Video Backlog: "Space Adventure Cobra"

Publisher: Madman Entertainment (Australia)
Format: Region 4 DVD, PAL, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub and English Subtitles.
Length: 99 minutes
Production Date: 1982
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes

By the 24th century, mankind had spread out over the galaxy. In the Seventh Galaxy, Bounty Hunter Jane Flower has just literally nabbed the head of a ruthless criminal. She heads to a bar to celebrate, where a man named Cobra takes an interest in her. Jane later leaves to claim the money for bounty, but Cobra follows her. Despite Jane taking pot shots at him, Cobra continues with the chase, but she becomes interested in him when he reveals he is the infamous Cobra, a space pirate and wanted felon with a 7 million beatle bounty on his head. She is sceptical at first, because Cobra supposedly died two years ago. But after troops from the Space Mafia Guild come to attack her and Cobra, he reveals his trademark while fighting them off, the Psychogun, which is hidden in his left arm. He explains to her that he has been hiding from the Guild and has changed his voice, face and even faked his own death to escape their clutches.

Completely convinced he is the real Cobra, she asks him and his android companion, Lady, to take her to the planet of Sido to rescue her sister Dominique from the notorious prison which floats endlessly above the planet. During the journey there Jane tells Cobra that she and her sister are actually triplets. They are from a legendary and powerful planet called Mirus, which has the power to move freely throughout the galaxy. It supposedly became uninhabitable one hundred years ago. The triplets are the last three survivors from that planet. Upon arrival at Sido, Jane helps Cobra to infiltrate the prison, but when his finally finds Dominique, she says that she doesn't want to leave. Worse is to come when Cobra's nemesis, the rather creepy looking Crystal Boy, who is one of higher-ups in the Guild, arrives on the scene and attempts to kill him. A tragedy soon occurs and Cobra discovers that Crystal Boy and the Guild want to use the triplets to control the Mirus so that he may destroy an entire Seventh Galaxy with it.

This film is the theatrical version of Buichi Terasawa's ("Kuboto", "Midnight Eye Goku") "Cobra" manga (partly released in English by Viz). Released a few months before the TV series (still unreleased in English unfortunately), it was directed by the very underappreciated and dearly departed Osamu Dezaki. I had a look at my previous review of this film and I must have been in a much forgiving state of mind when I last saw the film. The film has really aged badly. I think certainly it is a product of its time, but you have to remember that “Macross” was release the very same year. The plot of this film could be written on a serviette. However this doesn't mean it's a bad film. The plot is rather good, if somewhat cheesy at times. The main selling points of this film however are the incredible visuals and larger than life characters. But as I said before, they’re quite dated. Some of the earlier sequences and some of the action looks rather awkward and a little poorly animated. I was surprised at the mecha design. Yes, this is based on a manga from the 1970’s, but the mecha is certainly ugly and bulky looking.

I think either Terasawa or Dezaki had watched "Barbarella" and "Heavy Metal" a few too many times before watching this film. The visuals are very, very trippy at times and the designs are quite unusual and very "un-anime like" for the period. Whenever I watch the film for some reason I'm reminded of the animated French film "Fantastic Planet". Some of the dreamy visuals may be attributed to the fact that in the manga and anime TV series, a bored businessman named Johnson books a virtual holiday a la "Total Recall" and discovers he has memories of being the space pirate Cobra. Essentially the plot of this film is cut down from the manga and TV series, but all references to the Johnson character are omitted from the movie. Generally the film looks quite stunning and you can see that a lot of time, money and attention have been poured into this film. The animation is very fluid at times, but some of the action sequences involving combat can look awkward at times. The aged look of the film with its highly stylised surrealistic imagery coupled with its overly self-indulgent nature is threatens to make everything come crashing down in a heap at times. One scene has Lady playing an Emerson, Lake and Palmer-like 1970's prog-rock song on a massive pipe organ, as the rescued Cobra is reviving after an attempt by Crystal Boy to put him into stasis. In fact the visuals are so over the top at times, they practically overwhelm the story being told.

I bought this DVD almost four years ago, but have ignored it all this time. There are two major disappointments with this DVD release. First is that the film is letterboxed 4:3 rather than widescreen 16:9. The other problem for many is the lack of Manga Entertainment UK’s dub with the Yello (mid 1980’s Swiss dance band of "Oh Yeah" fame) soundtrack from their albums "Zebra" and "Baby". Yeah sure that’s not the original Japanese music, but it was pretty fun (Island owned manga, hence the inclusion of the Yello music). In its place we get the US dub directed by Carl Macek for Streamline, but not released because their parent company went broke (it first got released in 1998 by Urban Vision). Summing up it’s a fun film, but it is really too over the top. It’s aged pretty badly too. 6.5 out of 10.

Remaining Backlog: 25 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs)