesn't seem like a candidate for the military--especially when the United Planets Space Force is about to be forced into a potentially disastrous war with the Raalgon Empire.
But Tylor, having seen a recruitment ad featuring a cute girl proffering cute come-ons, spontaneously signs up with the UPSF. He blithely anticipates free meals, shelter, clothing, a cushy desk job, and eventual fame and fortune as a space captain--possibly even an admiralty. Astonishingly, he quickly blunders his way into a hefty promotion and a captain's chair. He complains that his new ship is a disintegrating rust bucket, but seems not to notice that the ship's crew is even less stable, being comprised wholly of the UPSF's most hopelessly undisciplined outlaws.
Despite the chaos around him--pitched mecha battles between the ship's pilots and Marines, impending interstellar war, a malfunctioning warp drive and an imminent coup d'etat--Tylor remains cheerful and oblivious. He butters up anyone who stands in his way, flirts with everything female, dazzles his enemies with illogic, sidesteps critical problems by ignoring or dismissing them, and evades catastrophe several times over. Along the way he draws the grudging attention of everyone on both sides of the imminent war. In fact, the young Raalgon Empress has decided she really needs to meet him...
Star Blazers without the angst
Irresponsible Captain Tylor is a well-balanced mixture of serious space drama and goofy character comedy. The serious side is actually reminiscent of old anime space-opera serials--in these four opening episodes, the dynamic between the Terran forces and the Raalgon Empire has already expanded into a complex conflict with hawks and doves on both sides. Tylor himself is really the only off-kilter element; he's simply so childish, so naively brainless, that the serious soldiers and military thugs around him consistently believe he's just got to be craftily concealing some sort of brilliant plan.
The result is something pleasantly fresh--a comedy with a plot behind it, and a serious science fiction drama buoyed by enough humor to keep it from getting too heavy-handed. The script frequently gives the subtle impression that Tylor simply walked out of some hyper Rumiko Takahashi satire onto a serious show, and the cast of that show simply isn't equipped to respond to him.
Not that Tylor's antics are completely believable. The show's weakest point (aside from the annoying videogame synthesized soundtrack, which sounds like John Carpenter on adrenaline) is the degree to which, at least in these early episodes, Tylor's just too dumb to be believed. Of course, everyone around him could be right...he could be concealing a clever, scheming mind behind his baffling Marx-Brothers blather. Time--and the other 22 episodes of this promising serial--will tell.
