Review for Slayers OVA Collection

Introduction

I came at Slayers backwards, that is to say that the UK anime industry came at the Slayers franchise backwards. I’m not a particular fan of swords and sorcery (although I have to admit that I have been taken with this year’s Shannara Chronicles), I always thought that it was a little too po-faced and self-conscious a genre. What little I read about Slayers, a sorcerer and a swordsman, demons, monsters and dragons did little to enthuse me. It took MVM licensing the television series, Slayers, Slayers Next, Slayers Try, Revolution, and Evolution-R, and then sending me the check discs to review for me to cotton on to what Slayers is all about. It’s about the comedy of course, and at its best, Slayers can offer some of the silliest anime comedy around. By the time I realised this, and had my interest piqued enough to seek out more in the form of movies and OVAs, said movies and OVAs had been deleted. That’s because the Slayers movies and OVAs were originally licensed by ADV, both in the US and the UK, and while in the US they were released after CPM released the first three TV series, in the UK they preceded the series release by some five years or more. On top of that, ADV went out of business in the UK before MVM started releasing Slayers. So by the time I wanted the Slayers movies and OVAs, I couldn’t have them anymore, at least not in the US or the UK.


Thankfully there is still Australia, and Madman Entertainment have the Slayers franchise in its entirety. Or at least they had it. Last year, during a clearance sale, they sold off the remaining stock for the Slayers Movies and OVAs, and I managed to complete my Slayers collection. Originally released by ADV separately, for the OVA collection, Madman collected both discs, The Book of Spells, and Slayers Excellent into a single Amaray case. The six OVAs relate more of the adventures that Lina Inverse had alongside Naga the Serpent, long before she first encountered Gourry and the others.


Slayers: The Book of Spells

The Scary Chimera Plan
Lina’s received a proposal. Not that kind of proposal! This crazy old man named Diol wants to use Lina as part of the ultimate chimera, blending sorceress and dragon to create a new breed of monster. Naturally Lina isn’t interested, but Diol isn’t taking no for an answer, and he’s created an army of Nagas to help him capture Lina.


Jeffery’s Knighthood
Lina and Naga have been hired to make a man of young Jeffery... Not in that way, despite Naga’s typical attire. Jeffery’s mother dotes on him, and is certain that he’s destined for greatness, including a knighthood, becoming a member of the royal guard. Alas the reality of Jeffery’s physique and attitude suggests otherwise. He’s ill fit to prevail even when the odds are stacked in his favour. Fortunately for him his doting mother has much to say about it... with a hammer.


Mirror, Mirror
The ultimate wizard Shazal Rugandy created a mirror, the Shadow Reflector which is rumoured to be the ultimate weapon. It casts a shadow of whoever looks into it, and that shadow becomes real, a copy of the original and perfect in every respect except they would have the opposite temperament. Someone using the mirror could conceivably create an army equal and opposite to his enemy’s. The mirror had been lost to legend, but a clue to its whereabouts has been stolen by the sorcerer Lagan. The Magic Users Association offers a reward of 200 gold pieces to whoever can stop Lagan, but Lina and Naga have no idea of what they are up against.


Slayers Excellent

1. The Labyrinth
Lina and Naga didn’t always travel together. In fact, their first meeting was even more explosive and destructive than their usual association. Naga the Serpent specifically targeted Lina Inverse to prove who was top dog, thaumaturgically speaking. After another challenge resulted in a little too much collateral damage to a tavern, the peeved villagers demanded restitution. They demanded that the perpetrator, Naga deal with rumours of villagers missing in local ruins, and as Lina didn’t pay for the meal that Naga incinerated, she should go along as well.


2. A Frightening Future
If there’s one thing that can make Lina’s eyes light up, and common sense switch off, it’s money, so when a rich merchant offers a pile of gold for Lina to escort his daughter to their summer vacation villa, she agrees without looking at the small print. The small print means that all expenses for the trip come from Lina’s pocket, and the way young Sirene spends money, it looks like Lina will be in debt before the trip ends. Worse, the spoilt rich kid has an attitude, and a laugh just like Naga’s.


3. Lina-chan’s Lovely Makeover Operation
Why is it always lunchtime that’s interrupted! This time it’s a militant fashion designer named Tatjana Dayward who has a proposition for Lina. She’s battling a rival designer, who fails to appreciate the formal necessities of clothes design. She wants Lina’s help in delivering a magical smackdown. It gets worse. When Lina finally sees the avant garde style of Marty Lenford, it turns out that she’s been inspired to create clothing based on Naga the Serpent’s typically brief attire. The battle lines have been drawn.

Picture

The Slayers OVAs get 4:3 regular transfers, which on these old-school discs are NTSC-PAL standards conversions, soft of resolution, and prone to blended frames and ghosting. Other than that, the image is clear and of watchable quality, even if the cel and paint source has seen better days, with colours somewhat faded. The character designs are typical Slayers, even if Lina is the only recurring character, while the animation, of OVA quality offers a little more pizzazz than the TV series it’s spun-off from.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 2.0 English and Japanese with subtitles and signs on both discs. I went with the Japanese audio; I can only experience Megumi Hayashibara as Lina, and was happy enough with the experience, while Naga’s laugh is obnoxious in either language. The dialogue is clear throughout, there are no glitches, and the action and music come across well too. The subtitling is inconsistent once more, as it was in the ADV authored movie discs. They can’t make up their mind whether to literally transcribe the spells or to translate them. One disc uses ‘Dil Brand’, the other ‘Mega Explosion Array’. Otherwise the subtitles are accurately timed and free of typos.

Extras

Two discs are presented in an Amaray case, one on a central hinged panel, while the inner sleeve offers some more Slayers artwork. The discs present their content with static menus, and have jacket pictures. Each episode is followed by a translated English credit reel.

The sole extra on The Book of Spells is the Production Portfolio, a 15:10 minute slideshow line art gallery with imagery from the OVAs, set to songs from the show.


Slayers Excellent offers a little more, including trailers for Slayers Excellent, and the Slayers Movie Collection. There’s also a menu option offering ADV Previews, but they’re actually Madman trailers on this Australian disc, for Eureka Seven, Ranma ½ The Series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, only one of them an ADV title.

The most interesting extra features here are the interviews with Cynthia Martinez (Lina – 5:45), and Kelly Manison (Naga – 4:47), as the actors talk about their respective characters, with some behind the scenes booth footage as well.

Conclusion

This collection is a tale of two discs, although it’s more of a distinction between good and great, rather than good and poor. The OVA collection episodes are set prior to the series storyline, just like the majority of the films, when Lina was travelling with Naga the Serpent instead of Gourry, Amelia and Zelgadis. As I mentioned in the movie collection review, the different character dynamic, more of a double act featuring a couple of equals, rather than a team and its leader, allows for a different style of comedy, and while this is in the vein of the Slayers series, it also does its own thing. Over the course of the movies and these OVAs, the Naga character has certainly grown on me, although not for the ridiculous fan service, and yes people do cosplay as Naga. She’s a strong and funny character in her own right, and when teamed up with Lina, the sparks do fly from their effervescent rivalry.


I found that I preferred the OVAs to the feature films, as the longer running time of the films meant that more than just lip-service had to be paid to the stories, and depending on how much you appreciated them, the narrative could detract from the humour. With the OVAs running to half an hour each, you don’t have to worry about the narrative so much and the episodes tend to go for the comedy jugular, the laughs are concentrated into the shorter runtime, and the end result is much funnier. And in this two disc collection of OVAs, The Book of Spells is even funnier than Slayers Excellent.


The three stories in The Book of Spells are zanier, more surreal, and more creative than those in Excellent. You have a wizard trying to turn Lina into a Chimera, you have Lina and Naga hired to train up a milksop of a wannabe knight, and you have the mission to stop the recovery of a magic mirror. All of the episodes really play up on the obnoxiousness of the Naga character, but The Scary Chimera Plan has her laugh able to clear a town, and it gets even worse when she gets cloned. Jeffery’s Knighthood is hilarious for his overprotective and doting mother, while Mirror, Mirror’s selling point is seeing the alternate versions of Lina and Naga, the altruistic Lina, and the demure Naga. These three episodes really subvert the usual Slayers tropes, and as result wind up refreshing the premise, and hence really working as comedy.


The three episodes in Slayers Excellent are more traditional Slayers fare for the most part, although they do have a greater degree of continuity running through them, and they also relate Lina and Naga’s first meeting. The fiery duo certainly didn’t get along at first, not until they were forced to take a mission into a perilous labyrinth, after one of their arguments got out of hand and demolished a tavern. A Frightening Future is almost a replay of Jeffery’s Knighthood, although without the doting mother to liven things up. Lina has to escort an obnoxious girl on a journey, and it’s a fairly mundane tale of her being increasingly obnoxious, and Lina getting increasingly frustrated, until the inevitable happens. The comic twist is to be expected, but it is a mundane story, only redeemed by Naga’s late arrival in proceedings. The final episode is like a couple of the movies, Lina on one side, Naga on the other, the town in the middle. One movie had golem designers on both sides, this episode has clothes designers, and it turns out that seamstresses are crazier than sorceresses.


The Slayers series are funny, and the movies with their concise and self contained storylines manage to condense the comedy down and are even funnier. The OVAs distil the comedy down even further, so that probably means that the three episodes in The Book of Spells are as funny as Slayers gets. Of course narrative and character development are rewarding in their own right as well, and Slayers Revolution and Evolution-R have proven that the creators aren’t averse to revisiting the franchise. I wouldn’t mind a full-length Naga and Lina series...