THE GREAT “SUPER DIMENSIONAL STRAGGLERS” WATCH 2 – RALL II

SUPER DIMENSION LEGEND RALL II – LAMOU-LU’S COUNTERATTACK (Cream Lemon Part 15)

ICONIC SCENE: Kallon takes a bath

RELEASE DATE: December 5, 1986

1. The “Rall” episode of Cream Lemon came out in early December 1984. After that came plenty of other stories under the Cream Lemon umbrella, but they’d also started making sequels to especially popular titles (primarily the “Ami” and “Escalation” stories). Two years after Rall, they decided to revisit it for a sequel, and gave it a most unimaginative title.

2. The plot is even less consequential than in the previous one: it’s three years later, and it appears that Lamou-Lu is returning. This time, his plan is to possess everyone in the village where Princess Kallon lives (?), starting with the princess’s decoy from last time (here called “Yuria.” I don’t recall if she had a name before). With the help of a shrine maiden, an ancient amulet, a magic mirror, a flying horse, and the magic sword “Reverse,” Kallon and her friends cure the villagers and stop Lamou-Lu, who incarnates here as a giant insect.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, really. And I’d say that the plot isn’t the point, the naked anime girls are… except that, for a 20-minute film, this is VERY heavily-plotted. Just the amount of magical items they collect is more than in most 1500-page epic fantasy trilogies.

3. Clearly, a lot of work went into this in the design stage: the returning characters are aged-up convincingly. This had the added bonus of making this one much less icky (for me) to watch, since they no longer looked like lolis.

4. It also doesn’t use “naughty tentacles” at all, so the scene where Kallon gets raped by a possessed villager is much less explicit than the equivalent scene in the earlier OVA. The animation itself is equally cheap in both films. I would say that this one definitely has a more ambitious plot, but it also has less backstory, so on THAT level, I think, again, they even out. But again, very few people watch Cream Lemon for the plot. If your goal is to see Kallon naked, I think either movie is fine.

5. Still, I have to give it credit: most sequels just rehash the original. Here, the original was a lolicon porn anime and THE FIRST in the “naughty tentacle” genre, and I’d imagine that for the audience when it came out, those were the two most notable points about it. The sequel has no lolis and no tentacles, and thus seems like it would alienate the people most eager to see it. I have no idea if it did or not, but I kind of admire it for leaning into the convoluted fantasy world rather than upping the lolis-molested-by-tentacles quotient. It’s still not worth watching, and it still has nothing “Super Dimensional” or “SF” about it, but it veers in a different direction than would be expected, and that in itself is kind of interesting.

THE GREAT “SUPER DIMENSIONAL STRAGGLERS” WATCH 1 – RALL

SF SUPER DIMENSIONAL LEGEND RALL (Cream Lemon Part 3)

ICONIC SCENE: Kallon attacks!

RELEASE DATE: December 3, 1984

1. So by the end of September 1984, the “Super Dimension Series,” Mainichi Broadcasting System’s attempt to carve out a place for anime on Sunday afternoons, was finished. “Super Dimension Century Orguss Memorial” was still a year away, “Super Dimension Fortress Macross Flashback 2012” was two and a half years in the future, “Super Dimension Fortress Macross II ~LOVERS AGAIN~” was eight, “Super Dimension Century Orguss 02” was nine. At this point, the title was essentially dead.

But, just two months after Southern Cross ended, another “Super Dimension” title was released, although not an official one, and indeed, it used a different word for “Dimension” (“jigen” 次元 instead of “jikuu” 時空). But, the title still means “Super Dimension,” so into the rewatch pot it goes (although it’s not technically a REwatch, because I’ve never watched it before).

It’s part of the “Cream Lemon” series…

2. Cream Lemon, of course, is a rather infamous title that’s notable for being a very early OVA series (though not the first) as well as being a very early pornographic OVA series (though also not the first). So it’s not exactly THE pioneer, but it’s probably the longest-running series of its type, if we include follow-ups, sequels, and spin-offs, although the first series only ran for a little over two years and sixteen episodes.

In some ways, I think the first Cream Lemon videos (most of which are stand-alone stories, although there are a couple of series) are much tamer than the stuff you’d find nowadays, but they still can be pretty explicit. Some of the episodes are well-regarded as more than just cheap, shoddily-animated sex scenes.

Rall is not one of those.

3. There’s not much of a story to synopsize: when the four moons over the fantasy kingdom of Rall come in alignment, the evil sorcerer Lamou-lu will rise and try to take it over. The only thing that can stop him is a magic sword, named “Reverse,” wielded by Rallian royalty.

As the story starts, the princess of Rall has been captured and is being molested by Lamou-lu. Then we meet our heroine, Kallon (played, without credit, by Sanae Miyuki (previously known as Miyuki Muroi), who also played Shammy in Macross and Mome in Orguss), who gets attacked by Lamou-lu’s soldiers, because he’s capturing as many girls of Rall as he can (you see, he and his soldiers gain power from lapping up vaginal fluid).

She gets away, but goes to save the princess, briefly aided by a knight (voiced, also without credit, by Nobuo Tomita, probably best-known as Kamille in Zeta Gundam). She of course gets captured, stripped, and molested by Lamou-lu, but then fights back and it turns out that the person who everyone THOUGHT was the princess is a decoy, and Kallon is the real princess. So she defeats Lamou-lu and frees all the girls.

4. Now, you may be thinking, “Gosh, for a film called SF Super Dimension Legend Rall, there doesn’t seem to be much science fiction, nor anything that would connect it to any of the Super Dimension shows, either in themes or in design.” And if you are thinking that, then you and I are thinking the same thing. There apparently are some science fiction Cream Lemon episodes, so I have no idea why this one gets the heavy-handed title. I guess, early on in the series, they just wanted to distinguish it from the slice-of-life dramas that the first two episodes had been.

5. So yeah, not very good, not really worth watching, but it has “Super Dimension” in the title, so I watched it.

That said, it had a MAJOR impact on anime pornography: this was apparently THE FIRST anime to feature “naughty tentacles” as penis substitutes, and thus was the film that the Eirin Film Classification and Rating Organization had to deliberate over, and on which they finally decided that since penis-like appendages are not actually human phalluses, they didn’t need to be censored. So without Rall, an entire genre (and fetish) would never have come into being.

Yay…?