Anime Profile: Outlanders

Out of nowhere, a feet of giant spaceships suddenly appear in Earth's atmosphere, and they don't seem very nice! In fact, they seem down right nasty as they appear to be hell bent on eradicating every human on the planet. The military scrambles to defend their home world, but they are no match for the alien technology which crushes their vehicles like insects. But then something odd happens... one of the aliens actually leaves the safety of the ship and comes down to the planet, landing nearby Tetsuya, a hapless photographer. All he can do snap pictures while he witnesses the beautiful green-haired Princess Kahm, dressed in some sort of weird armored bikini, brutally slice and dice a bunch of soldiers with her sword. Once they're out of the picture, she turns her attention to the timid Tetsuya.

Tetsuya can do nothing as he sees her toss aside the bodiless head of her most recent victim and start walking towards him. But then, just as she strikes, he stumbles and blocks with his camera, causing the flash to go off and momentarily blinding our lovely princess. Tetsuya sees this as his one chance to strike, and lunges toward her... which lands them both in an up close and personal embrace, where Tetsuya is unintentionally treated to a crystal clear view of Kahm's cleavage. Kahm, who can literally feel Tetsuya's excitement at what he's seeing, takes it upon herself to stop trying to kill him. Instead, she leans in and gives him a nice kiss... just before bonking him on the head to knock him out.

Tetsuya awakes on her ship, surrounded by some short, strange-looking green creatures who help to fill him in on what's going on. Apparently, he is now Kahm's fiancé! Needless to say, Tetsuya is shocked, and so he takes one of the little green fellows hostage and demands to be taken back to Earth. So Kahm has to cut her bath short in order to come deal with the situation, and this is where Tetsuya learns another astonishing fact... her father fully intends to kill every human alive, and the only way to prevent this is for Kahm to actually marry one of them! Upon learning this tiny little detail, Tetsuya calms down and accepts Kahm as his new fiancé.

Of course, the show isn't over yet! First Princess Kahm's best friend, Battia, drops in and picks on her for wanting to marry such a loser, and so they end up having a friendly little sword battle over it. Then Fleet Commander Progress stops by to get the Princess for an audience with her father, since she is already set to marry someone that he picked out. And then good old beast-man Geobaldi says hi by gently nudging his ship into the top of Kahm's. And so with all but one of the major players introduced, it's now time to go meet daddy!

Daddy, also known as the Emperor, has already picked out a fiancé for his daughter, so when he learns of Tetsuya, he orders him to be executed! Poor Tetsuya! If Princess Kahm is going to have any chance of choose her own fate and marrying Tetsuya, she's gonna need some help from friends in order to rescue her groom and escape from her father with enough time to elope and consancrate the marrige. Now, somewhere in here there is some kind of fancy space maneuver which helps them to escape, though I really couldn't tell you what it is because they kind of didn't tell us!

In fact, this show seems to have a habit of skipping over so major details and plot points. Why? Because they're trying to cram an entire manga series into only 48 minutes, which is really too bad because this was enjoyable enough to warrant more. At the very least I think it could have benefited from being a three episode OVA series. Do you hear me out there?! Fourty-eight minutes is not enough! Go remake this into a longer series right now!

This 20th Anniversary Edition released by Central Park Media has been completely re-dubbed from the previous Dark Image Entertainment release. And what's more, the English voice actors were chosen by fans. Auditions were posted on the internet, and fans voted on who they wanted. This could have easily gone very, very wrong, but luckily for us all it seemed to work pretty good.

I noticed that the dialog for the dubbed version doesn't always match that of the Japanese dialog, and I'm not just talking about little things like slang or needing to reword something so that it can fit with the lip movements. I'm referring to some major differences, such as the English version saying it was just a coincidence that both Kahm and Tetsuya spoke the same language, while in the Japanese version it's implied that they can understand each other because Kahm kissed Tetsuya.

Also, there are some other points in the dub where dialog was added where none existed originally. This new dialog mostly seemed to be little jokes, and although some of them would occasionally bring about a chuckle, I think they actually changed the intended mood of the scene, and would have rather had the original mood than a slight chuckle.

The extra features on the DVD include a short featurette about selection the English voice actors, and many, many previews for other releases. I watched all of these, and really enjoyed most of them. They got me excited to see some of these releases that I had never even heard of, such as Otaku Unite and a second installment of Animation Runner Kuromi. I just can't wait to see those! Otaku Unite releases on March 7, and Animation Runner Kuromi 2 will be released on May 9, 2006... why so long?!