Spoilers Below

When looking back on media from a bygone era it can sometimes be more helpful to look at--rather than the cream of the crop or the absolute worst--sort of the "middle pickings", the stuff that's either just so-so or good but not great. That last category is where the OVA adaptation of Birdy The Mighty sits. Quite comfortably, even.

Across four episodes of slightly varying length (the first is 44 minutes, all subsequent episodes closer to half an hour), Birdy The Mighty spins the kind of goofy sci-fi action tale that was common to the point of glut in 80s and 90s anime. There are--as always--a few twists on the usual formulas. Rather than having its two leads be physically separate people, circumstances conspire at the start of the series to have absurdly normal (and of course, meek) high school student Tsutomu and the titular space cop / electricity-powered super soldier Birdy Altera share the same body, giving the series a sort of pseudo gender-bender angle that wasn't uncommon at the time (though many of those shows skewed far more ecchi than Birdy ever gets). Combined with the protagonist's hotheadedness (and delightfully weird hair) and a running teen romance subplot to give Tsutomu some depth, and you've essentially got two decently fleshed-out coprotagonists in one. Economic!

Birdy has more going for it than many of the more forgettable entries into its genre. The animation is quite good (not rare for OVAs), though whether the visual style is charmingly retro or hopelessly dated will largely depend on your preferences. The action sequences, which cap each episode (and take up a majority of the fourth), are really the main draw here, being well-choreographed and backed by the same funky, upbeat soundtrack that propels the rest of the anime (provided by Ko Otani, who also did Outaw Star and more recently, the OP for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure), it's hard to fault them in any major way and the show's general quick pace prevents them from falling into the same slog that wasn't uncommon in shonen at the time. The villains in particular are an interesting trio, with main baddie Revi primarily delegating evildoer responsibilities to the enigmatic Gomez and a former Imperial Army scientist who is preoccupied with turning himself and all of Japan into mutant supersoldiers (how I long for the days when Nazis and their east asian allies were easy villains), a mutated civilian in the second episode and a robot girl in the third round out the villain court, and for a series this small, they're more than enough.

There is more to Birdy of course: there's a subplot about a police inspector, some comedy that sometimes works (Tsutomu's dad is the kind of complete idiot that works pretty well as the comic relief in these sorts of series) and sometimes does not (there is a weird recurring gag about a kid bringing porn magazines to school. Surely this happened to someone at some point, but it's ubiquity in anime makes it seem like an epidemic), the aforementioned romance subplot (Tsutomu's crush is cute and she becomes supportive more quickly than most superhero girlfriends, but, the entire bit is a tad unnecessary), an incredible amount of deeply nonsensical technobabble, and of course fanservice for Otaku-san, it is here worth mentioning that while the show doesn't delve too much into fanservice for most of its runtime, there is a bath scene that leads to Birdy pursuing a villain while straight-up naked, something that is much funnier than a good half of the intentional comedy here. Finally, it is worth mentioning that the last episode has some of the best cheesing for the camera I've ever seen in the medium, both from Birdy and from the aforementioned Imperial Army science goon.

And that's really all there is to Birdy The Mighty. The series leaves some plot points unresolved--maybe they were hoping to make more OVAs--but for what it is it's an enjoyable romp. If you like this sort of thing it's probably right up your alley, if not, you can safely skip it. Still, I had a good time with it and it's hard to say anything truly negative about something that almost exactly meets your expectations--no more, no less.