You're Under Arrest - Mini Specials

Introduction

Kosuke Fujishima is better known in the West for his delightful Ah My Goddess manga, which only relatively recently has had the full anime series treatment. For an earlier success from Fujishima, you would have to look at You're Under Arrest, a similar in tone series that relates the trials and tribulations of the Tokyo traffic police through two of their members. But as with many early anime series, we in the UK got the short end of the stick. 2 seasons, 52 episodes and more of You're Under Arrest were released in the US, and more recently the Full Throttle series has been released in Japan, but all we got were the four OVA episodes that kicked the whole anime adaptation off, the You're Under Arrest Movie, and this collection of Mini Specials. Being a completist at heart, it was almost obsessive compulsion that drove me to get this disc to finish off the UK You're Under Arrest experience, that and the fact that I quite liked what I saw of the OVAs. These Mini Specials were made in 1999, between the first series and the movie.


Reading up on the Mini Specials, it turns out that there were twenty, seven-minute episodes made, as well as a full length Traffic Control at the Beach episode that came at the end. This disc just collects the mini-episodes, and episode 21 is a bonus episode on the series discs, the very same series discs that we don't get here in the UK.

Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa are partners in the Tokyo traffic police, and the mini-specials follow them on their adventures as they deal out their more humorous brand of justice to panty thieves, peeping toms, and perverts. These short episodes offer more of a setup-gag format, and a lighter look at the characters than evinced in the series, and especially the movie. Twenty episodes are presented as 5 crime files on this disc from ADV.


1.1 Don't Tear Up the Tickets!
1.2 Driver Safety Workshop
1.3 Dash into Fire
1.4 Lifeguard - Mouth to Mouth

2.1 The Silky Panty Collector
2.2 Catch the Angel
2.3 Horror Night
2.4 Attracted to Danger

3.1 Let Me Look Into Your Eyes
3.2 Tune-up Restaurant
3.3 The Splendid Battle
3.4 The Fighting Bag


4.1 10,000 from the Heavens
4.2 Mystery! The Naked Woman in the Tunnel
4.3 Held By Concrete
4.4 A Spring Night's Dream

5.1 Convenience Store Panic
5.2 Flame's Silver Chase
5.3 Feel My Heartbeat
5.4 We're In Action

Picture

This DVD is a step back in time. The animation was made in 1999, and the transfer looks it. It's a 4:3 ratio transfer that is soft, bordering on the VHS quality, shows its NTSC roots, and looks distinctly low resolution. The animation itself is cheap and cheerful, certainly not up to the standards of the OVA, let alone the movie, with a lot of static shots and similar short cuts. It's also distinctly pre-CG, with a slight wobble with each scene change indicative of an actual acetate sheet being changed. It does all that it needs to though, and these short animations don't really deserve more than this.

Sound

You have a choice of DD 2.0 English and Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and signs. The dialogue is clear enough in either version, and the most you can say about the sound is that it works, and is unproblematic. The UK version of the OVAs only offered the dub, you either like it or lump it, but given the option as you are here, it becomes clear how creaky the dub actually is.

Extras

All you will find are trailers for Evangelion (Director's Cut), Zaion, Noir, and Angelic Layer.

Conclusion

I first encountered You're Under Arrest through the OVAs a couple of years ago, and found a charming series with likeable characters and gentle light stories that were more about a friendly atmosphere than they were about serious crime fighting. Having now sampled the other UK outings for the characters, first the rather more serious toned movie, and now these mini specials, I'm getting the distinct impression that this is a series that started out at the top, and gradually worked its way downwards. Of course I may be completely mistaken, with the movie hardly representative of the series as a whole, and these short 7 minute episodes not the ideal format to develop characters and establish a mood in, but since we in the UK have never had the series as evidence, and most likely never will, I'll have to go with the majority opinion.


There's none of that charm that was so evident in the OVAs, so exemplified in this show's Kodansha stable-mate Ah My Goddess, at all evident in these mini-specials. The seven-minute format doesn't really allow for the gentle pace required, and instead what we get is a fairly straightforward setup followed by a punchline format. With all the story possibilities available in the cop genre, the Mini Specials stick to a rather wearying litany of perverts, panty thieves and peeping toms, and this is fairly repetitive Carry On level humour. Even those episodes which aren't so oriented, have a rather holiday postcard edge to them, although my only complaint is that they could have mixed them up a bit better, instead of having a glut of panty snatchers early on. Just for the record, we have lecherous high school boys, a cat burgling panty snatcher, a panty thief in a swimming pool locker room, a guy looking to make a panty quilt, a pervert photographer stalking the women's locker room at the police station, remote cameras in a fitness club female toilet, a naked ghost in a highway tunnel, a female flasher with an electric personality, and a road safety video shot by former adult video producers. It's a guided tour of every minor perversion prevalent in Japanese society at the end of the 20th Century. While all perverts get their painful comeuppances, we viewers get just the briefest glimpse of animated frillies, without suffering the same electrocutions, tortures and humiliations.


There are other, less one track stories to be had, although most of them are bunched up at the end of the run, with spooky monster muggers in the park, lunchtime antics in the police station commissary, a street performer holding up traffic, a hapless purse snatcher, a suicidal man who gets in between Natsumi and her money, and a hold up at a convenience store, with the world's smallest knife. However, they all take the same tongue in cheek tone.


The Mini Specials would probably be better appreciated if you have seen the series, are more familiar with the world and care about the characters. I get the feeling that these shorts are meant to subvert them, and just have a bit of random fun in a slightly more serious story universe, but without the series to compare them to, the subversion is wasted, and you have to take them all at face value. At face value they are just humorous little ribald skits that elicit a chuckle or two, then instantly fade from the memory. They are not at their best when seen in hefty chunks as I watched them, and it would be more enjoyable to just catch the occasional episode. You could do a lot worse than forgettable entertainment though.