released 28 feb 04 / last mod 01 jun 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* At the beginning of MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO, the evil Jovian Lizards invade Mars and wipe out the human colony on the planet. Now the Lizards press their attacks on Earth -- and Earth is forced to rely on their last hope of salvation, the space battleship NADESICO, built by Nergal Corporation and manned by a civilian crew.
The crew is a gang of eccentrics and misfits. The captain is Yurika, a young lady who combines the tactical skills of a military genius with the personality of a dippy romantic teenager. She has eyes for Akito, who really wants to be a cook but always ends up dragooned into becoming an ace mecha pilot. Yurika keeps insisting that Akito is mad about her, managing to twist everything he says or does -- even when he threatens to kill her -- into this fantasy.
That captures the tone of MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO: it's a slapstick parody of mecha anime series such as SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO, MACROSS, and GUNDAM. I had initially been reluctant to try the series out, since anime humor tends to be weak more often than not, but I rented MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO THE MOVIE and found it nicely produced, though it suffered from an incomprehensible plot, assuming there was actually a plot there. Reviewers suggested the series was much better scripted than the movie and a laugh riot, so I decided to check it out.
Actually, what I found after going through the four episodes on this DVD was that the series had production values much closer to the norm for anime, and though the plot could actually be followed ... well, it's not all that funny, the style being: "Everyone acts like idiots and runs around a lot." I would rank its scripting as about comparable to the old Hanna-Barbara cartoons -- OK, maybe a bit better, though the Hanna-Barbara stuff did have its moments -- but certainly not in the same league as the old Jay Ward-Bill Scott stuff or Looney Tunes. I might have chuckled here and there but I never laughed out loud.
MARTIAN SUCCESSOR NADESICO seems to have been targeted at a junior-high audience who really likes anime and is familiar with the gimmicks of anime series. I think it would work very well with that audience. I don't think it's of much interest to older audiences, and it would certainly be of no interest to somebody who wasn't an anime fan. Possibly the later volumes work better, but after going through this one I am not all that inclined to find out.