Too late I did it I decided it is time for me to write a post about Dirty Pair, yet another in a line of old cartoons I'd never seen before beyond like, a couple screenshots or maybe a clip here or there. Indeed, Dirty Pair recently had a slight bump in notoriety due to a clip from an episode involving a trans woman being outed as such and the response of the protagonists being "who fucking cares" which is, you know, more than a solid 90-95% amount of media being made in the year twenty-twenty-fucking-three.
Here's the scene, for context.
It's not perfect - the two are visibly shocked by the revelation before they recover (following the lead of another character who stands up for her first) - but this was also 1985 (its original air date was in fact a little over a month after I was born), and while I don't think it really needs to be graded on a curve, if you graded it on the curve of media made in the 80s it comes of even better than it already does. The show as a whole is pretty queer, honestly, but in spite of being queer myself I don't quite have the queer studies chops to dive into that stuff in a way that would do it justice. Suffice it to say that by dint of it being a science fiction show you kind of get a lot of stuff on screen that is treated as normal in a way that it probably wouldn't be otherwise. There's more to say about the show though, which is all under the jump that I've inserted because it's nice to put jumps in when you are about to really ramble, I think.
I have a terrible habit, which is that occasionally I will find something that I think is extremely exciting, and in my excitement I will begin to systematically devour any and all materials I can get my hands on which have to do with that thing. The last time this happened was probably at the start of the pandemic and it is now why I own copies of multiple artbooks about DOOM and DOOM Eternal, along with a boxed copy of Sigil signed by John Romero himself and a stuffed cacodemon that is staring at me e'en now from its position on the nightmarish collection of papers, figures, keys, and god knows what else I call my computer desk. Dirty Pair has had a similar effect, but unlike DOOM, which has a bunch of stuff you can find and play/read/watch easily (before you ask, yes, I did watch the latest DOOM movie where the protagonist was a lady. It wasn't very good, but the imps threw fireballs, which is more than I can say for the last movie), Dirty Pair's last big release was the release of a manga series ten years ago that featured some of the original light novels adapted to manga form by the guy who did the Star Wars manga. It's actually not that good - the character redesign in particular takes outfits that were already a little sci-fi horny and dials them up to a level that goes beyond "yeah this is kinda horny" to "hey man what the fuck are we doing here" which, you know, whatever. It also aimed to be grittier in tone than any previous adaptation, which in comics means there are a lot more tits and also rather more panels spent on depicting sexual assault than I really think we needed to see, ever.
This is always going to be the elephant in the room: Dirty Pair was conceived and written by a dude, and the books (yes, I hunted down copies of the two books that were translated into English, this is how you know I've got real brain worms) are told from the perspective of one of the two women who, you know, maybe mentions how young and hot she is more than is strictly necessary (the second book is way less grating in that respect and even manages to hit a tone that almost reminded me of the way Vonnegut's prose flows, although Vonnegut probably spent a lot less time writing characters talking about how big their tits are and also I feel a little weird even saying "almost" because like... I don't want to give anyone really high expectations here). Most of the time the prose reads exactly like any other science fiction written by a dude in the 1980s, which is to say it's kinda clunky and overexplains stuff and leaves you wondering on more than one occasion if the author had ever spoken to a woman before. This goes double for the first book.
If you are going to hunt these down (say, on some kind of online internet archive that really should be protected because it does things like make it possible to read old pulp sci-fi that hasn't seen a proper printing since the early 00s), go in with expectations properly adjusted. There are some illustrations in the books that kick ass though, which almost makes it worth the occasionally clunky prose (and if you just really wanna know what spawned the anime and OVAs and movies and rebooted anime, well, sometimes you gotta go to the source. I had to know! Now I know!). I dunno they're fine, Kei makes for a fun narrator, especially when she is being a drunken, horny little shithead. It can be good! It can also be less good! Whatever, that's enough about a couple of books that I've obviously only read translations of because I don't speak Japanese (and while there are eight novels (if you can believe it, the eight released in 2018), only the first two have translations that I could actually dig up. The fifth book was also released in English, but I haven't found it yet. Someone should pick up the rights to the damn things and do a proper translation and re-release, is what I'm saying, because I'm sure that sometime in the last 30 years the prose probably improved).
The anime itself, however, took what was in the books and spun it out into some of the best goddamn animation I've seen in a while. I cannot actually tell you how many times I paused an episode just to look at the backgrounds (1980s sci-fi anime backgrounds almost always kick ass, and this shit is on another level. Just look at this shit!
The ship design is also on point, and frankly the soundtrack brings the right tone to the show (it helps that the opening theme is a banger). The voice work is also great (I cannot vouch for the quality of the dub, although given the existence of a kickstarter campaign to re-record a brand new dub of the show that ran in 2021, I'll let you draw your own conclusions. In fact, the work done by the two main actresses was so well-respected that when the time came to do a new series in the mid-90s, it ended up being a complete reboot instead of a sequel because they couldn't get both of them back. Iconic performances, I think. Oh, and I would be fuckin' negligent in not mentioning this, but the show does have some unfortunate character design choices here and there (there's a Chinese cook who shows up a few times who is something of A Problem, although not awfully so). The show shows its budget now and again - some episodes are a little rougher than others, but the last two episodes are masterpieces - but frankly that's par for the course. They can't all have big animation budgets, alas!
You know what can though is the feature-length release Project Eden, which is the last thing I've seen so far (leaving me 10 OVAs, one remaining hour-long special, and the rebooted series to get through before I am all done). The visuals are top-notch, the soundtrack is deployed like a weapon (it is used for a gag at one point that made me burst out laughing which is not, generally, a reaction stuff gets from me), and the story's a fun sci-fi adventure romp and while the romantic arc feels a little forced, it at least establishes pretty firmly that Kei has a type.
I'll probably have more thoughts about the series (is that the right word?) when I get through the rest of it, but this stuff's been taking up so much brain space I had to start yammering on about it now rather than later. I think the thing that really kills me is that this stuff feels like it is always in perpetual danger of disappearing entirely. The kickstarter I mentioned will be the first time the series (and its films, and the reboot) are going to be available on bluray, and god willing it gets better transfers than what's currently up on Crunchyroll because I am dying for better looks at this shit. The films especially could do with some proper love and care - the versions which are available for free on youtube (provided you are in the US or appear to be there at least) are a miserable 480p, and I know for a fact better transfers exist because I've seen screenshots and clips that look a hell of a lot crisper than that. Unfortunately for me, I didn't know there was any kind of kickstarter campaign until this year, and the campaign was in 2021, so I kinda missed my chance to get in on the ground floor of this thing. Supposedly there's going to be a retail release that I can get my hands on, for which I will pay a high price if necessary because I really, really happen to think this series kicks ass.
This is a good show! You should at the very least watch the tv series, because it's very good! I'm a big fan, which is obvious because I've just rambled about this shit too much. Sometimes I think about someone doing yet another reboot, but I am faced with the dilemma that is "man I would rather just see new stuff" in spite of thinking you could probably do some cool shit with a new Dirty Pair series. A true contradiction.
Anyway, once I get through the rest of this stuff I'll probably have more thoughts and I will write them in a post on this very website. Maybe I will even bother to write coherently that time, rather than this stream of consciousness rambling bullshit I keep doing.
Oh oh, and there was also a game released for the Famicom which is a little platformer thing and it's, you know, it's certainly a 2d platformer made in the late 80s/early 90s for the Nintendo Family Computer system! Which is to say it's weirdly opaque, mechanically, and also I died a lot and only made it to the second level before I was like "hmm this is probably enough." Kei and Yuri sure are in it though, and recognizably so!