Hyper Combat Unity Dangaioh, or simply, Dangaioh, is another in a long line of anime releases that focuses on large mecharobots that destroy everything in their path while fighting some obviously demented enemy. The movie here is a combination of two episodes from a series that played about 10 years ago in Japan. In it, 4 young humans from different worlds have been found to display psychic powers. In X-Men fashion, a weird doctor/professor trains them into becoming an elite fighting force that is said to be the most powerful in the Universe. When the four warriors join into the one large mech (AKA: Dangaioh), they are capable of beating all opponents. In this volume, the enemy decides to attack on a non-traditional front and weaken the group from within by exploiting their human frailties and emotions.

The movie started off with a prologue that explained what had happened to date. It lasted about 12 minutes which tells you how much must've went on before these two episodes took place. I don't want to spoil anything for y'all so I'll just say that there's a bit of interesting story here although not enough to make this worth purchasing for anyone but a fanatic anime lover.

Picture:

The picture was presented in full frame format and looked like it had some damage due to age. The dvd transfer itself was okay, if not top of the line, with no recurring artifacts.

Sound:

The sound choices here were either 2 channel stereo or 5.1 but no original Japanese audio track was available. I usually prefer to have both but issues involving copyrights generally get in the way of the lesser titles so you have to take what you can get. A friend who's been into anime for a long time told me the dub track presented here was not very accurate to the original source material but I have no way of checking that so I reviewed it as a standalone release.

Extras:

There were trailers to some Manga releases as well as a few very interesting looking Palm Pictures dvds that I might have to check out (Scratch, Dark Days, and OSC-Dis Videos). There was also a dvd catalog for Manga and a paper insert in the dvd case with a chapter listing.

Final Thoughts:

Because the movie comes from a few of the middle episodes of the original series, you "know" the outcome is going to have the good guys win so the dvd has to rely on the various elements of story telling to attract an audience. The episodes were originally titled, The Spiral Knuckle Of Tears, and Gil Burg: Demon Of Revenge. Like most anime, there were plenty of plot holes and continuity problems as well as weaker than normal source material. Still, the show wasn't bad and I'd suggest it as a rental for those who like mech-based anime. The mech designs weren't bad at all and the action was pretty good although the use of swear words seemed more like an attempt to curry favor with young kids (the "wow, they said..." factor). If generic mech combat anime is your thing, it's worth a rental but Pioneer's related series is probably a better buy.