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Back in the day, Central Park Media licensed an anime
called Minna Agechau (1987), a
softcore comedy, only for the 1991 release to be cancelled. The story has
developed Chinese whispers around it, but it can be summed up as thus: CPM licensed the title, promoted it with
their future habit of playing to anime's mature side, as they released Urotsukidôji in the USA, and whilst
there were mainstream media on this "smutty cartoon", such as L.A. Times on 29th August 1991
publishing Japan’s Latest Export: Soft-
Core Cartoon1, and a pair of (cardboard) panties promised to be
included2, the issue was as much its licensor Sony wanting to not present a terrible image in the United States.
Back home, when this was a tie-in to a nineteen volume manga, which got a 1985
live action film by Shusuke Kaneko,
future Gamera: Guardian of the Universe
(1995) director, Sony would have
probably not cared, but they hastily intervened and prevented the release3.
For the cost of this, CPM did however
get a title licensed to them for free: Dog
Soldier.
The titular dog soldier is John
Kyosuke Hiba, a Rambo stand-in who,
at work at a construction, is a former soldier pulled back into combat when a
fire fight transpires. It also brings back into his life Cathy, a girl he grew
up with in the slums of L.A., part of a ridiculous melodrama that is tied into
a very badly regarded anime. Only over forty plus minutes long, Dog Soldier is ridiculous cheese of the
highest order where, with his friend and fellow ex-soldier Fudoh, John is
brought into a conspiracy where the McGuffin is an AIDs vaccine, absolutely of
its time and the one cringe worthy detail. It is eyed by Phantom, the up and
coming death merchant whose desire to sell it for biological warfare to the
highest bigger is contrasted by being Makato, the childhood friend of John and
Cathy who went the extreme path as an illegal arms dealer after living in the
slums of L.A. with them.
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Considering the author of the
manga Tetsuya Saruwatari penned Riki-Oh, where the 1991 Hong Kong live
action adaptation is entirely faithful to the source but barely covers a longer
work which gets weirder, you would expect Dog
Soldier to be ridiculous. With "grenades strapped to bunnies" one
thing I can confirm about the manga4, Dog Soldier the anime is however its own separate thing, part of a
legacy of "lame anime" poorly regarded for its clichés and being
silly. It is appreciated by someone like others like me in that, despite its
dry clichéd plot, its goofball touches make it entertaining, like the abrupt Cup Noodles reference, or when meeting
Cathy in a baseball stadium, John decides to pitch slide on their first meeting
as adults like a dork. The one thing, as mentioned, of the era is that the
McGuffin is an AIDs vaccine, which reflect the era, where stigma and
unscientific fear and lack of knowledge was there, this a historical footnote
worth using to point this out from the ignorance shown. It is not a great work
from Shou Aikawa, who whilst known
for infamous titles like Urotsukidôji
was also to become a much more well regarded screenwriter, making this one of
those embarrassing earlier scripts for touches like this. Not wanting to be too
tasteless, and I apologise ahead if this is for some, not only would it be the
least practical choice as a biological weapon in the first place, but barring
the taboo the name evokes, you could replace this with something also trivialised
in pop culture, like Ebola, and the McGuffin is entirely a prop which needs to
exist but has no direct connection to the production. It is merely the nod to
the period there which shows the ignorance from the anime production team.
Also crammed in, for a work only
forty plus minutes long, is the amount of back-story of drama which is po-faced
in seriousness even if very silly. It is macho melodrama, where one can
monologue about their back-story even when there is a knife in the brain, and
Cathy's divide in loving Makoto, who is manipulating her, and to John is pure
soap opera, leading to the least scientifically logical knife battle in terms
of distance and space travelled. The end song, out of place lyrically, is yet
perversely apt, a tale with the possibly un-pc English translation name, from Okujou no SISSY, of "Sissy on the
Rooftop", which is about a teen contemplating jumping off the school roof
with lines like "My heart is strangled in my school bag". Dog Soldier is too short and over the
top to hate, a quirky oddity from the past whose infamy thankfully keeps it
alive despite never returning past the VHS era. Its connection to Minna Agechau is the pink panty wearing
cherry on top of this curiosity, tying the pair in a curious history and as an
unconventional double bill. Dog Soldier
is ridiculous, without a doubt, not great artistically but the story is too
goofy to hate it but within the OVA and in how the United States got it in the
first place.
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1) Japan’s
Latest Export: Soft- Core Cartoon : * Video: Adult-oriented animated erotica, a
billion-dollar business in Japan, tries to shed its cult image in the U.S. Some
predict American resistance. Written
by Chuck Philips for the Los Angeles Times and published August
29th 1991.
2) All
About 'I Give My All', written by Mike
Toole, and published by the Anime News Network on September 17th 2017.
3) Minna
Agechau's trivia page on Anime
News Network.
4) Example from the manga of this
transpiring.