Dirty Pair TV: Good Stuff
When RightStuf announced their two Dirty Pair TV series box sets I pre-ordered mine pretty much that day. Â The first one arrived recently, and I just got around to watching a bit. Man is that a fun show. When you see an action show with a date like 1985 on the box, you might expect something with less of the polished, frenetic spectacle of high-energy modern shows. You would be sorely mistaken in this case.
Seriously, the first episode starts off with zero backstory or lead-in—it hits the ground running at full speed, and does not stop until the credits roll. In terms of frantic, end-to-end, to-the-limit, extreme action, I would put that 25 minutes up against just about any episode, of any show, of any era, in any medium. Nor does it disappoint in the epic-scale collateral damage that earned the Dirty Pair their name, although only a little bit of it is their fault. Forget xXx—these girls were doing that stuff when Vin Diesel was still in high school.
Being a general fan of light, frantic, extreme action, I’ll close by quoting the immortal words of the Outpost.com spokesman: That’s good stuff.
November 17th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
I read somewhere that they released it subtitled-only. A shame. They dubbed the “Dirty Pair” OAVs into English. I was hoping they’d do the same with the original TV episodes. They dubbed the original “Mobile Suit Gundam” into English,and that was from 1979. Why couldn’t they do the same with the “Dirty Pair” tv series?
December 28th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
“Why couldn’t they do the same with the “Dirty Pair†TV series?”
To dub a series into another language, the tracks that carry the voices have to be separate from the ones that carry the background music and sound effects. The “music-and-effects” tracks for the TV series and the OVA series appear to have been lost in an archive fire at Sunrise around the mid-90s, to judge from the available evidence (French and Italian dubs of DP exist from the end of the ’80s to early ’90s, but the tracks were not available by ’98 when ADV was seeking the license; other Sunrise series from the ’80s have a similar problem).
ADV accomplished their English dub of the OVA series by creating a completely new background for those ten episodes (that’s why they don’t match the tracks in Japanese). Unless someone is willing to spend the money to make new background tracks for the 26 episodes of the TV series plus “From Lovely Angels with Love”, we will have to be satisfied with “sub-only”.
New re-mastered Japanese releases, such as the boxed set from 2006, can be released indefinitely into the future, since they don’t need to have the voices and music isolated from one another.
January 2nd, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Well, that’s certainly interesting, and not something I knew. Doesn’t make a dub impossible, of course, just proportionately more expensive, and I’m doubtful RightStuf would’ve been able to economically justify a dub of Dirty Pair (being from the ’80s) anyway, but the lack of a clean soundtrack master makes it that much less likely. (You do have to wonder if, since there are older dubs, some French or Italian company doesn’t have some 2nd generation masters laying around in a vault somewhere.)
An aside, this series continues to be pure, unadulterated awesome. It’s somewhat baffling that it didn’t make it to the US until now.