Tylor, The Irresponsible Captain #1 (DVD)
APPROX. 175 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 1993 - MPA RATING: MA13
" Is Tylor really an idiot? Or is he really some kind of genius just pretending to be an idiot for reasons that will be revealed later?
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"Irresponsible Captain Tylor" is a TV and OVA series, released in Japan in 1993 and 1996 respectively, that has been completely released domestically by The Right Stuf. The first DVD has seven TV episodes on it, "The Mysterious Irresponsible Man", "Hey Ho! The Happy Pensioned Life!", "The Ship Sets Sail, but Misgivings Remain", "Enemy Crisis! We Surrender!", "Angel in White. Begins with an H" (the H stands for hentai, which basically refers to pornography, although there is nothing X-rated in this show), "The Tail of the Lizard´s Tail", and "A Gentleman´s Word is His Bond". With so many episodes on one disc, you certainly can´t claim that The Right Stuf tried to gouge you in quantity.
The first episode begins tamely enough, with an apparently homeless man watching the TV in a store window while rain falls on him. He sees an advertisement to join the United Planets Space Force, and because the girl in the commercial is cute, he does so. That man is Justy Ueki Tylor. For the first two episodes, he isn´t the captain of anything, so instead we get to see some of the main plot set up. The galaxy´s two main forces, the United Planets and Raalgan Empire, are at the brink of war. The emperor of the Raalgan Empire was killed in an accident that many believe was caused by the United Planets. The new Empress, only 16, is persuaded to declare war. How that war will end, neither side can predict.
On the more humorous side of things, Tylor secures his command of an out dated, decrepit old destroyer named the Soyokaze by episode three. He´s not much of a hands-on commander, though. He frequently leaves the bridge to take a bath, and tells the crew to just do whatever they want to do. At the first site of danger, Tylor bravely confronts his Raalgan enemy face to face and. . .surrenders. What really makes it funny is how infuriatingly laid back Tylor is, and how it drives everyone around him up the wall. In fact, the UPSF high command sends him out on some missions just to try to kill him!
Another part of this show that absolutely killed me laughing was the marines onboard the Soyokaze. A rag tag pack of veterans, they initiate the "traditional" fight with the pilots after the Soyokaze leaves port, trashing most of the ship in the process. One of the marines is Jason. As in, Jason from "Friday the 13th". I´m not going by his hockey mask alone, his bio lists his name only as "Jason", his age as "?", and mentions that he "has a certain fondness of chain saws."
Besides humor, the show has plenty of continuity. I was impressed how, when the marines destroy a good portion of the ship in the third episode, the ship had to be repaired in the next episode. Or how, as of the end of the disc, the Raalgan spy is still aboard the Soyokaze and undiscovered by the crew. Rather than using an episode-of-the-week formulae, the show´s plot tends to be more serialized.
