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Review

by Zac Bertschy,

Bounty Dog

DVD

Synopsis:
Bounty Dog DVD
In a world where mankind has reached the furthest depths of darkness on the moon, building one glistening lunar metropolis after another, one man (well, one man and a team of other people) has the power to stop an encroaching evil from slowing progress. Can the cybernetic, super-powered Bounty Team bring this evil to justice?
Review:
What can we say about Bounty Dog that hasn't already been written? Well, everything, seeing as how this total waste of 60 minutes has had an impact the size of a cashew on anime fandom. Manga Entertainment chose to relegate it to further obscurity by releasing Bounty Dog on DVD with only an English dub track, zero extras, and no promotion. One would suspect that the thousands of Bounty Dog fans out there are screaming blue murder, but after watching this thing, I'm pretty sure there aren't any Bounty Dog fans.

Picture, if you will, the dark side of the moon. Black, right? In Bounty Dog, it's a kind of sickly yellow and green color. This entire 60 minute, two-episode OVA is this disgusting yellow and green color. You can't escape it, there's no avoiding it; it's like the animators for this series ran out of all other colors and had to produce Bounty Dog inside of a few days, so they simply slathered the entire production in yellow and green. I realize it's supposed to give the show a sort of ‘science fiction’ feel, but the result is hideous. It's nearly enough to turn you away completely. Thankfully, if the show's hideous exterior doesn't drive you away screaming, everything else about this production will.

The story can be broken down into one basic sentence: a crack team of super-powered bounty hunters tries to take out the ultimate evil. Sound exciting? No, it sounds like the plot of every other half-assed science fiction anime ever made. I'd wager the production staff of Bounty Dog only used about a quarter of an ass on this, to be precise. The characters are all completely one-sided, hollow, and emotionless. You'd get more action-packed drama watching a construction worker empty a bag of doorknobs. Little to no motivation is provided for the characters, so watching them go about saving the world is really, really boring and pointless.

It doesn't help that the English dub is, perhaps, one of the least convincing in the history of English dubs. The characters seem to have been directed to “sound bored and apathetic.” They have no emotion whatsoever and sort of plod through the already clichéd, pointless story with all the excitement of a C-SPAN Congressional hearing on the preservation of wild grasses in northern Florida. Usually a bad dub is avoidable and the show will shine through with the Japanese voice track, but Manga elected to leave that little option off the ‘extras’ list. You have no choice but to suffer through the English dub of Bounty Dog.

To put it simply, there just isn't any reason to watch this show. It's ugly, uninteresting, clichéd, and to top it off, you're literally forced to watch an English dub that rivals even the worst samples from Streamline back in the 1980's. Avoid Bounty Dog as though it carried some sort of airborne flesh-consuming disease.
Grade:
Overall (dub) : F
Story : D
Animation : B
Art : C
Music : C

+ Uhmm...
Worst. OVA. Ever.

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Production Info:
Director: Hiroshi Negishi
Script: Mayori Sekijima
Unit Director: Shin Matsuo
Music: Sho Goshima
Character Design:
Hirotoshi Sano
Masamune Shirow
Art: Tadashi Kudo
Animation Director: Hirotoshi Sano
Mechanical design: Atsushi Takeuchi
Art design: Atsushi Takeuchi
Producer:
Haruo Sai
Masaki Sawanobori
Koji Shimana
Licensed by: Manga Entertainment

Full encyclopedia details about
Bounty Dog (OAV)

Release information about
Bounty Dog (Dub.DVD)

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