CITY HUNTER 3 - Get wild and tough

While I've been an anime fan all my life (more or less), I was mostly unaware of City Hunter until fairly recently. Oh sure I've heard the name and I found a couple of undubbed, unsubtitled pirated episodes at my local Chinatown video store, but beyond that, I was largely unaware of the franchise. But when ADV gave the series a proper release, I decided to give it a spin as a blind buy.

Boy was I lucky! 300 bucks for this DVD set on Amazon? You gotta be kidding me! Anyway, I digress. . . .

Ladies and gentlemen (especially the ladies), meet Ryo Seaba - troubleshooter, investigator, gun-for-hire and ladies man. If you need help, if the police cant help you, if you have no where else to turn, leave "XYZ" on the message board at Shinjuku train station and City Hunter will respond to your plea.

His skill with his Desert Eagle is unparalleled - he can place a shot on a target, in the same hole, six times in a row. He can shoot the gun out of the hand of a thug holding a lady hostage through the gaps of a moving subway train at rush hour. His skill with the ladies. . . not so much. He's lecherous, he spends his free time hunting panties, his favorite word is mokkori - which is roughly the American equivalent of "Schwing!". He's about as subtle as a three hundred pound hammer to the head.

Which - funny you should mention that - is where his assistant Kaori Makimura comes in. She is primarily responsible for screening clients, helping investigations and other managerial tasks. She is also charged with keeping Ryo's libido in check, often by striking him about the head with a three hundred pound hammer.

As one might tell, the series is kind of goofy, bordering on the Loony Tunes at times. Kaori keeps her impossibly large hammers in the same place that the Highlander keeps his sword. Ryo's hunt for mokkori is ludicrous at best, ridiculous at worst. It is, at the easiest descriptor, a comedy.

Ah, but wait a moment - when Ryo needs to get his game face on, the trickster and the fool melt away, revealing a total badass who gets the job done. Despite the comedy and letch, the show is also full of Drama and Crowning Moments Of Heartwarming - like the time that Ryo was hired by a doctor who was dying of cancer. She intended to pay Ryo's fee from her life-insurance, hiring him to kill the sadistic boxer who murdered her lover. After finishing the job, rather than taking her life-insurance and letting her go back to drowning in alcohol, Ryo . . . well, cue the Manly Tears from the audience.

City Hunter started as manga by Tsukasa Hojo, running from 1985 to 1991. It spawned a four-season Anime series, several Direct-To-Video specials and a live-action movie starring Jackie Chan. This would be the third of the four seasons - hence City Hunter 3. Season three is only 13 episodes long, which I think why it's a weaker entry into the franchise. Unlike previous seasons, where each story was a two parter, most of the episodes here are stand-alone. We get some double length episodes towards the end, but the majority of the stores are wrapped up in 25 minuets. This doesn’t really let the series build momentum like it used to.

Don't get me wrong, City Hunter 3 sticks to the formula, so it's not bad - it's just not quite as badassed as it used to be.

Being an older series - produced in the late eighties and early nineties - the animation for City Hunter is a bit rough and primitive. It's not exactly Speed Racer or Star Blazers level of animation, but don't go in expecting slick CGI. That said, it's still very serviceable and looks smooth for the era. The voice acting is, well it's Akira Kamiya - the very voice of Manliness itself. He's done Ken from Fist of the North Star, Roy Focker from Macross. He's probably the Ur Example when it comes to Hot Blooded characters, and fits the roll perfectly.

THE DVD -
The video quality holds up well considering the age of the series. There's some print damage here and there, but overall it looks pretty good. The colors have not faded, there's not much over saturation, and everything seems clean. As far as soundtrack goes - since AVD films was not anticipating moving a great many units, plus the HUGE number of episodes to dub (65 in just the first season alone) we only get a Japanese audio track with optional subtitles.

THE EXTRAS -
Not surprisingly, we get very meager handful of extras - mainly trailers. There's a handful of City Hunter trailers - City Hunter the Motion Picture a.k.a. Goodbye, My Sweetheart), . 357 Magnum, The Million Dollar Conspiracy, Bay City Wars, and Secret Service. Then there's an assortment of ADV trailers for then current releases: Eden's Bowy, Princess Blade, Pretear, Orphen 2: Revenge, City Hunter: Secret Service (again), Cosplay Complex - and that's all.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
It's a damn shame that these things are out of print. While City Hunter Series 3 isn't bad, it's pretty short and certainly not worth the three hundred bucks that you get it for on Amazon. So on that basis alone, I'd say skip this set, unless you can find a copy at a used store for cheap. That said, you can get the second half of season two for less than twenty bucks from www.rightstuf.com - and THAT is well worth getting at least.