Review for Dirty Pair Flash DVD Collection

7 / 10

Introduction

This particular title has bugged me for years. I once entered a lottery on a now-defunct anime review site which was clearing out old review discs, and got Dirty Pair Flash: Volume 3 out of the lucky dip. I watched it, quite enjoyed it, and then went looking for the rest, only to find out that ADV had deleted the title in the UK. Subsequently they went bust, killing any chance for a re-release here, and over the years, while I have occasionally scoured the Internet looking for a stray volume, by and large I’ve been unlucky. Then last year, I somehow managed to snag the second volume for a ridiculously cheap price, but in the end, I never watched it. The reason was that last year, Nozomi Entertainment in the US went and license rescued the Dirty Pair Franchise in its entirety, releasing the Original Dirty Pair series, the OVA series, and the Dirty Pair features from the eighties, and then the Dirty Pair Flash OVA series remake from the nineties. What’s more, rather than simply repress the old ADV masters again, Nozomi re-mastered the whole shebang from scratch, removing ADV’s English overlays from the footage and credits, greatly improving image quality and audio quality too.

Of course if you ask any genuine Dirty Pair aficionado, you’ll hear how Dirty Pair Flash is an abomination and should be avoided at all costs. The remake redesigned the characters and gave it a distinctly nineties spin which for many renders it as unrecognisable as a Dirty Pair title. I’ve never seen Dirty Pair, with only a few viewings of that third volume of Dirty Pair Flash to inform my prejudices. On top of that, I love goofy anime sci-fi from the early to mid-nineties. Nozomi Entertainment’s Dirty Pair Flash release was at the top of my pre-order list, although my backlog being what it is, I’m only getting to watch the show now, nearly a year after I bought it. Just, don’t expect any meaningful comparison to the original series.

In the 23rd Century, crime is on the increase, and the 3WA Organisation stands against the relentless tide. They recruit TroCons, Trouble Consultants to police the crimes that the regular police can’t touch, and it’s the 3WA’s Central Computer that puts together the optimum teams. It must have had a virus they day it put Kei and Yuri together and gave them the hallowed Lovely Angels codename, as they’re a couple of delinquents who can hardly stand the sight of each other, let alone work together to defeat criminality. In fact they’re more liable to cause more damage to the worlds that they try to protect, than the criminals they hunt. All 16 OVA episodes are presented across three discs from Nozomi Entertainment.

Disc 1
1. Runaway Angel
2. Darkside Angel
3. Frozen Angel
4. Sleeping Angel
5. Stray Angel
6. Lovely Angels
Their first mission? You wouldn’t think it, given just how badly new recruits Kei and Yuri get along. The tomboyish Kei is quick to resort to violence, while Yuri would much rather be out on a date. When a dying man passes a computer card to them, it’s the key to a conspiracy reaching into the heights of the GCN Corporation, with factions battling for control of the galaxy itself. Throw in a deadly and beautiful assassin, and the darkest secrets of the Lovely Angels themselves, and it looks like Kei and Yuri will have to work overtime to save the galaxy. Fat chance!

Disc 2
7. Tokyo Holiday Network
8. Mysterious High School Seventeen
9. A Steamy. Romantic Tour
10. Sparkling Pure Love Flower Shop
11. Tokyo Hot Pursuit Airport
Kei and Yuri are almost working well together. They’re even establishing a reputation for themselves. Unfortunately it’s a reputation for chaos and mayhem that has people dubbing them the Dirty Pair. Take Yuri’s ‘landing’ at Narita Spaceport for example. Their new boss Mr Poporo has assigned them to protect a systems’ specialist named Touma on the Theme Park World’s World. In the 23rd Century, theme parks remake whole worlds to play in, and this one has recreated Earth of the 20th Century. But in 20th Century Tokyo, Kei and Yuri have their hands full keeping the geeky Touma alive. But once that’s taken care of, what better to do than to enjoy two weeks of vacation in a giant theme park?

Disc 3
12. Snow White Chaser
13. Pink Sniper
14. The Winners in Summer Colours
15. My Boy in Rose
16. Gray Avenger
The final collection of episodes offer stand-alone stories for the Lovely Angels, with Kei having to babysit the heir to a fortune while fighting off assassins, where a rookie assassin’s first mission is to kill Kei and Yuri just when they get a much needed vacation, where Kei and Yuri have to undergo special training to go undercover and arrest a wanted felon... by playing beach volleyball, where Yuri has to live up to a twelve-year-old boy’s fantasy image of her... which is okay as he’s rich, and where an escaped felon targets Kei and Yuri’s boss Mr Poporo, and they’d help if they weren’t busy writing apology letters for all the collateral damage they cause.

Picture

When I saw that volume 3 of Dirty Pair Flash from ADV all those years ago, it was typical of the era, an NTSC-PAL standards conversion, with English language overlays on the Japanese text and credit sequences, with oversaturated colours and a soft, video source appearance.

Recently Sunrise went back to re-master Dirty Pair Flash, and Nozomi have sourced that print from Japan for their release. It’s 4:3 NTSC as you would expect, but the image has been cleaned up a treat, the colours are natural and the show looks filmic, with a nice layer of grain throughout, although absent any significant print damage. Detail levels are a lot higher, and the quality of the line art work and backgrounds really does come through in this version. It’s a beautiful restoration that pays dividends, offering an experience that does justice to the show’s cel and paint origins. It’s a nineties sci-fi with character designs indicative of the period. There’s a lot of space action going on here, with starships and planets, as well as robots and lightsabers, cyborgs and blasters. A lot of thought has gone into creating this future world, and it’s certainly fun to watch.

The one bugbear comes with Disc 1, where Nozomi’s transfer isn’t quite so smooth, with pans, scrolls and zooms afflicted by a constant judder. It’s a little distracting and disappointing given the effort into getting the image looking so good. Fortunately, it’s not an issue with disc 2 which look as if has a proper progressive transfer. The same is true for the first three episodes of disc 3, but for the final two episodes, it isn’t progressive, although it’s still watchable and relatively smooth when interlaced. I also have to say that Dirty Pair Flash doesn’t upscale all that well, although given that it was made in an era where the TVs it was designed for were all 480i NTSC, that is forgivable. It works better on smaller screens though, 32 inches and below.

Sound

Nozomi Entertainment really go to town with the Japanese audio, even though it’s only a stereo track. We have DD 2.0 Stereo Japanese but at 448kbps bitrate, on a par with the peak DD 5.1 tracks. Certainly there is no problem with watching the Japanese version, with clear audio throughout, a nice bit of stereo separation, and a good deal of clarity for the dialogue and the music. In comparison the English dub, although it too is presented at a respectable 224kbps, sounds rather weedy and ineffectual in comparison. Certainly I had to whack the volume up to get a decent level out of it. It’s also the old ADV dub, and it’s certainly showing its age now, although there is nostalgia value in hearing something from that era again. Naturally there are translated subtitles and a signs only track to go with the show. The subtitles are accurately timed, but one or two niggling typos do get through.

One thing that I love about Dirty Pair Flash is the music, especially the theme songs, which have a great eighties pop vibe to them. I think the end theme for disc two, Kimi ga Daisuki is one of my favourite anime theme songs ever.

Extras

Dirty Pair Flash is presented in an Amaray style case, with one disc on the front panel, and two discs overlapping on the rear panel. It’s not the easiest case from which to extract the discs, and a genuine Amaray with a hinged panel would have worked better.

All three discs autoplay trailers for the TRSI webstore, and present their content with static menus, against music from the show.

Disc 1 is where you’ll find this volume’s textless credits and trailers for Dirty Pair, and the Dirty Pair features.

Disc 2 has its specific textless credit sequences, and trailers for Ninja Nonsense and Rental Magica.

Disc 3 has a line art gallery with 23 images, the US trailer for the Dirty Pair Flash, and trailers for The Third: The Girl With the Blue Eye, and Gasaraki. Unfortunately the textless credits for volume 3 aren’t here. I guess I can’t ditch that ADV disc just yet.

Conclusion

It may be the bastard stepchild of the franchise, the one that no one loves, and everyone tries to forget exists, but I really like Dirty Pair Flash, mainly because it’s a fun bit of nineties sci-fi OVA action. It’s as if they made Bubblegum Crisis but wholly for laughs. Then again, I’m contrary that way. I’m the guy that thinks the Dalton Bonds are the best, because they capture the eighties action vibe in a way that the other Bonds don’t. Dirty Pair Flash is fun, irreverent, entertaining, and energetic, with a likeable central duo. It has sharp and witty writing and an emphasis on over the top action that is just the right mix to relax to, the sort of show that you switch off your brain to enjoy. That it throws in some tried and trusted sci-fi concepts, and the OVA format allows for some decent budgeted animation, and some well-developed production design is just the icing on the cake. Just don’t expect a lot of consistency and focus to its storytelling, as thematically, Dirty Pair Flash is all over the place, not helped by the first disc of episodes being made in 1993, while the second and third collections were made after a two year gap in 1995.

The first six episodes comprise one whole story, with the fledgling and unlikely duo of Kei and Yuri put to the test by a galaxy spanning conspiracy. This is the best of the collection, with more of a dramatic edge balancing out the comedy, a greater emphasis on the story, and the one place you’ll actually find character development. Kei and Yuri start off as antagonistic towards each other, but slowly develop their partnership as the story unfolds. It isn’t clear at first if they are suited to working together, and it looks as if they will fail the test when Kei quits the 3WA. This mutual antagonism makes dealing with the threat all the harder. Throw in an assassin with a shrouded past, and a boss in Mr Garner with a history of his own, and you get what is really a movie in six parts. It’s a well-written tale with twists and turns, emotional ups and downs, and is an engaging ride to the end. It’s a shame then that this is the disc with the biggest video niggles in this collection.

Disc 2 also appears to present a complete story at first glance, but that turns out not to be the case. It’s actually a collection of three stand-alone episodes, bookended by a two part story, all sharing a single setting for consistency. That setting is something of an oddity too. If this were live action sci-fi, I could understand setting it in 20th Century Tokyo to save some money on sets and effects, but you wouldn’t expect that same kind of budgetary consideration in an animation. But sure enough, the bulk of the episodes take place on World’s World, a planet wide theme park that recreates 20th Century Earth as a big tourist attraction, and Kei and Yuri get to spend some time in a very recognisable Tokyo. This collection also has the added comic relief of Touma, the geek computer expert to make things interesting. But the main story takes place at the start and end of the disc, with a wayward computer causing havoc for the theme park. The intervening episodes are single stories, with one episode set in a ‘haunted’ school, one with Kei and Yuri chasing a wanted criminal into the wilderness outside the park, and one with Touma smitten by a local girl, and wanting relationship advice (the punchline in this episode was signposted far too early).

Disc 3 throws all semblance of continuity to the wind, and offers five stand-alone episodes. They vary in quality as you would expect, with Pink Sniper and My Boy in Rose my least favourite of the lot, both dull and stretching inconsequential stories far too long. The opening episode, Snow White Chaser is nice mix of comedy and action, while the Beach Volleyball episode is the Dirty Pair at their funniest, and the collection ends on a high with a bit of clichéd Die Hard action, as the Dirty Pair have to fight a rogue mecha piloted by a vengeful escaped prisoner through the corridors of their HQ building.

Dirty Pair Flash is very much a show of its era, a mid-nineties action sci-fi comedy. The characters are entertaining, the stories are well written, and it maintains a hectic and engaging pace that holds the attention for much of its run. That said, Dirty Pair Flash doesn’t do enough to rise above its peers. It may feel like Bubblegum Crisis played for laughs, but in the end it is no Bubblegum Crisis. It is now what it was then, utterly disposable entertainment, although the first volume of episodes is stronger than that. Nozomi Entertainment have done a fine job in getting a restored print for this release, and the difference between this and the old ADV release is like night and day. The jerky playback on disc one is an annoyance, but not a fatal one.