Another repost for posterity:

Kill Your Nostalgia: Ronin Warriors

(We're not off to a good start.)

• Original Title: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers
• Release Date: Apr 30, 1988 - Mar 4, 1989 (Japan), June 26th - August 17th, 1995 (USA)
• No. of Episodes - 39
• Last Seen: In a hazy, foggy, fever dream, but probably sometime before 1998.
• Rewatch Format: Pure, unfiltered, `90s dub. This was a mistake, but maybe the best mistake.

This has to be the oldest thing I could possibly have seen (except for Samurai Pizza Cats, but let's just pretend that doesn't exist), predating Gundam Wing by at least a few years, and is easily the oldest show to qualify for this retrospective. It occupies a very murky part of my life, in those odd years where you are rapidly learning so much about the world that, as you get older, the little details seem to blend in and get lost to time. Perhaps that was the universe's way of saying "This is a bad idea and was meant to be forgotten!" but fuck the universe, I'm a glutton for punishment.

Ronin Warriors involves the evil warrior spirit thing Talpa, his Dark Warlords, and the otherworldly forces of the Dynasty as they attempt to take over the world. Opposing them are the Ronin Warriors, five teenagers with attitude indeterminately aged guys with mystical armor who each embody an aspect of Confucian virtue, which they do their best to shoehorn into just about every episode or situation. This plot is bog fucking standard, and outside of one or two minor revelations, follows the exact path and pattern that you would expect. It is, in almost all things, a complete mirror image of Gundam Wing's tangled, confusing mess of a story, and at certain points I actually found myself wishing for a random organization or an out-of-nowhere motivation flip flop, but alas, it was not to be.

With that being said, what the show lacks in complexity, it makes up in pure gusto. Ronin Warriors dives headfirst at every possible trope and cliche, and does so with a kind of reckless abandon that I haven't seen since Space Battleship Yamato's remake (which was endearing in SBY but perhaps unintentional here). All of the villains are cackling madmen, who speak of global conquest while their shadows creep over the city, literally engulfing it in darkness, plot points are resolved by The Power of Friendship with a completely straight face...I mean, it's got the subtlety of a sledgehammer hitting a walnut but you can't deny its enthusiasm.

A big part of that is the dub, which is absolutely hilarious. My personal favorite is the Dark Warlord Anubis (featured above), played by Paul Dobson who obviously was having as much fun as possible; his shrieks of "QUAKE WITH FEARRR!!!" never fail to make me smile. The rest of the crew are equally horrible fun, with some very odd casting choices, such as:

• Randomly give one of the (Japanese) Warriors a British accent.
• Making our main hero Ryo sound like a surfer bro.
• Inexplicably changing Mia's voice actress for one episode.
• Having one of the Dark Warlords sound like Wallace Shawn.

While the dub is a lot of fun, the characters are not. Some of them barely even qualify as one-dimensional; Mia and Yuli in particular exist solely to be captured and do next to nothing in the entire series. They're also static portraits who neither change nor grow; Anubis is the only one whose character develops in any meaningful way, and it's more of a light switch flip-flop than anything subtle or deep. No, this is a show where good and evil are clearly defined, with the villains featuring no redeemable qualities and our heroes saddled with very few, if any, critical flaws that aren't resolved by the episode's end. The protagonists in particular slot neatly into the tropes they are assigned; the natural leader, the hard-headed but soft-hearted strong guy, and the slightly more mature, cool-headed dude are all on hand, with the rest so bland and uninteresting that I've honestly forgotten what, if anything, they exemplified.

The animation is bad. I mentioned in my Gundam Wing musings that it was plagued by repeated sequences, but Ronin Warriors surpasses it in every regard; not only are scenes reused between episodes (including the aforementioned transformations), but sometimes the same shot is actually looped three or four times back-to-back, perhaps in a desperate attempt to pad the run time. Even when the action is fresh, it isn't particularly good looking even by 80s standards, with most fights ending up as a bit of a disjointed mess. The simplistic character designs don't do much to justify the reduced fluidity; the Ronin Warriors themselves sport pallet-swapped armor designs with only a few ornamental differences, the Dark Warlords are mainly split up by the weapons they use, and the cannon fodder are more or less clones of each other.

I've come to the conclusion that if you really want to go back and watch 80s/early 90s anime, your only recourse for high quality animation is in films. I recently checked out Patlabor: The Movie, and the difference is absolutely night and day, obviously thanks to the increased budget and decreased run time, but it goes to show that you can dig back into the archives and find yourself pleasantly surprised.

No, seriously, check this shit out:

Not bad for `89, right?

The most surprising thing about Ronin Warriors was the music. I have no idea if this is due to the dub, or if the original actually went for this vibe, but there was a LOT more hair metal rock guitars than I expected out of the soundtrack, especially for a show that features people dressed like faux-samurai fighting a weird demon guy. I understand the era that it was made in and I know they are actually fighting in modern Tokyo (so it's not a period piece), but it didn't fit all that well even with those caveats. There's just something about discussing a thousand year evil and fighting with a staff that doesn't mesh with music I could see my dad enjoying.

So, Ronin Warriors is bad. It's a bad show. The writing is bad, the plot is simplistic, the characters are one-dimensional, the animation quality is poor, and the soundtrack is confusing. The best part is the dub, but I don't know if you'd consider the hilarity to be intentional; maybe whoever licensed this dreck knew exactly what they had on their hands and decided to just have some fun with it, but I've heard that the dub actually sticks to the plot of the original for the most part, so who can say. Maybe they actually called for hammy performances in order to keep it faithful; regardless, the dub was where I found most of my enjoyment, as all nostalgia quickly fled from me in the very first episode.

I'm going to leave you with the Japanese ending, as it's a fun jumble of Engrish which doesn't seem to mesh at all with what's going on in the background, and thats always worth a giggle: