Review for Outlaw Star Complete Collection

Introduction

It almost became something of a joke, All the Anime’s continual delays of Outlaw Star. This should have been their second home video release after Cowboy Bebop Part 1, but issues kept cropping up with the master, the subtitles, and the quality control. All the Anime is a new company, and teething problems are to be expected, but when weeks turn into months, and months turn into almost a year, fan patience really was tested. Even the most ardent supporters of All the Anime’s insistence on getting things right first time began to waver. But there is still something to be said for getting things right, and you can’t doubt this company’s passion for their vocation when they plan replacement discs for Cowboy Bebop because of a few graphical glitches, when they decide to start over and create their own masters for Durarara!! after fans express disappointment with aspects of the Siren Visual discs that they used for the initial release. Yes, Outlaw Star is nearly a year late, but when the check discs finally arrived, and I placed the discs into my player and spun them up, all of that was forgiven. The wait is worth it. I haven’t seen the original release of Outlaw Star, but the AV quality of this release is almost pristine, and it may be one of the best presentations of a classic anime on DVD to date.


Gene Starwind is a superlative bounty hunter in a future age. He’s brave, reckless and highly skilled, and has a keen eye for the ladies. He’s also got an ego to match, and he should be renowned throughout known space. The only problem is that he has a phobia about space travel stemming from a trauma in his childhood. So he’s confined to grabbing bounties on the world of Sentinel III, and working odd jobs with his partner Jim Hawking. All of that changes when they are hired as bodyguards by an Outlaw named Hilda who’s also looking for parts for her spaceship. That would seem pretty normal, except her ship is the Outlaw Star, the most advanced ship in the galaxy, and the component she needs to make the ship operational is a naked girl in a suitcase. Suddenly they’re thrown into a galactic mystery with pirates, outlaws, police, aliens and assassins on their tails.


All 26 episodes of Outlaw Star are presented across four discs from All the Anime.

Disc 1
1. Outlaw World
2. World of Desires
3. Into Burning Space
4. When the Hot Ice Melts
5. The Beast Girl, Ready to Pounce
6. The Beautiful Assassin
7. Creeping Evil

Disc 2
8. Forced Departure
9. A Journey of Adventure! Huh?
10. Gathering for the Space Race
11. Adrift in Subspace
12. Mortal Combat with the El Dorado
13. Advance Guard from Another World
14. Final Countdown


Disc 3
15. The Seven Emerge
16. Demon of the Water Planet
17. Between Life and Machine
18. The Strongest Woman in the Universe
19. Law and Lawlessness
20. Cats and Girls and Spaceships
21. The Grave of the Dragon

Disc 4
22. Gravity Jailbreak
23. Tenrei, the Hot Spring Planet
24. Cutting the Galactic Leyline
25. Maze of Despair
26. Return to Space

Picture

Outlaw Star gets a 4:3 regular transfer in NTSC format from Anime Limited. I haven’t seen the original Beez release of this show to compare, but I can bet that was an NTSC-PAL standards conversion, and I can further bet that it was taken from a video source, and reedited with English language credit sequences, and quite possibly given its 1998 vintage, English overlays on text in the show too.


Anime Limited’s Outlaw Star uses materials from the recent re-mastered release from Japan, and it’s a wholly different animal. It looks stupendous, with the late nineties, traditional cel animation coming alive on these discs. I’ve seen three Japanese re-masters of vintage shows now, Martian Successor Nadesico and Dirty Pair Flash were brought to the West by Nozomi Entertainment, looking spruced up, with better detail and richer more accurate colours. Outlaw Star is in a different league altogether. For the first two titles, it seemed as if they went back to a telecine print to strike a new master. For Outlaw Star, it looks as if they actually had the original film elements to work with.


It’s still a vintage animation. But it’s clean, stable, free of print damage, while detail is exquisite. You can see every line, every nuance in the artwork. Colours are fresh, vibrant, and accurate, and you don’t have to worry about anything like bleed, shimmer or moiré. The transfer is surprisingly good given that the first three discs have seven episodes apiece. I saw no problems with compression artefacts or mosquito noise. But the icing on the cake is the progressive encode. With compatible equipment you can get 24 frames per second playback, with smoother, crisper animation. This is a show that looks fantastic scaled up on a flat panel display. Of course Blu-ray would be better for a cel animated show, but this DVD presentation isn’t to be sniffed at.


Outlaw Star is an ink and cel animation, and that does tell in some of the limitations. Cowboy Bebop just a year later would meld CG and 2D animation to create its future world, but here Outlaw Star is a strictly ink and paint affair throughout, but it still manages a cast of memorable characters, with some great designs, the future world design is imaginative and epic in scope, the action sequences are fluidly and energetically animated. You do get the odd shortcut where budgets have to be trimmed, but that’s no less true of anime today, and you can forgive the odd occasion where characters drift off model, as it was practically impossible to fix back then for home video release.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 Surround English and Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and a signs and song lyrics track. I went with the original Japanese audio, and it was a very enjoyable experience. The audio comes across clearly enough, with no hiss or distortion, the action sequences have impact, the music drives the story well, and the dialogue is clear throughout. I gave the English dub a try and it’s very much of its time.


A couple of slight issues though. Outlaw Star dates from a time when adapting a show to the West often meant re-editing the show by going through, and overlaying any Japanese text with English translations. I don’t know if this happened with Outlaw Star, not having seen the Beez release, but episode 6 does have some on screen Japanese text which unlike the rest of the show’s Japanese text, isn’t captioned.


Another thing is that this is one of those releases where it’s been authored in such a way that there is a limit to how many subtitle captions can be on screen at any one time. If there is someone speaking, and text appears requiring translation, then in the full subtitle track, the dialogue takes precedence. Normally this is only an issue in the next episode preview, when someone speaks over the next episode title, and the translation is missed. Since they will also say the episode title, it doesn’t make a difference as that will be in the subtitle stream beforehand. Episode 23 however starts with a lot of screen text and spoken dialogue. The first line of subtitles actually has a note in brackets underneath, mentioning that if you want to see what the on screen text translates to, switch the subtitle track to find out. It also came to my attention that the English dub is a little out of sync in the second half of episode 1, preceding the action by a smidge. I checked a further few episodes on disc 1 and they seemed fine.


Finally there are two dropouts in the Japanese audio on this release, 15:16 into episode 14, and 19:38 into episode 22. The English audio is fine at this point. These are relatively quiet moments in the show, there’s no music, action or dialogue to miss, just background noise, but the drops are noticeable.

Extras

The discs get a simple presentation, static menus listing the discs contents, with audio and subtitle options, episode listings that provide access to three chapters of each episode, and a Play All Option. This transfer being sourced from the Japanese re-master, the credit sequences are in Japanese, and the one thing that is missing is an English language credit scroll, at least at the end of the disc, or separately in the extra features. I don’t know if there is anything in the packaging that addresses this, otherwise the ANN Encyclopaedia is your friend.


The sole extras are on disc 4, and seem to be ported directly from the Japanese release. There are no English subtitles here, but since all you get are a 2-minute teaser video, the textless credits (2 OP, and 2 ED), and about a minute each of TV Spots, Re-mastered DVD Spots and Original DVD Spots (the one place where you can compare the new transfer to the original release), then subtitles aren’t really all that useful.


The big extra feature here is a 13 minute Art Gallery slideshow, which offers design artwork, character art, and production line art for the show. Japanese text introducing each section isn’t captioned, although the images speak for themselves. Also, the slideshow is silent, and it could have done with some of the show’s soundtrack to spice it up. The final thing is that it’s one of those galleries that place the images in a border, wasting a whole lot of screen real estate, and making it harder to appreciate the images on smaller screens.

Conclusion

I have no nostalgia for a show that I had never seen up to this point, but I was feeling it nevertheless as I watched Outlaw Star for the first time. It came as a reminder of a different time in anime, the start of the first DVD boom that I now look back on as a golden age, when anime creators still had Japanese prime time TV to aim for, broader audiences to reach, and the latitude to take chances with their creations. Today anime seems produced to order by committee, ticking off the checklist of clichés in order to satisfy the target otaku demographic. It’s all about the fan service. There is fan service in Outlaw Star, there’s a hot springs episode, there’s a cat girl, and a wee bit of nudity too. But it is the least of its parts, not the whole point of the show. Outlaw Star is rougher around the edges, unafraid to take chances, and a whole lot of fun because of it.


Inevitably comparisons are going to be made with Cowboy Bebop. After all, both shows are on the surface about a motley crew adventuring in space, both shows have an over-reaching arc interwoven with stand alone episodes, and both shows were made barely a couple of years apart. Such comparisons are going to be disappointing though. Cowboy Bebop was a perfect storm, great characters, brilliant writing, awesome music, stunning animation, and stand alone episodes that were the equal of, if not exceeding in quality the fantastic main storyline. Cowboy Bebop was stunning television. Compared to that, Outlaw Star is merely a very good anime show, and I have to say that it does show its age after 15 odd years.


Outlaw Star’s writing is adequate, the overarching story is very interesting, but the standalone episodes tend not to match that quality, and even detract from the main story, it doesn’t make the best use of its characters, and the animation is average, the music forgettable. Just don’t make the same mistake I did of comparing the two.


Outlaw Star does create a fantastic and consistent future world, and most episodes start with a prologue expounding on its finer points, whether it’s the difference between the Space Forces, Pirates, and Outlaws, or faster than light drives, to the various types of aliens, or more specific character biographies. It’s very nice way of painting this universe in broad strokes, before the episode itself gets down to the nitty-gritty. The story kicks off in grand style introducing the main character Gene Starwind, a cross between Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, a sort of naive rogue bounty hunter with a fear of space travel, and his partner the young genius Jim Hawking.


They wind up being hired by an Outlaw named Hilda to protect her from a group of pirates, and recover a bit of technology that will help her pilot the galaxy’s most advanced starship. That bit of technology happens to be a girl named Melfina, who when plugged into the ship (naked in a flotation tank), serves as its navigation system. The ship, later dubbed the Outlaw Star, and Melfina have been created to reach the legendary Galactic Leyline. Melfina knows nothing of her past, of who she is, while the legends of the Galactic Leyline offer much in the way of riches and power, and it’s no surprise that everyone is after it, and the Outlaw Star with which they can obtain it.


Cue the Kei Pirates and the Anten Seven assassins, who will stop at nothing to gain this power, and a couple of ruthless outlaws in the form of the MacDougall brothers Ron and Harry. Thrown in the Space Forces and a mad scientist and you can see why Gene has to get over his fear of space travel pretty quick so that he can keep his promise to Melfina to discover her past. Along the way they pick up an alien Ctarl-Ctarl girl named Aisha Clanclan, who serves as the cat-girl quotient in the show. She’s less cute and moe however, and more super-strong and single-minded. There’s also the assassin Suzuka, who’s initially hired to assassinate Gene’s sponsor (and gay stereotype) Fred Luo, but sticks around when she decides that Gene’s adventures are more interesting than her usual line of work, and when she fails to kill him in accordance with her nickname of Twilight.


Another aspect of the show that I liked was the use of Grappler ships, with spaceships fighting each other with robotic arms as well as missiles and laser beams. It fulfils the mecha requirements of any futuristic anime, but it also seems like a fantasy extrapolation of what was then the Shuttle program, where NASA’s space shuttles used to go into orbit with a robotic arm to assist with repairs and the ISS construction.


The show progresses with the back and forth jockeying between the MacDougalls, the Pirates, and the crew of the Outlaw Star (made all the more interesting when psychopath Harry MacDougall actually falls in love with Melfina), all the way to the end of the show, where these forces converge on the Galactic Leyline and secrets become revealed, in a three episode conclusion that has a little homage to Star Trek the Motion Picture. It’s a great story, comes together well, somehow melds future technology with ancient aliens, Tao powers and magic spells, and still holds the attention and entertains.


The problem comes with the standalone episodes, which aren’t up to the standard of the main storyline, and vary in quality from the good to the mundane. One problem with the show is that for an Outlaw with the most advanced starship at his command, he and his friends spend a fair bit of time in one system, and a lot of that on one planet. They escape Sentinel III, but wind up needing repairs to the ship and in debt, so Gene and Jim set up their odd-jobs/bounty hunting business on Heifong, and the scenery does tend to get a little tedious in the middle half of the show. Moments of excitement do arise, and it isn’t as if the Kei Pirates or the MacDougalls have given up. But the fun episodes are interspersed with episodes about Aisha getting a job in pest control, a spacebound Die Hard clone, a pirate looking for treasure and apparently quoting Gold Roger from One Piece, the future version of MMA where Aisha enters a fighting tournament against Fred Luo’s betrothed, and the episode where Jim falls in love.


The good episodes among these are fun to watch, but not so much the weaker efforts, and regardless of how good they are, you’re always left wondering what’s happening with the search for the Leyline. And as I mentioned, the show doesn’t make good use of all of its characters. It makes a big deal about introducing the Anten Seven assassins, and then promptly forgets about them for ten episodes. While crazy Harry gets a lot of development, the same isn’t true for his brother Ron, and even among the crew of the Outlaw Star, Aisha rarely seems more than a single note, mascot character, Chewbacca to Gene’s Han Solo, while Suzuka is barely used at all.


Still Outlaw Star is fun to watch, and it’s made with a broad audience appeal, a refreshing lack of clichés, and a rough and ready style that you just don’t see in anime these days. I have a lot of time for anime of this vintage, and it makes a welcome change from the mainstream otaku fan-service deluge that we are getting this summer. In typical car-crash timing, a Blu-ray release of Outlaw Star this autumn was finally announced in Japan, the week before the UK release of the re-mastered DVD. Do not let this dissuade you from getting the DVD. For one thing the transfer is very good, and it up-scales a treat. The second this is that it is very cheap, a basic Amaray release from All the Anime. The third thing is that in the 18 to 24 months, which is the minimum that it would take for a potential UK Blu-ray release of Outlaw Star, you’ll have probably watched this four or five times, and really got your money’s worth.