This is my second weekly review of a random bubble era OVA.

Intro
One of my favorite arcade games is the classic Sega game from 1985, OutRun, much like its contemporaries by the same team and on the same hardware, such as After Burner and Space Harrier, was quite the graphical stunner, but there is something special about OutRun in particular. Take After Burner for example. It gives you the exhilarating experience of being a part of the recently released film, Top Gun, with perhaps the best and most surreal flight simulation yet seen in video games. But you could argue the way it achieves this is quite simplistic, and maybe even one note, regardless of the quality of the game. It’s the speed alone that helps achieve this feeling of being a fighter pilot. On the other hand there’s OutRun. OutRun and rest of its ilk are credited to famed developer Yu Suzuki, who would later go on to form his own company, Ancient, where, alongside SEGA, he’d go on to work on the 8-bit Sonic the Hedgehog games on Master System and Game Gear, the Streets of Rage games on Sega Genesis, and perhaps his magnum opus, the Shenmue series on Dreamcast. Suzuki spent some time on the American west coast doing research, and the results of that are plain to see. Get into the groove of the game and it truly feels like you’re putting the pedal to the medal down roads of Southern California. The bright blue skies, the waving palm trees, the sunlight glistening on the water, the salty smell of the coastal summer breeze… Well, I suppose you wouldn’t be able to smell the game… The whole vibe of the game makes you really feel like you’re driving under Californian sunshine. The setting, the city pop esque tunes, the hot babe. The gameplay too was quite innovative as much like DOOM nearly a decade later, previous racing games only had simple tracks with no verticality, which OutRun included, as well as making the feeling of going up and down the inclines quite fun. This week’s OVA, Riding Bean is quite similar. The 1989 OVA, Riding Bean, is quite literally a Hollywood action film of the time with a little bit of anime pizazz for both better and worse.

What is This?
Riding Bean is an action manga that had a short lived run of just four chapters in Monthly Comic Noizy from September 1988 to February 1989 penned by Kenichi Sonoda, who’d later most famously work on Bubblegum Crisis and its sequel, Bubblegum Crash, as a character and mech designer. While the manga was canceled alongside the closure of the magazine, an anime OVA loosely based on the premise and characters was released on February 22, 1989. While the previous OVA is entirely unknown outside of Japan, Riding Bean was licensed for release in the United States by AnimEigo in 1990 (according to the Dubbing Wiki), who’d later gain great success for their releases of Urusei Yatsura, Bubblegum Crisis, and Kimagure Orange Road. AnimEigo would later release an English dub in 1994. Currently the OVA is available legally from a few streaming services including Retro Crush, but not for free.

Plot, Characters, etc.
The plot of this OVA is quite a bit simpler and dependent on in-the-moment excitement, so I won’t give a detailed early plot summary this time. Riding Bean sees titular white-knuckled driver Bean Bandit, and his female roommate, the gun-slinging Rally Vincent as they get framed for the kidnapping of a young girl who’s the daughter of the owner of a large conglomerate. The characterization of both is somewhat one note and intended to make the male audience excited. That said, the characterization of Rally isn’t demeaning, despite the inclusion of a dress-up scene, so I don’t mind this. As for Bean, I would have disliked it if his badass presentation was done in service of demeaning women. You might wonder, why would I have this constantly in mind? 80’s OVAs are known for plenty of great and terrible things due to their hyperfocus on male nerds, as the otaku subculture crystalized into what we know it today, and a large motivation for using the OVA format is to do things you wouldn’t want parents to stumble upon. And it’s here where the OVA falters.

But first, what was good about the OVA? A lot! I compared it to OutRun earlier, and that’s because it truly utilizes the medium of animation to realize a Hollywood action flick style story. The animation is stellar, in particular the shootout scenes. The way bullets tear into their targets, and the expressions of the characters involved twist and contort, is truly a sight to behold! It’s like watching a scene from a Terrentino movie with a little bit of unrealistic-ness that animation can afford. And honestly, that’s what I seek from animation, and fiction as a whole. All this is paired with American rock music, and it truly did feel like I was watching a classic action flick. I don’t watch those sorts of things often, since I prefer coming of age and romance, but there really is a charm to seeing tropes of genres come together in nearly perfect sync doing what they do best, and is why I’m a big fan of some action series to this day, such as Baki and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, long since my time as a child reading Dragon Ball. This is the OVA at its best. Chase scenes, shoot outs, etc. that play off the strengths of the two main characters, and man, this anime really is a blast at its best, but unfortunately it’s not all there.

I prefer if everything in a narrative has a purpose. No matter how small or big, questionable or wholesome. The way I see it, why do something if there’s no real point? And that’s how I view the nudity at the beginning and the main villain’s…proclivities. The beginning is pretty small in the grand scheme of things, but it still feels like the woman is being exploited for the sake of the audience’s stares. There is absolutely no reason for her to be naked. The main villain however is a lot worse. She is an abusive lesbian pedophile that has a Stockholm Syndrome riddled villain stuck to her like a dog. That is quite the sandwich of things to hate about the villain. And it doesn’t really go anywhere, aside from the scene which addresses Bean’s reason for helping the kidnapped child. There honestly was no reason they had to go that far with the character, and find this exploitation way worse than the fan service at the beginning with Rally. That said, while this is a pretty large issue, it was basically my only one with the OVA as a whole.

Legacy
A couple years later in February 1991, Sonoda would helm a new manga until June 1997, Gunsmith Cats, which is apparently pretty well known. I, myself, knew about it before this whole thing, but that is no marker of popularity. Gunsmith Cats treats the previous work as a sort of prototype and features a new Rally who, alongside her roommate, operates a gun shop and works as a bounty hunter. Bean even seems to appear here and there as both an ally and enemy, as the story suits it. Gunsmith Cats would see a three episode OVA series produced during the manga’s run from November 1, 1995 to September 1 of the following year. Both versions of the series would also see English release a few years later, but would see some controversy due the sex contained in the manga which would halt its English serialization temporarily. Today, the entire manga is available from Dark Horse Comics under an 18+ age rating, and the anime’s license is currently owned by AnimEigo. The manga also included making of materials and the entirety of the Riding Bean manga which I took a cursory look at, and found that personally, it was a little too gratuitous and exploitative for my liking. Gunsmith Cats too may or may not be my thing, but I’m interested in checking it out.

Final Thoughts
All in all, this was a very fun anime to watch from start to finish, warts and all. While I personally preferred Boarders over this, I’d say that thus far this is easily the most recommendable to most people, despite the otaku fan service. I’ve seen a lot worse and visually at least, it doesn’t go far enough where I’d be hesitant to recommend this. I’ll have to check out Gunsmith Cats as well, but perhaps another day when I’m in the mood for sexy ladies and not taking it seriously.