About.com Rating
The Bottom Line
The second half of the show that all but codified "girls with guns" for anime is just as much fun at the first, with no end of outlandish mishaps and near-impossible missions for the Lovely Angels (or "Dirty Pair") to get enmeshed in. The booklet of discussions with the creator is a nice extra, too.
Pros
- A fun mix of both action and comedy tropes.
Cons
- Its relative age (it's a 1980s series) might be a turn-off.
Description
- Director: Toshifumi Takizawa
- Animation Studios: Sunrise
- Released By: Bandai Channel
- Released Domestically By: Nozomi Entertainment / Right Stuf International
- Audio: Japanese w/English subtitles
- Age Rating: 13+
- List Price: $49.99
- Anime Genres:
- Comedy
- Drama
- Action
- Seinen
- Sci-fi
- Related Titles:
Guide Review - Dirty Pair - The Original TV Series Part Two
The second half of The Dirty Pair TV series delivers all the goods of the first: raucous physical comedy, slam-bang action, and two of the best (anti-)heroines in all of anime. The only thing more fun than watching them screw up is watching them not screw up—despite the damage bill it usually involves.
As with the first part of the show, the episodes are mostly self-contained adventures where spacefaring troubleshooters Kei and Yuri (the “Dirty Pair” of the title) are sent to investigate some problem by their long-suffering boss Gooley. Sometimes, much to their annoyance, it means being yanked off vacation; sometimes it means accepting assignments so insane no one else would touch them; and most of the time it means leaving behind a mess even bigger than the one they came into clean up.
What’s more, none of these hijinks ever plays out straight—they all take bizarre right-angle turns along the way. In one of the early episodes in the set, the Angels are drafted in to find out who destroyed a statue, one which a young man has been using as a substitute girlfriend. Kei and Yuri take this as a challenge: since they’re the ones responsible for trashing the statue in the first place, they set out to get him hitched and forget about that piece of plaster. Turns out he has a very good reason for having an inanimate girlfriend: it’s because his body chemistry goes bonkers when a woman gets too close to him. And there’s even more on top of that, but you get the idea.
A few other things stand out in the second half. Yuri, the normally demure half of the team, jas a few episodes where she takes charge—e.g., when she destroys an indoor shooting gallery with her own all-too-real gun (there’s an assassin after them). Even her more conventional work in a supporting position has more meat to it this time around, as when she befriends a young computer hacker and tries to determine whether or not he masterminded a hijacking that might have included his own sister.
The series ends with a climax of sorts, where the Angels have to save Gooley from the machinations of one of his own underlings and run the risk of blowing up most of the planet in the process. But because the series hasn’t followed any particular overall plot, it’s a fairly arbitrary way of making things go out with a bang; the teaser for the final episode leads directly into the OAVs that were released shortly afterwards. Still, the show never lacks for laughs or action. Also, keep your finger on the pause button: there's an amazing number of visual in-jokes to be found throughout the show.
This set also includes a booklet with some bonus material: a 1993 essay by Dirty Pair creator Haruka Takachiho; a 2010 interview with Takachiho, where he responds to questions sent in by fans at Right Stuf’s website; and a tribute to the late Carl Macek, who helped bring the Dirty Pair OAVs into English.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.