ibmman | Semi-review of "Princess Army Wedding Combat"

I've always enjoyed reading reviews, and I've always enjoyed looking at things very critically and going about analyzing them as if I was going to write a review, but I have rarely ever written any reviews for much of anything (nearly had an opportunity a few years ago to help with a computer hardware review site but it fell through). So I figure hey, I've got a lot of things I could say something about, why not do so every once in a while? In the least it's a somewhat creative process, so it could be somewhat constructive and not just procrastination- right? maybe?

So last Friday after the meeting we were looking through the club tape library for things to show for our Old School Monday showings, and I re-found something that had intrigued me in the past. I've sort of meant to check it out before, since the title always makes me do a 'WTF?' double-take: "Princess Army Wedding Combat".

Always seemed like it was either something rather bad or maybe even a practical joke, since I had never heard of anyone speak of it.

(nah it didn't come with the figures,
Lupin actually came from a can of 'Georgia' brand coffee I had in Japan)

So which is it?
Well, it's a real 2 episode OAV from 1992, it's even got an ANN entry! First of all I had to get my VCR to play it at the right speed**, and then try to get it to not flicker an annoying amount, since I don't actually have the remote here in order to adjust the tracking. Luckily at no point did the tape get stuck in the VCR. Considering the apparent tape wear, at least a few people had to have checked this out sometime in the last fifteen years. It turns out it's really less exciting than the title might let on. It isn't a new type of combat involving princess and weddings. It's not even about a real princess, and nor is there actually a wedding. There is a little bit of combat.

The title more accurately would be 'Princess Army- Wedding Combat', and I think it makes some sense like this. There's a girl (it was too short for me to remember her name) who's got a group of friends that all practice Judo, and she always kicks their asses, but it seems they all like her. There's also an "I'm superior to all of you, bow at my bishieness" blonde guy who plays piano, and although he's a rather flat character (ok, ok, they're basically all flat characters) he seems to like her too. So she's pretty popular with the guys. In comes a guy who's a childhood friend, who recently came back from Poland seemingly with the purpose of convincing her to marry him (which was apparently the dying wish of the girls' father). He's also apparently a famous Judo guy, because of course when he was young he was told he had to be strong in order to protect the girl in the future. Normally the 'I've spent all this time training so I can be with you forever' guys aren't so bad... but this one is rather pushy and stalks her around school, etc and he just doesn't seem to want to give up.

She then finds out that not only does he want to marry her, but also take her back to Poland. Apparently for the purpose of being able to develop her martial arts skills to their fullest extent. Now excuse me, but I would think that Japan is a little better known for martial arts than freaking Poland, right??? I've never heard of any polish martial arts styles. No idea where they got that from. Anyway, obviously the girl is supposed to be the 'princess', and her guy friends would be the 'army', who are trying to defend her from Mr.poland who wants to have a wedding, and thus they have some random Judo sparring matches, the combat.

All in all not as exciting as I would have hoped. Hence the rather glaring omission of humor from this post. It's so mediocre that it wasn't even funny, and it's difficult to say much of anything funny about it. This might describe it best:

If you weren't going to watch it before (very likely), you had the right idea! But hey, at least they didn't forget Poland.
It's so mediocre I even took the effort to make that mediocre graphic in order to try to express it better.
Maybe WordArt would have been more appropriate.

**Random technical rant:
(if you ever wondered why DVD was a good idea for consumer video, try going back to VHS every once in a while. Although having worked with broadcast video production for nearly 10 years I can definitely say there are tape formats out there which are superior to DVD in every way as a video storage medium, with the single disadvantage of not being random access, and thus not supporting fancy extras like menus. Beta had failed in the eye of the consumers, but it definitely didn't in broadcast and production. Digital Betacam evolved has evolved into HDCAM, the Digital HD Beta format being used very often for master recordings now in everyday HD production. The storage capacities of DVD and even Blu-Ray absolutely pale in comparison to what is achievable with digital tape.)