The second random compiling of Rambo episodes contains another batch of eleven animated adventures of Rambo and the Force Of Freedom in their ongoing quest to put a stop to the evil aspirations of General Warhawk and S.A.V.A.G.E..

The episodes Rambo – Volume 2: Enter The Dragon is at least kinda-sorta more obviously linked together than those in the first compilation. Whereas those on the first disc really had very little in common and weren't presented chronologically (neither are these ones), at least the selection this time out concentrates on marital arts and ninjas. While not each and every one of these cartoons features someone running around in black pajamas, enough of them do to make it a more understandable collection.

The premise behind these episodes is the same. General Warhawk and his rag tag crew of bad guy terrorists get up to no good and Rambo and his two pals, Turbo and Kat, always manage to get roped into stopping them. Usually at some point during any given episode, Rambo will put on his head band, strap on his combat knife, lace up his boots and get ready for action. This allowed the animators to reuse the same animation for this scene in each episode, and save a few dollars here and there by recycling the same footage. This is pretty common in cartoons, but it seems painfully obvious in this series and each time it happened it had me in stitches as this sequence does a pretty good job of aping the similar sequence from the movies, though the results are a lot less bloody.

At any rate, these cartoons play out nicely despite their very painfully obvious shortcomings. Yeah, you can tell from the second he starts speaking that the guy who does the voice of Rambo is obviously not Sly Stallone and at times you'd swear some of the background characters were literally just copied and pasted out of a G. I. Joe episode but Rambo coasts by on the sheer wackiness of its premise and on its sheer quantity of ninjas and racial stereotypes. Political correctness is not Rambo's forte, it never has been and it never will be, so it kind of seems fitting that all the foreign characters speak in horribly contrived accents and say things like 'With two, you get egg roll!'

While most of the episodes in this set follow the same formula as those in the first volume, there are two that really stand out from the crowd:

Ninja Dog is interesting in that some very white looking Japanese business men who are friends of Rambo's hide a top secret microchip under the collar of Rambo's friend's dog, Pee Wee. When the good ninja, whose name I don't remember, picks Pee Wee up and pets him he comments that 'this dog has the spirit of a ninja.' Thankfully, he's right and he'll get a chance to show just how much of a ninja he really is when he and Rambo team up to fight some bad ninjas on the top of a train.

The second true winner of the set is Pirate Peril. In this thrilling installment, Rambo and his friends head off to Hong Kong to visit some old friends of his. Together, they eat Chinese food on a boat until a gang of scurvy pirate show up and start talking smack. Rambo decides he can infiltrate their organization by pretending to be one of their own but when one of General Warhawk's men blows his cover, he'll have to use many rockets to blow everyone up and save the day.

Each and every one of these eleven episodes is ridiculous but they're not without their camp value and unintentional hilarity. The other episodes in this set are: Enter The Black Dragon, Enter The White Dragon (both of these have lots of ninjas in them), Fire In The Sky, The Iron Mask, The Konichi (ninjas, again), Masquerade, Mephisto's Magic, Night Of The Voodoo Moon, and Raise The Yamamoto. The creators of the series managed to pack so much action into these twenty seven minute long vignettes of violence that plot really doesn't matter.

Video:

The 1.33.1 fullframe image presents the series in its original aspect ratio but it doesn't look like Lion's Gate put any effort into cleaning anything up for DVD. While the animation never looked that great in the first place for this series, the DVD transfer is far from clean – you'll notice print damage and mild smudging on the image throughout playback. Thankfully there aren't any serious issues with edge enhancement and there's only some slight shimmering here and there. There aren't any problems in terms of compression artifacts either, which is nice. Too bad that the elements weren't in better shape for this series, because despite the fact that digital/transfer problems are kept to a minimum, the series still doesn't look so hot.