Original Dirty Pair

What could I possibly say? This was perfect. A perfect story serving as a perfect capstone to a perfect show. Words fail me trying to convey the mixture of emotions I’m feeling right now.

There really could have been no better way for Original Dirty Pair to go out. A finale that knows it’s a finale and knows the promises it must reaffirm. Who else could Kei and Yuri be but Space Truckers? Sure, they’re technically undercover again, this time to infiltrate an independent truck company on the verge of folding due to corporate pressure, but it feels a little bit different this time. There’s no obvious diegetic guise the girls slip into here, and they certainly don’t seem to be acting very hard. Indeed, Kei and Yuri are for one final time handled perfectly, and this might be the story that shows their relationship in the best and purest light. They’re just being themselves here, which is the boldest, most brazenly revolutionary thing they can do. And they clearly relate to and empathize profoundly with the truck drivers, and why wouldn’t they? They share a common bond as travellers on the cosmic highway, as fated to be alone together as they are to constantly journey from place to place. The title “No Need to Listen to the Bad Guys. We are Space Truckers!” couldn’t have been more accurate: It’s as apt a summary of the episode itself as it is a crystal clear statement of purpose for Dirty Pair on the whole.

(And notice how, in the teaser for this episode, it’s *Yuri* who gets the most excited about becoming a trucker, saying it’s something she’s “always wanted to do”. Try as she might to pass herself off as a romantic, refined Yamato Nadeshiko heroine, at heart Yuri is just as much a working class wanderer and voyager as Kei is, and her true colours shine the brightest and most vibrant of all.)

We’ve seen Space Truckers in Dirty Pair before, in “Lots of Danger, Lots of Decoys”. But that episode, much like the TV series it’s from, had an extremely goofy, tongue-in-cheek tone to it. That wasn’t a bad thing, and a lot of the first Dirty Pair show was laugh-out-loud funny. But this time it’s played a bit more serious and a bit more sophisticated. Not that there aren’t still laughs to be had, of course, but the comedy tends to come more in light doses delicately woven into the fabric of the narrative itself, rather than shoved front and centre in slapsticky glory. There’s an elegance, nuance and sense of mature dignity to the writing here that really sells the quiet tragedy of Uncle Jayd and the truckers, and Kei and Yuri effortlessly fit right in. This has been a signature of Original Dirty Pair from the beginning, but it’s so very important that this episode in particular embodies this sophistication as well as it does, because of its delicate subject matter.…

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Just like its main characters, Dirty Pair as a franchise is an expert in the art of obfuscating comedy. On the surface, this series seems to the uninitiated to be the most ridiculous thing ever, and even the title story of The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair played out very much akin to a straightforward parody of pulp sci-fi and space opera tropes, and even of Haruka Takachiho’s own Crusher Joe. It’s probably because of this that Dirty Pair possesses the hyper-niche, marginal status it does. This *also* means that Dirty Pair is able to quietly do something flagrantly radical and openly experimental and go completely unnoticed and uncredited except by a handful of ardent admirers because it’s not the kind of series that sort of thing is necessarily expected of.

Just as Kei and Yuri can make wisecracks and giggle disarmingly in the middle of a crisis, so does Dirty Pair’s reputation keep it as fiercely marginal as its heroes themselves are.

Which is why episodes like this one are Dirty Pair’s secret weapon. “Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell” is, without question, the darkest, most sombre story this franchise has done to date, at least on screen. It’s also one of the best. Even though Affair of Nolandia definitely had its more contemplative moments and had that one admittedly disturbing bit of psychological and body horror, it was on the whole a tight, jaunty, engrossing piece that kept the audience engaged from start to finish. Even “Criados’ Heartbeat” had to throw out a subplot about the girls’ vacation and Kei getting ready for a date and kept an upbeat tone throughout. This though is genuinely difficult to look at sometimes: This episode has a body count to make both Doctor Who and the original Star Trek blush, and I’m pretty sure every single supporting character introduced here gets gruesomely and ruthlessly killed off by the end of it. But more importantly, these deaths are absolutely not played for cheap shock value or sensationalism: Each and every one is played as a tragic loss and an unconscionable blow, which is only to be expected given this episode deals in some of the most incandescent anti-imperialist rage I’ve ever seen from Dirty Pair.

“Red Eyes are the Sign of Hell” is a perfect case study for exactly why “That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!” was plainly the misstep it was. The plot here is absolutely no less formulaic or predictable than it was in that episode, but it absolutely doesn’t matter. Kei and Yuri are dispatched to a planet whose government is embroiled in a thirty year war with a rebel faction that was on the verge of signing a peace treaty before a group of elite assassins showed up and started indiscriminately slaughtering the rebels, serving to escalate the war even further. The show wastes no time in letting us know what we’re in for, by the way, with the assassins, who the camera shoots essentially as horror movie monsters, showing up and gunning down an entire platoon of rebel soldiers in the *teaser*.…

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It might be worth taking a little time to look at the way Original Dirty Pair was first distributed to viewers. This is, of course, an OVA series: Far from the stigmatic connotations direct-to-video works have in the West, Japanese OVA programming is best seen as an early precursor to something more akin to Netflix Originals or Amazon Prime Studios-Shows that have a vocal and loyal enough audience worth catering to, but one that’s not big enough to justify trying to pitch the show to a major network. In addition, this would be the medium of choice for more unconventional, experimental works that would be hard to sell anywhere else.

The thing about OVA though is that, as the title might suggest, these were things released only on physical home video media, which meant you had to actually go out and buy each new release as it hit store shelves. In the case of Original Dirty Pair, the show was spread across five volumes of VHS and Laserdisc, each with two episodes each. Today’s episode, “That Little Girl Is Older Than Us. The Preservation Was a Success?!”, was released on what would have been volume four as a double bill with “Revenge of the Muscle Lady!”. The reason I bring this up is that, for the first time, Original Dirty Pair sort of feels like it’s treading water a bit here, and that’s something of a larger concern when we’re talking about an limited run OVA series with a sparse ten episodes as opposed to a major network television series that ran for a full season with an episode count pushing thirty and all the accompanying pressures, restrictions and obligations that go along with such a structure.

It’s not that this episode is bad, far from it: In fact, this is a perfect case study for how much progress has been made in the past four years. The TV series basically had two modes-Unbridled masterpiece and catastrophic misfire. There were a small handful of middling or mediocre episodes later on, but by in large this was the general model we were working under. Here though, every episode up ’till now has been absolutely magnificent and a contender for the franchise’s best work. But the downside of that is when we finally hit “functional”, “serviceable” and “watchable” it’s much more more noticeable and worrying than it would be in any other context. What we have this time is a bog-standard detective story in a light sci-fi setting: There’s an unsolved mass murder on a star liner culminating in a scientist putting his young daughter into cryogenic deep-freeze and sending her off in an escape pod. Madame Beryl was assigned to the case, but couldn’t solve it, and it goes cold for twenty years until Kei and Yuri stumble upon the girl’s escape pod while returning home after coming off on an unrelated investigation. Stuff happens, there’s some cute moments with Kei trying to bond with the kid and a shootout with the orchestrator of the original attack, who turns out to be the most predictable suspect imaginable.…

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The thematic framework Dirty Pair inherits from Japanese women’s professional wrestling cannot be overstated. The inherent and accepted performative artifice of puroresu is absolutely central to how Dirty Pair operates at a basic level, as is the genre’s target demographic. As an anime or manga, Dirty Pair is typically understood as seinen in the usual system of genre classification: This would be works specifically aimed at men between the ages of 18 and 40. Except…that can’t really be true, can it? In Japan, the original market for women’s professional wrestling was women themselves, and the wrestlers became icons to a generation of teenage female fans: Men were a periphery demographic. And so it is with Dirty Pair, which, while later appropriated and stolen by men (as men always do to things targeted towards women and have done throughout recorded history), certainly must be seen as a series written with an at least significantly female audience in mind.

Dirty Pair has done pro wrestling before, of course; There’s no way it couldn’t with its lineage. We have an entire chapter dedicated to Kei narrating a wrestling match in The Dirty Pair Strike Again, the girls being confused for wrestlers in “How to Kill a Computer” and participating in a sort of mock match themselves in “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette”, then fake fighting coded as a full-on worked shoot in “Hire Us! Beautiful Bodyguards are a Better Deal”. “The Chase Smells Like Cheesecake and Death” even featured actual wrestlers as major antagonists, Kei’s personal heroes Lan and Jerry, who were running an underground doping ring based around exploiting their brother’s developments in steroid research. This episode, “The Revenge of the Muscle Lady!”, plays out vaguely similarly, with an acquaintance of Kei and Yuri’s going rogue and getting involved in the trade of pharmaceutical muscle enhancements and the girls having to go in and sort things out.

But the major difference this time is that this is a story that doesn’t just evoke the trappings of pro wrestling as a nod to Dirty Pair’s heritage, it actually works entirely by the genre’s logic and storytelling conventions itself. The animosity between Sandra and the girls is quite explicitly a grudge match, especially the final confrontation in the rocket hangar bay, and the entire story is basically a wrestling angle. And what makes this story in particular unique and special is that it takes that style of narrative structure and blends it with subject matter more fitting Dirty Pair’s audience: Namely, young adult female fans of pro wrestling and science fiction (remember, this is Japan in 1988 so that demographic isn’t quite as strange as it probably sounds to a certain sort of Western audience). What we have here is a story that has its roots in school and relationship drama caricatured to puroreso levels.

In spite of the obvious steroid references, this is not a story about doping or drug use in sports, that’s largely just a framing device to get the girls to confront Sandra.…

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This is the moment where Original Dirty Pair finally lives up to its title.

“Are You Serious?! Shocked at the Beach, Wedding Panic!” is a very Yuri story. Structurally, it’s extremely reminiscent of the other big stories that have focused specifically on her as a character, namely “The Curse of the Backwoods Murder”, “Gotta Do It! Love is What Makes a Woman Explode” and “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in each of those past adventures, Yuri becomes entangled in a love story that plays out very much akin to stock or cliched Harlequin fare, with Kei becoming the third wheel. Part of Yuri really wants to just completely immerse herself in the romantic atmosphere of it all, because she does have an attraction to that sort of mushy stuff and wouldn’t necessarily mind living a quiet and charmed fairy tale life like that. This time, she falls in with the second son of a notorious mob family involved in a counterfeit operation the girls have been sent in to bust. She goes along with it mostly to keep up her undercover identity and gain access to the family’s printing room, but she pretty clearly has real feelings for the guy too.

In spite of being a deft Miami Vice style “you become your alter ego” sort of plot on top of things, this is largely the archetypical Yuri story. The reason why this is her signature plot is because the girls’ personalities and characterizations are drawn quite explicitly from astrological symbolism, and Yuri is a Piscean. Those born under this sign are said to be romantic dreamers who are infinitely fluid and malleable: They can reshape themselves into any number of different identities, but tend to be most drawn towards roles that allow them to be very expressive, such as art and dance. This makes sense because, if you recall, the Dirty Pair novels are all told from a first person perspective, namely Kei’s. This means Yuri isn’t technically a character, or rather it would be more accurate to say she’s a *diegetic* character and the only things we learn about her are what Kei cares to tell us. In that respect, Yuri really is an ephemeral, intangible being.

However the downside to all this is that Pisceans can get so wistful and so formless they can become totally detached from reality and become lost in their own fantasy worlds they imagine for themselves. And, like clockwork, in each and every one of the stories that has taken care to seriously engage with who Yuri is at a fundamental level, this is depicted as the greatest threat she faces. In “The Case of the Backwoods Murder”, she starts to dream about rekindling a relationship with her childhood friends Thunder and Lucha: Yuri can only view them through rose-tinted and distorted memories of her youth, and imagines running off with them as part of a inauthentic romanticized conception of simple country living.…

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If there was going to be an episode that caused me any manner of trepidation, it was going to be this one.

Dirty Pair has historically not been good when it comes to gambling or games. Any kind of games: Casino games, card games (unless the Bloody Card is involved), video games, the lot. Despite “Go Ahead, Fall in Love! Love is Russian Roulette” being an early highlight of the TV series, “The Vault or the Vote? A Murderous Day for a Speech”, which saddled Kei with a crippling gambling addiction basically for shits and giggles, gets *my* vote for quite possibly the single worst bit of filmed Dirty Pair ever made. Even the first chapter of “The Case of the Backwoods Murder” from The Great Adventure of the Dirty Pair bugs me a bit, because Takachiho seems to cluelessly conflate video arcade games with gambling, and as someone who has very fond memories of afternoons spent in such places and for whom video games as a medium became dreadfully important, it left something of a bad taste in my mouth. I know Japan has a much stronger tradition of linking arcades with gambling then the West does, such as in pachinko halls, for example, but it’s still not to my tastes. And of course, there was that terrible, terrible Famicom Disk System game from last year.

So I was a bit nervous to see the trailer for this episode prominently featuring the girls dressed to the nines in a casino, a deeply worried Gooley and Mughi dressed as what appears to be a pallet-swapped Mario. Thankfully, the episode itself turned out to be completely contrary to any expectations I might have had. It really is it’s own thing (indeed, this may well be the episode that codifies what the stylistic tone and general themes of the OVA series are), but if we were to compare it with one of the TV episodes, we wouldn’t liken it to either of the casino or gambling romps, but rather to “Something’s Amiss…?! Our Elegant Revenge”. As was the case in that story, “And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore” is actually about, at least in part, diegetically and extradiegetically underestimating Kei and Yuri. It leads us along thinking the girls (and in one scene, even Mughi) are going to go badly astray somewhere along the line, building to some embarrassing failure and then just…doesn’t. And, I have to sheepishly admit, I fell for it.

Most of the plot for “And So, Nobody’s Doing It Anymore” is essentially window dressing for its central joke, but there is a point to the to the high-rolling casino trappings. There are two main threads to unpack here, one of which flags the story’s ultimate resolution and one of which involves the fact Meteo is a game that’s built to be rigged and built to get people addicted. The casino can control where the asteroids land, and thus determine the winner game to game based on their video surveillance of the bets people are placing.…

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Kids are horrible.

One lingering consequence, among many, of the damagingly retrograde social norms of the Victorian age has been an idealization and objectification of children. Drawing on sources as seemingly disparate as the scripture of the New Testament and Rosseau’s notions of the blank slate and social contract, the Victorians reconceptualized childhood (some would say invented and defined it) as a time when human beings are inherently good and innocent, free from the poisonous influence of cynical adult society. What this does, of course, is only facilitate the oppression of children and the removal of their agency, because “The Children” in the monolithic general must be looked after, sheltered and protected. It’s another manifestation of what Lee Edleman calls reproductive futurism, an oppressive ideology where one is shamed out of political agency out of respect for idealized future children.

This project itself is not immune to this reading. I’ve several times used the word “childlike wonder”, though not in ignorance of what I was saying, I might add, and I certainly do have a fixation on children’s literature and people who place heavy emphasis on children’s perspectives, such as Steven Spielberg and Hayao Miyazaki. But when I use phrases such as “childlike wonder”, I try to do so with the conceit that such a state of mind would really just be a variety of idealism and cosmic wonder that might come more easily to children than to distracted adults. And the very best children’s literature, in my view, does the exact opposite of sheltering children and forcing them to remain apolitical: It listens to them and gives them an outlet to form their voices and positionalities, and in doing so it helps them grow into better people. That need for respect and dignity in narrative is not limited to children, even if it’s the sort of thing that, for whatever reason, is thought of as strange to afford anyone but children.

Youth and maturity come in different forms and have many different meanings and contextual associations. As I’ve argued before, I’m of the opinion a perspective to strive for in life is a delicate mixture of the two elements: Youthful energy, spirit, drive and idealism with experience, maturity and wisdom. Star Trek: The Next Generation seems to be shaping up to be this sort of thing with the restless, yet worldly, sense of adventure that permeates the show’s worldview. And this is what Kei and Yuri, our evergreen seishun heroines, stand for as well. But here also I’d like to draw a distinction between childlike and childish: This is what the girls are up against in this episode, and they make it perfectly clear their intent is to dispel any outdated myths about the intrinsic goodness of children. Obviously, Kei and Yuri would be against reproductive futurism: Their affinity with Missinie in Affair of Nolandia notwithstanding, kids have not been especially kind to the Lovely Angels over the years, and the implicit shaming that accompanies reproductive futurism is something that affects women in particular.…

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If a god is in truth the idea of a god, what does it look like when gods fight?

“We’re Not Afraid of Divine Judgment. It’s Like Magic?!” opens up seeming like it’s going to be a cross between the Dirty Pair novels and, of all things, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!. The girls arrive incognito on an agricultural planet that’s been subject to a number of mysterious unsolved murders. An extremely religious culture, the settlers on this planet all swear fealty to a massive church that dictates their social, spiritual and material lives. It’s the belief of the local police that it’s the planet’s God itself that’s responsible for the killings, though they see it more as “divine retribution” than murder. But Kei and Yuri suspect something else is up, so they sneak in undercover to investigate. The design of the planet is definitely a memorable one, featuring a mix of pastoral farming scenes and twisted, nightmarish imagery straight out of a horror movie, Original Dirty Pair upping the ante with futuristic space ravens and blood red, almost volcanic skies, befitting the tone of the story.

It at first seems as if the show is building to the reveal of an implausibly massive Scooby-Doo hoax gambit: We get early confirmation this “God” is a “new” one, far more stringent and judgmental than the old one and, while there are a series of awe-inspiringly grotesque scenes of God’s supposed furor, Kei and Yuri swiftly reveal them to be part of an elabourate, yet mundane (albeit futuristic) technological smoke-and-mirrors trick. But it’s then that this episode gets *really* good, because, as the Lovely Angels face down *God himself* and declare to a giant space church full of parishioners that all of his miracles were the work of sophisticated technoscience, God blindsides us all with the confession that yes, obviously everything he does is thanks to science. But what does it matter? He is, so he claims, the “One True God”. The God of Science. Someone who has “cast off” his “mortal bonds” to become a Divine Machine. In other words, this God is the God of Scientism and technofetishistic positivist atheism. This is the God of the Church of the Singularity.

What this story becomes then is one of gods in conflict with one another: Kei and Yuri are up against an opponent who is genuinely playing on their level. The God in this episode bears some resemblance to both Criados from the TV series episode “Criados’ Heartbeat” and The Master from The Dirty Pair Strike Again: Like Criados, he’s an explicitly transhuman character who has attained both his trashuman status and his spiritual enlightenment through experimenting with technology, but while Criados went mad from the process, this person decided his enlightenment gave him the right to start a religion around himself. Much like The Master, he designed and built an entire hierarchical church structure with himself at the centre, although unlike The Master he decided he was both God’s Chosen and God Himself.…

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It’s understandable that Kei and Yuri wouldn’t know what Halloween is. It’s a holiday that’s only come to Japan comparatively recently in its history, mostly through osmosis of Western pop culture, and there isn’t really a Shinto, Buddhist or Hindu analog. And as such, the titular Halloween party of “No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party” is strobing, neon excess of a festival, a gloriously and beautifully Long 1980s commentary on the corporate-state forces that turn holidays into celebrations of capitalism and consumerism. Indeed, this is what Halloween is now, which makes this episode probably more relevant today than it was in 1987.

But this, like so much about Dirty Pair, is conveyed strictly through mood, atmosphere and visual symbolism. The look of this episode in general is *phenomenal*, and I could, as usual, spend an entire essay gushing about that. The animation and background work already elevated to a new level from the previous show, this is the moment where Dirty Pair finally starts to look like the Long 1980s I remember. Not that the older animes looked bad by any stretch of the imagination, but this one stirs a very specific set of emotions within me. And in spite of this outsider critique and the girls’ unfamiliarity with the night, “No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party” ends up resonating with much deeper and more fundamental truths. This isn’t simply the greatest Halloween special ever, this is a story that glows with an innate understanding of ritual, associative symbolic power, allegory and synchromysticism. And on top of that, it’s a masterpiece.

There’s a wryly knowing tone set right from the start: There’s a musical cue that plays over the title card that sounds for all the world like the Jimmy Hart version of the famous theme song to the *movie* Halloween. Both it and the CRT Jack-o-Lantern, complete with scanlines, that becomes a minor reoccurring motif even feels like they’ve been plucked from the opening to Halloween III: Season of the Witch (a movie that was, in part, about returning Halloween to its Celtic roots as a rejection of its commercialization, which is maybe fun to think about). And while the Tactical Robot the girls are chasing in this episode is clearly supposed to be a skeleton, it also *looks* a heck of a lot like the T-800 from The Terminator, which also means “No Thanks! No Need For a Halloween Party” is a considerably better Terminator pastiche than the *actual* Dirty Pair Terminator pastiche was: The Robot never stops running and is seemingly invincible (up until the climax, of course), but Kei and Yuri just find that annoying instead of terrifying.

There’s also the various criminal gangs the girls end up (completely accidentally and incidentally) taking down in their pursuit of the Tactical Robot, all of whom are in disguises themed after various fairy tales and children’s literature: There’s a Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, an Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, a gang that seems to have a pulp sci-fi theme and (much to my delight) an Alice in Wonderland.…

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The Starshine is bright and warm wherever Angels tread.

If there was ever a year where Dirty Pair could be said to have been at the peak of its pop culture saturation, 1987 was it. High on the success of Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture (which got its own Famicom Disk System game), Haruka Takachiho’s perfectly timed third novel Dirty Pair’s Rough and Tumble, a slew of tie-in merchandise and the premier of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Kei and Yuri were by now most definitely in the public eye on a scale they’d never been before. But in many ways the franchise’s true home, or at least the home of the Sunrise anime branch of the series, can be said to be OVA. And it’s here where the Lovely Angels got a second wind with an entirely new episodic series following in the footsteps of the cult hit Dirty Pair television show from 1985. This series is officially just called Dirty Pair, but is usually afforded the subtitle “The OVA Series” by fans and critics to differentiate it from its predecessor. More infrequently, it’s also known as Original Dirty Pair, a nod to Sunrise’s belief that this show is closer to the original light novels than the other anime adaptations.

Regardless of what you call it, Sunrise released a series of ten brand-new episodes between December, 1987 and March, 1988. This was an extremely wise move on Sunrise’s part in my opinion: One thing I feel severely damaged the ultimate efficacy of the Dirty Pair TV series was that it struggled to maintain its early momentum as the season wore on. It seemed like the show was dealing with too large of an episode count and the ideas started to wear thin after some time. It’s a perfect example of why I think all TV shows need to have about a third fewer episodes per season, with an ideal of about 10-13. This allows the creative team to focus on one a handful of really solid stories at a time, and means they’re not rushed to throw something out to meet a pre-existing quota. And Original Dirty Pair definitely hits the short end of that spectrum. Combine this with the fact that the OVA medium allows for far more creative freedom just in general as OVAs are not at the beck and call of networks, ratings and broadcast schedules, and we have the potential here for an incredibly fine-tuned and honed sort of Dirty Pair anime.

So what’s new this time? Well, like all iterations of Dirty Pair, this series of course exists in its own continuity strictly distinct and separate from anything that came before or after. Stylistically, this manifests in the Lovely Angel looking like a cross between its Affair of Nolandia and Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture incarnations. The girls’ uniforms similarly resemble most closely the ones they wore in Dirty Pair: The Motion Picture, but are all white, reminiscent of the all-silver wrestling outfits they wear in the books.…

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