Anime Review: Dirty Pair (1985)

This... is not the best of the two.

I was paging through some older reviews on this blog, and I noticed something: I've reviewed everything related to the Dirty Pair anime... except for the TV series. I should rectify that and finish it off. Not sure why I didn't review this back then, but whatever.  So let's turn back the clock to 1985!

Spoilers after the jump? Yeah, sure, why not?




Dirty Pair, as longtime followers of this blog know, is one of my all-time favorite anime, checking in just under A Certain Scientific Railgun on my top anime list. And as I mentioned before, the only thing I haven't reviewed is the 1985 TV series.  I don't even have an excuse, since I have it on DVD.  That said, I still enjoyed watching this show again. Allow me to give you some background on the show.


Dirty Pair follows the antics of Kei and Yuri, 2 young and attractive Trouble Consultants for the World Welfare Work Association, or 3WA for short, their pet cat-dog-thing Mughi, and their helper robot Nanmo.  The series showcases 25 different cases, which makes this a very episodic series, and is very loosely based on the 1970s novels. Emphasis on "loosely".  In fact, the only connection the anime has with the novels is Kei, Yuri, and Mughi! Even Nanmo was an anime-original character.

With all this in mind, the show itself screams "1980s". The outfits Kei and Yuri wear, some of the dialogue, Kei's hairstyle, the soundtrack. All of it is extremely '80s and I love it for that. It does not try to hide its age or its mild camp. It presents itself with no surprises.

As mentioned earlier, the show is quite episodic, and that hurts it a bit in the pacing department. Literally 2 of the episodes are actually directly connected, with the rest being individual stories. At the same time, this lets a viewer sit down, pick an episode, and watch it, and know exactly what's going on at any given point. Being an episodic series is both a blessing and a curse for this series.


Scores:

Writing: 3.5/5 (very campy)
Characters: 4/5 (also extremely campy, I <3 2.5="" br="" episodic="" kei="" pacing:="" series=""> Value: 3.5/5 (Part One box set comes with 13 episodes for $30)

Overall: 3.4/5
It's a series that's fun to watch once in a while.


Thanks for reading my review! Check out more recent reviews here and here, and see my analysis of Kei and Yuri here!