Battle Skipper

Original Title: 美少女遊撃隊バトルスキッパー
Romanized: Bishoujo Yuugekitai Battle Skipper
Literal: Beautiful Girl Commando Unit

Plot Synopsis

At the elite St. Ignacio Academy, you will find the enormously popular Debutante Club. But the club has a darker side--it's run by the heir to an extraordinarily rich and equally bad family with its hands in all manner of shady military hardware deals. Only one thing stands in their way: The mysterious Exstars, a team of astoundingly powerful do-gooder mehcha. But who pilots them? None other than St. Ignacio Academy's honorable but critically understaffed Etiquette club, including three ill-trained new recruits. Let the battle begin!

Quick Review

Rating: 0.5 / 5
Reviewer: Marc
Review Date: 2006-01-08

I'll be blunt: Battle Skipper is a cliche-filled, fanservice-sprinkled, marketing-driven retread of an anime series whose sole purpose is to sell goofy-looking robot toys, and it doesn't even do that well. The series has worse-than-no plot and a collection of cute but forgettable girls to try and distract you, but ironically, the action--what you'd think would be the high point--is uninteresting at best. The clunky looking mecha that it's ostensibly designed to sell are so goofy looking that the battles look as much like kids banging toys around as cool anime. At least the end themes are borderline-listenable JPop.

The only thing Battle Skipper good for is heckle-fodder--if you want to mock the string of badly-executed anime cliches with friends, have a ball.

US DVD Review

The budget-priced DVD (which includes all three episodes as "The Movie") features Japanese and English stereo soundtracks, and for extras character profiles, art galleries, storyboards, the Japanese TV commercials, and a trivia quiz.

Content Guide

While you'd think it's be clean enough for kids, the modest amounts of nudity (and I suppose not-so-serious violence) bump it up to USM's 13-up category.

Violence: 2 - There's plenty of fighting, but it's far from graphic, or even very serious.

Nudity: 2 - Some skin scattered about.

Sex/Mature Themes: 0 - Nothing of note.

Language: 1 - The dub seemed clean.

Notes and Trivia

There are a couple of real St. Ignacios, but the one most likely to have a Japanese school named after him is St. Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order--he sent St. Francis Xavier to Japan as a missionary in 1549, and the Jesuits are known for starting schools. The only other candidate is probably St. Ignacio Clemente Delgado Cebrián, a missionary to Vietnam who was executed in the 19th century.

There was also a comic version of Battle Skipper by Akira Matsubara published alongside the video release (all three episodes were released simultaneously in Japan) in the monthly "Dengeki Comic Gao!"

Availability

Available in the US from US Manga Corps on a budget-priced hybrid DVD as "The Movie". Was previously available on a single dubbed VHS volume, and before that on three individual dubbed VHS volumes, all out of print.

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