Taking an Unscheduled Break

Unfortunately I will be taking a little bit of a forced break from this blog for a little while. My PC is on the way out (think the hard drive is just about to give up the ghost. Had this PC for 9 years, which is a decent run), so I'll be getting a new one. However no one in my local area does custom PCs (I refuse to go to Harvey Norman for an overpriced one), so I'm going to have to order one online. Been meaning to do this for a long time now, but the impending death of my current PC has finally forced my hand. As a result I won't be doing any more posts for a little while. Hope to be back within a month. It's bit of a shame as I have been on a roll for a little while and have been able to make a post almost every week for a while now.

The Obscurities in the Western Connection Catalogue: “Dancougar”

Release Date: 24 April 1995
Format: PAL VHS, Japanese Dialogue with English Subtitles
Runtime: 77 mins
Catalogue Number: WEST038
Japanese Title: Chouju Kishin Dancouga: God Bless Dancouga (God Bless Dancougar)
Japanese Production Date: 1987

This is the eighth part in a series of nine articles on the somewhat obscure 1990’s UK based video distributor Western Connection and the anime titles they released in English, titles that no one else bothered to re-release anywhere else. For a run down on what I thought made the company so special, see here.  Continuing on with their 1995 releases, a very productive year for the company, we come to one of the odder tapes they released; the feature length OVA “God Bless Dancougar”, a concluding chapter to the 38 part “Dancouga” TV series which had not been released in English at that point in time. I previously reviewed the 2017 Discotek DVD release of the TV series here. Besides being an odd choice for UK release, what makes this release one of the strangest releases from the company is the baffling state of the video master that licensor Toho gave Western Connection.

Taking place a year or so after the final climatic battle seen in the “Requiem for Victims” OVA, the Earth now seems to be at peace. All members of the Cyber Beast Force (CBF) are still with the military, mostly training new recruits, but some of them have second jobs; Sara is a model and Shinobu performs in a band. Shinobu invites everyone on the team including Professor Hazukito and Laura to one of his live shows. Due to a curfew placed on the city’s residents, everyone is soon forced to disperse, which is lucky for Sara and Shinobu as they still have some unresolved sexual tension from the TV series that needs to be resolved. Both of them have a fight after he says he was kidding when he said that he loved her. They both storm off, but Shinobu soon meets an older woman named Reki Shikishima who invites him to her underground bar. The bar is essentially illegal due to the government imposed night time curfew.

The next day Sara goes to see an old friend of hers from the Space Officer Academy that she hasn't seen before the war. Sayuri was rather timid when Sara first met her, but now she has a doctorate in computer engineering and seems very confident. Sara almost doesn't recognise her at first. The following day the CBF are scrambled as a giant monster, possibly something left over from the Muge Empire invasion, attacks the city. The team are having trouble trying to defeat the monster, and even Professor Hazukito is unable to provide them with any information or tactics to deal with the creature they're fighting. During combat Sayuri contacts Sara and gives her all the data she has on the mysterious creature. Unfortunately a tragedy is about to occur. The fighting closes in Masato's family villa and it is destroyed, instantly killing his father. The monster then self-destructs destroying the city as a result.

The military are furious and detain the CBF for a quick court martial, the result of which has them sent to military prison with hard labour. Inside the prison, Shinobu meets an inmate who asks him if he wants to be part of a break out. Shinobu egarly agrees and uses a compact laser cutter to break out of his cell that night. He then heads for the rendezvous point the inmate told him about. There he is surprised to find Masato and Ryo, but Sara isn't with them. The inmare tells the other CBF teammates that she has been rescued by Sayuri. He leads them to an abandoned subway beneath a building where they meet the Black Knights. They were the team of fighters formed by Alan, the man known as “The Black Knight” who piloted the black beast warrior machine and helped out the CBF from time to time in the TV series. Although their leader is now gone and they are no longer fighting an alien enemy, they still operate as a guerrilla squad, fighting the government. Before they can explain their actions, the guards from the prison find them and fire upon them. The Black Knights team tell them to escape and to go to the bar where Shinobu first met Reki.

When the three CBF team members arrive, Reki tells them that she was the Black Knight’s girlfriend, and that she has carried on his legacy. Professor Hazukito is also there and tells them that he is involved in this too. He explains that Sayuri is planning to control the world by the use of a super computer and the government has become tyrannical. Somehow Sayuri has managed to create a computer that lives off data and this computer has created a new dimension that might cause the world to vanish into dimensional space if it isn't stopped. Not only that, Sayuri has kidnapped Sara. The CBF members set off to defeat Sayuri and rescue Sara, but unbeknown to them Emperor Muge is alive and well, and it is he who is behind this plan.

This OVA is quite a decent follow up to the TV series and somewhat lacklustre “Requiem for Victims” OVA. While I felt the story was a bit weak when compared to the storylines of the TV series, the animation more than makes up for that. For the most part it's really fluid and the designs benefit a great deal from the extra attention paid to them. In particular the transformation and battle sequences are much more realistic and exciting here than they were in the TV series. The Dancougar transformation scene benefits the most here and you can clearly see how all four beasts fit together. The sequence is lovingly animated and detailed. Confusingly after the climactic battle in this OVA, a short pop video like sequence with the CBF playing instruments as a band and singing a song is inserted just before we see the conclusion of the story. Not sure what the idea was behind that. It just comes off as odd or perhaps a rather cynical attempt to advertise the soundtrack.

Unfortunately the mind boggles at the reasoning behind this release from Western Connection. This tape was released over a year before the “Dancougar” TV series began being released in the US on VHS by Software Sculptors. “Dancougar” never played on TV in the UK either, so why in hell would they pick it for UK distribution? While you could probably understand the OVA to degree without watching the TV series, it’s far more beneficial to do so. UK viewers must have been utterly confused as to who these people were and what they were doing. The wedding sequence at the end of the film must have bamboozled them completely. I can just see hundreds of UK viewers saying “where the hell did this girl come from?”. I bet some viewers must have concluded that all of her scenes prior to the wedding sequence had been deleted from the video.

But that’s not the weirdest aspect to this release. Toho have given western Connection a very odd master of this OVA indeed. Apart from the title sequence being edited with stock footage to remove the “God Bless Dancouga” title card (maybe Toho thought western viewers would be offended by the title?), you can frequently see the edges of where the paint stops near the top and bottom of the animation cels. The first thing I noticed while watching this OVA was I could sometimes see through the cels to the backgrounds at the top and bottom of the screen. As the film progressed, legs and heads disappeared as they got closer to the top and bottom of the screen, explosions stopped at the top and bottom of the screen as well, people became floating torsos and occasionally in close-ups of character’s heads, they suddenly had bald spots then miraculously grew their hair back within milliseconds (click on images to enlarge);

So what in hell was going on? It would seem this OVA was shot in a “open matte” aspect, possibly for dual TV/theatrical distribution. This was a very common practice in the 1980’s for theatrical anime. What used to happen with anime films in this era was that they were shot in an “open matte” format (i.e. 4:3 ratio, same as a normal TV screen), then matted into theatrical ratio for theatrical distribution (i.e. the top and bottom of picture blacked out so it was the same as the theatrical ratio, “vista” size, 16:9 ratio). This way when it was later shown on TV or for video distribution, there was no need for an expensive pan and scan conversion since it was originally filmed in a 4:3 TV sized format. What doesn't make sense however is why the camera operators have filmed “God Bless Dancouga” in a way so you could see where the tops and bottoms of cels had ended (the painters and animators only paint and draw what needs to be shown in a shot or frame, nothing more. Characters don't usually take up a whole cel from top to bottom).

The end result in a 4:3 format is pretty distracting at times and I don't understand at all why they've done it. It's just done in a completely half-arsed manner. There's no way in hell this is suitable for a 4:3 ratio TV broadcast. It seems so damn unprofessional. I just don't know what to make of it. I've never seen anything like it before I saw this tape. Oddly the OVA was never given a theatrical release as far as I can tell. The Japanese laserdisc and VHS versions of the OVA are “faux widescreen”, with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, covering the “unfinished bits” in the original open matte print. One wonders why the film wasn’t shot in widescreen format to begin with. Perhaps the idea was to give it a theatrical look and this was decided on very late into production. I guess we’ll never know. The master given to Western Connection is pretty scratchy and the sound is quite muffled and somewhat tinny too. Somehow I get the feeling Toho just gave them the crappiest master they could find.

Western Connection's production is also up to their usual crappy standards. The subtitle timing is a little off as per usual but more spot on than some of their other titles. Surprisingly some of the translation isn’t great. Some of the lines don’t make a lot of sense. As for the VHS slick, instead doing the usual and taking the synopsis from a Anime UK/Anime FX review, they've actually written one themselves. However it misspells or makes up character names (who the hell are Shino, Rat and Masa?) and borders on the edge on being incomprehensible. In fact it's complete dribble and barely makes sense. Bizarrely two of the three pictures on the back of the cover of the tape aren't even from this OVA. One is a shot seems to be from the concluding “Dancouga” OVA series “White Hot Final Chapter” (which hasn't been released commercially in English anywhere in the world yet and most likely it will never be). The other picture isn’t even from the “Dancouga” franchise at all. It’s from “Ai City”, another Toho movie that Western Connection released as “Love City”.

This is another bizarre release that has seemingly been dumped into the UK market for no apparent reason (other than the fact it was part of a package deal Western Connection struck with Toho). Unless you had seen the TV series, you'd end up scratching you head many times during the show wondering what the hell is going on. A lot of stuff from the TV series is referenced during the OVA. This is not a standalone OVA by any means. The original reason I got this tape was I that had watched the US VHS release of the TV series and wanted to see what happens next. Of course by the time the TV series had been released in the US (in 1996), Western Connection had disappeared off the face of the Earth and this tape wasn't being sold in the UK anymore. While this this nonsense was quite frustrating for fans, it was fairly common practice at the time. Licensing an OVA or film is far less risky than a long TV series, even if viewers really need to see the TV series first if they are to make heads or tails of the OVA or film.

It's nearly impossible to find this tape. It’s not listed on Amazon UK like the majority of other Western Connection titles and I’ve never seen it for sale on eBay. I had real difficulty trying to get a copy until I discovered somebody selling off their personal anime collection and offered them a decent price for it some 15 or so years ago. I don't know if it was worth all the effort to find it as the story and plot are a little silly and trite. The state of the master used for UK VHS release would also dissuade even the most hard core fans of the franchise from tracking the tape down. Still it's a decent robot anime and I got some kicks out of it, plus the animation is very good for a mid-1980's production. I would have thought that Discotek might licence and release this OVA plus the remaining OVAs to complement their “Dancouga” TV series DVD release. To date this hasn’t happened which is a bit of a shame.

Note: This post is based on a previously published version posted on the defunct “Lost World of Anime” website in 2005.