THE GREAT ORGUSS REWATCH 38 – Super Dimension Athena

SUPER DIMENSION CENTURY ORGUSS
MEMORIAL VOL. 2: Super Dimension Athena

ICONIC SCENE: She’s super-dimensional!

RELEASE DATE: May 28, 1985

This one starts off similarly to Volume 1. There, Mome explained the multi-dimensional Earth. Here, the narrator explains the Singularity Points and how they have to get to the Big Singularity Point.

Then we flash back to Kei and Tina together from the beginning of Episode 1, followed by one of the scenes with Athena as a little girl. Then we get to the “present,” with Kei and Athena fighting and entering one of the dimensional rifts (from Episode 19). Instead of sending them back to World War II, however, Athena finds herself alone on a beach (from Episode 26). Olson (or an illusion of him, I guess) shows up and tells her that Kei is her father.

Again, this is all kinda weird. The Memorial volumes absolutely do not suffice as independent works, divorced from the series. There’s A LOT from the series that you have to know already in order for these to make sense. However, there’s a fair amount of scenes that are rewritten in order to smooth the transitions. It’s like the staff did all they could to make the Memorials films that new viewers could watch and understand, but given time (and presumably budget) constraints, they couldn’t QUITE achieve that. I mean, if you remove the “next episode previews,” the two Memorial volumes together add up to a bit over eighty minutes. The original Mobile Suit Gundam (which, at forty-three episodes, isn’t THAT much longer than Orguss) needed three two-hour-and-twenty minute movies to trim the fat but still tell the story coherently.

The Memorial staff also adds in a new way to transition to new scenes, by adding a shutter snap. This becomes almost Evangelion-esque before the “commercial break,” as a few dozen “snapshot” scenes go by in quick succession, with the film getting more overexposed with each shot. It’s a small thing, but I always like stuff like this, because it shows that the editors cared about the project. It’s extra work, and no one would’ve known the difference if it weren’t there. It’s a small bit of added value for anyone who watches the Memorials.

After the “commercial break,” this volume stops being primarily about Athena and becomes a cut-down version of the last two episodes. For pure storytelling, it’s the most effective portion of either Memorial. And there’s one massive cut that, for personal reasons, I’m glad they did: at the end, when Kei and Olson finally reach the Big Singularity Point, all of the stuff about them meeting their younger selves is cut. They leave the Space Elevator, they arrive at the Big Singularity Point, and then the dimensions separate and we see all the alternate worlds that I talked about at great length a couple of posts ago. I know it wasn’t meant to be viewed like this, but the fact that I saw the TV series AFTER the Memorials (about fifteen years after, in fact), meant that the surprise of Kei and Olson meeting themselves was preserved for me, causing just as much of a “WTF” reaction as it was meant to.

Oh… and I also realized that Captain and Manisha are cut completely out of the story in the Memorials.

So yeah… ultimately, as I said, I think the Orguss story is too complicated to whittle down to eighty minutes. But (as I’ve also said) I also think it was too complicated for a weekly TV series. It’s easy to see why the show wasn’t that popular with a family audience. Video seems like a more natural outlet for it, where it could attract an audience of hardcore science fiction fans and not have to worry about things like toy sales… and yes, less than two months after Orguss finished airing, Takatoku Toys went out of business. But the OVA revolution was still a couple of years away when Orguss started airing. If they’d hung on to the concept for a while, they might have been able to do the series with fewer constraints.

OBLIGATORY ASS-SHOT: Even slimmer pickings than the second half of the TV series, so this really is the only one.

P.S. As for “expanded universe” type stuff, there naturally isn’t as much as there is for Macross, but there IS some, none of which I own. There’s a two-volume novelization, written by Toshiki Inoue, the author of the three-volume Macross TV novels (and, I assume, just as threadbare as those novels are, if not even more so). There are also two drama albums, “Orguss Connection” and “Orguss Grafitti,” both of which just had one pressing on vinyl in 1983, and have never been issued on CD (that I know of). I’ve never heard them and have no idea what they’re about.

Anyway, after the release of the Memorials, Orguss was effectively dead. For a while.

THE GREAT ORGUSS REWATCH 37 – Mome’s Dream

SUPER DIMENSION CENTURY ORGUSS
MEMORIAL VOL. 1: Mome’s Dream

ICONIC SCENE: Mome’s Nightmare.

RELEASE DATE: April 4, 1985

So now we skip forward nearly a year from the end of the TV series broadcast, and look at the two VHS compilations of the series. You can tell that the show wasn’t REALLY popular, or else they would’ve made a movie, but it also wasn’t an abject failure, or else these wouldn’t have come out. These video compilations were a cheap way for a middling-level series to make a few more bucks, and for hardcore fans to re-experience at least parts of a show they liked, since full-series video releases weren’t yet feasible (as far as I can tell, the complete series finally came out on laser disk and VHS in 1991).

In the ‘80s and early ‘90s (I first got copies in ’86), the Orguss Memorials were the only way for me to experience the show, and until MUCH later, were the only experience I had of the show’s ending, since the US Renditions English-dubbed releases stopped at Episode 17. And of course, that’s not how these videos are meant to be viewed. Like the movie editions of various TV series, these are meant to be watched in addition to the series, not as a replacement for the series. While there’s an attempt to make the story coherent here, mostly they’re just a collection of the “good parts” of the TV series, for any fan that liked the show when it was broadcast and wanted to own a piece of it. And this is the first time I’ve watched these since probably 1991 or so.

Y’know, after seeing the series with the stereo mix of the opening for so long, it’s super-weird to hear the original mono mix of the songs.

After the opening, Mome narrates how the world is split into various dimensions. There is no new animation in these videos, but there is some new voice work, and a few of the scenes are repurposed from their placement in the series.

Weirdly, the story proper skips over Kei detonating the dimensional bomb and his arrival in the world of twenty years later, instead starting with the scene in Episode 7 where Mome has coffee with Kei. But I guess that this is “Mome’s dream,” right?

There’s also absolutely no introduction of the characters. We’re obviously meant to know them all already. Also strangely, a lot of the battle scenes seem sped up. I suppose it saves time AND makes the Orguss look like it’s moving faster.

And speaking of moving faster, the scene where Sley goes to meet Mimsy in the “secret room” from Episode 13 is changed, so that now, she’s waiting for Kei. Strange.

Overall, the compilation seems focused around Mome (as you’d expect from the title) and the Kei-Mimsy-Slery love triangle. A lot of the scenes are presented out of order (again, the beginning is from Episode 7, and yet the climax is from Episode 6), but I suppose it hangs together well enough as a coherent story. More than the series, though, it feels mostly like a love story with futuristic elements to it and occasional battle scenes.

And then, after the ending credits (and again, the mono mix of “Gypsy Heart” sounds strange after hearing the stereo version constantly for the rewatch), we get ALL the “next episode previews” from the first half of the series (and I notice that it’s in the preview for Episode 15, “Singularity Point!!” that the narrator takes over the previews from Kei). This takes up nearly ten minutes.

So is the compilation worth watching? These days, probably not. It’s never been subbed, not even by fans, and despite some new voice acting work, there’s not much that’s terribly different from the series. It’s fine if you want a quick jolt of Orguss, but that’s really about it. The void it was made to fill no longer exists.

OBLIGATORY ASS-SHOT: Many to choose from, but I decided on this one because it also features Sley. Remember Sley?