By AnimeEv 1 year, 5 months ago
The 1980’s were a great time to be an anime fan of any kind. If you were around for that period and you think “classic title”, you’re likely to come up with a flood of great shows from a variety of genres which are all over the map, from the kooky comedies of Rumiko Takahashi (who, believe it or not, was slumming it with Inu-Yasha), to classic sports shows like Touch, and all the way up to righteous cyberpunk action jams like Megazone 23 and Bubblegum Crisis. Those were my salad days, most def, but some of the classics are buried jewels, begging for extraction.
Good thing your boy owns himself a shovel, ne?
Armor Hunter Mellowlink was a 12 episode OVA series set in the VOTOMS universe and directed by Takeyuki Kanda, with “series composition” notes from VOTOMS creator Ryousuke Takahashi. The story is bone simple: Ality Mellowlink, a soldier first betrayed by the upper echelons of his unit and then framed after he has the gall to survive, hunts down the scumbags who sold him and his team out and brings hell along with him via the aid of a VERY. LARGE. RIFLE.
Impressive, right? I wasn’t kidding: they use those things to knock out armored tanks known as VOTOMS, and it’s a rad take on the classic “mecha can beat everything!” jive that seemed to tailspin out of control in the late 1980s, with a healthy injection of Rambo and Bruce Lee mixed in to up the ante. As the story progresses, Mellowlink encounters a myriad of tramps, backstabbers, sociopaths, killers, and rogues, and the viewer is left to play the odds in terms of who is who while he drops his deceased comrades’ dog tags onto the cowering visages of the traitors at hand, all the while dispensing a healthy dose of ass-whoopery.
How does this all average out? With the letters W, I, and N.
Now, I love VOTOMS, but I have to admit that the show is definitely an acquired taste: it’s long, has tons of layers, features decidedly old-school production values and touches that might turn off newer fans (“Horns on the soundtrack! And no fan-service?!?!”), and stars the most decidedly interesting-yet-impenetrable protagonist to ever grace the stage of a Sunrise show: Mr. Chirico Cuvie, a man who’s this short of autistic despite being an absolute beast of a mecha pilot. Fans of VOTOMS tend to be the same kind of people amenable to old-school “hard” sci-fi and 1970s space operas, and frankly if you are into that sort of swing you should make the effort to check it out post-haste, but I can see where the new jacks out there might give up on it. It’s fairly demanding in some regards.
Mellowlink, however, came along a few years after the big V and was lucky enough to be in the perfect place at the perfect time: it gets its serious action show points from a more fluid style of animation, a shorter series span, a bigger emphasis on “bang blast blood scream pow” fight scenes, and a lack of willingness to embrace the brainy and “cold” aspects of VOTOMS, which oddly enough makes it a very nice companion piece to the show and provides a feisty little yin to the yang of its mother series. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that Mellowlink would have done damn good business in the early 90s stateside if it was licensed, and that it’s sadly under-used theme of guerilla conflict and improvised combat tactics would’ve sat well with many a fan back in those days, as the mecha scene was already heading towards rote exercises in empty formula fulfillment.
Eerily enough, the show’s masters were apparently damaged in either an earthquake or a fire, and were thus rendered unsalvageable. Upon hearing this news, most fans gave up on the show getting licensed, and all that was available were old LDs (good luck then, AND now!) and nth generation fansubs. However Tim Eldred, an early VOTOMS superfan and a true keeper of the faith, noted in an interview in the late 90s that the show could possibly be salvaged from LDs at some point, which presumably explains the DVD box set re-issue in 2006. The DVD is certainly not crystal clear, but it’s nice to have it available for those who want to check it out. It also lead to some fansub groups re-issuing their subs digitally with higher-grade source copies… not that I’m embracing that sort of thing, of course.
So tragedy turns into triumph, and Armor Hunter Mellowlink lives to stalk his prey on digital media once again. For those of you who like your action raw, your mecha realistic, and your venomous contempt for authority as powerful as the grenade rounds you use to tear through the flesh of those who’ve wronged you for their own ends, well… you’ve got some watching to do.
Bonus creepy serendipity time! I bought a pre-recorded VHS copy of VOTOMS stage 3 and 4 at AnimeFEST in Dallas in 1994, which we’ll be returning to this weekend. 12 years later I missed a train one day while living in Shukugawara, Kanagawa. What did I find while I killed some time at the local Lawson and opened up Hobby Japan? News about the aforementioned Mellowlink DVD set. It’s been with me ever since, like a beacon calling out to me in the name of measured, patient destruction and animalistic revenge.
Links: ANN’s encyclopedia entry.
Interview with VOTOMS expert Tim Eldred.
Sunrise, VOTOMS, mellowlink, old school, you might've missed it
