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!

Review

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

Seeing TOMY--yes, the toy company--featured prominently in the credits of anime is not a good sign. When the opening scene consists of a girl in the shower on a space station shaped vaguely like the Motorola logo it's an even worse one. Don't let the big-name Japanese voice cast and the word "Slayers" on the box fool you: The trio of episode-length, fanservice-seasoned toy commercials that make up Battle Skipper are exactly the sort of vapid shlock you'd expect a committee to produce based on a toy line.

The series plays like a list of anime cliches: With the shower scene (second most classic of fanservice shots) out of the way, we're introduced to the generic uber-rich-girl villain the exposed body belongs to and her generic spectacled stud of a servant. They eventually come up with a nefarious reason to do battle with the Exstars, mecha-equipped defenders of peace, justice, and shameless marketing to adolescent boys.

The Exstars, in turn, consist of two semi-competent girls from the school and their three semi-reluctant new recruits. Backstory? Sorry, not here. With the Exstars comes that all-important most classic of fanservice shots, the "school uniform removed-then-replaced by stylish, skin-tight battlesuit" sequence. The transformation sequence doesn't even make sense in this series, but it just had to be there. At least one of the girls looks freaked out and makes some confused comments during her transformation for a change, but they still strike dramatic poses for no readily apparent reason.

Thus is set up the epic battle between St. Ignacio Academy's heroic but understaffed Etiquette Club and the evil powers behind the Debutante Club. (I wonder if there's any relation to that other group of anime Debutantes--maybe they've gone bad in the future?)

That summarizes the attempt to take every adolescent male anime cliche you can think of and work them all into one marketing-driven mess of a series. The whole thing is embarrassingly illogical--just skipping the plot entirely would've been better than the excuses that pass for dialogue. I'd expect the apparent target market (who probably still think girls have cooties) wouldn't appreciate the brief flashes of skin, but maybe they figured they'd pick up a few particularly desperate older viewers that way.

Surprisingly, Battle Skipper is actually focused much more on the characters than the mecha it's designed to sell. My guess is this is either because dialogue is cheaper than action, or because the Battle Skippers are so lame. Stiff, boxy, silly-looking contraptions, it's so painfully obvious they're based on toys it's almost a joke. Usually the animation team makes an effort to make the animated ad more exciting than the toy itself, but these chunky things motor around so ridiculously they don't even seem to function within the paper-thin logic of their own world. Oh, well, I guess there's something to be said for truth in advertising.

As you might guess, the action--usually the sole reason for watching a series like this--is uninteresting. The animation itself isn't outright terrible, but the execution is lame. The art is standard fare for a lower-budget mid-'90s series: Cute but forgettable girls and bland backgrounds. The mechanical designs of course look like toys--black, spiky badmecha and colorful, equally chintzy-looking goodmecha.

The acting in the dub ranges from not-so-good to terrible, but the abysmal writing shoulders a lot of the blame (not that there was much to work with). I can't speak for the Japanese dialogue, but the end themes are, surprisingly, the high point. Each is different, and the first one sounds like a slightly toned-down, poorly-sung version of a Max song (a decent hyperactive J-technofunk girl-group), which is to say almost listenable. The rest of the soundtrack is maybe a step and a half above elevator music.

I've run out of insulting words, so it's time for the wrap up: 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 only thing it's good for is heckle-fodder.

Related Recommendations

There are plenty of other series that do empty-headed girl action, and do it better. A few: Debutante Detective Corps (wackier but more fun), Wild Cardz (hyperactive and weird premise), Z-Mind (oddly realistic girls-piloting-robots), and I'll throw out Magic Knights Rayearth for a fantasy-themed transforming girls show and Moldiver for a funny ditzy superhero girl show. Heck, why not Battle Athletes Victory (the TV version), too.

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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