That Stupid Club

Come Mar and Apr and it’s the typ­i­cal moment where we’re being INNUDATED with new anime, and the ever pop­u­lar (and often deli­ciously crappy) mecha genre is going into fac­tory over­time mode. We already have the some­what impres­sive Rei­deen (con­sid­er­ing its prog­en­i­tor mate­r­ial), and quite a few barrel-bottom scrap­pers (like the hilar­i­ous Voltron knock­off Dan­cougar Nova that doesn’t even go for the magic num­ber 5 for the use­less gestalt parts), but that’s not the focus for this lit­tle piece…

Heroic Age sounds suit­ably pulpy as a title, and from all indi­ca­tions it seems to be exactly that. In recent years we’ve had some resur­gence with both the grand space opera and the real­ism sub-genres in the area of sci-fi, what with efforts like Gun­buster II and the Crest/Banner of the Stars (com­ing on the heels of the genre clas­sics like Leg­end of the Galac­tic Heroes) for the for­mer and Plan­etes and Star­ship Oper­a­tors for the lat­ter. Heroic Age is a some­what schiz­o­phrenic com­bi­na­tion of both these areas, as we’ll soon see.

Our story begins in apoc­ryphal fash­ion, with one of the series’ char­ac­ters giv­ing us the cus­tom­ary info­dump nar­ra­tive on the grand scope of things. In vague fash­ion we get the spiel on an advanced alien race called the Golden Tribe (given the way Marvel-esque cos­mic enti­ties are tagged, this isn’t as howlswor­thy as it seems) that issues a clar­ion call to the younger races in the primeval past, and 3 “younger” races answer in suit­ably stir­ring fash­ion in the race to the stars and domin­ion over all things mate­r­ial. After weigh­ing up the sit­u­a­tion our glow­ing plot devices decide to move on (another plane? uni­verse? col­lege party with brewskis?), but a wee fact snares their atten­tion: pesky homo sapi­ens has joined the party late (pre­sum­ably get­ting the memo from the local plan­ning depart­ment on Alpha Cen­tauri in time).

Some con­fus­ing con­fla­tion of time and cir­cum­stance hap­pen, and our res­i­dent super­friends are seen muck­ing around in a ruined human craft that has landed on an uniden­ti­fied world, and would you know it, there’s a human babe in your typ­i­cal swad­dling clothes there for the pick­ing. Our Golden Tribus mem­bers, in a stun­ningly obvi­ous reverse spoof of Super­man, whisks him away.….

Cue the present…

The human ves­sel Arg­onaut (suit­ably named once the nature of its mis­sion is clear) is out on a long trip through the cos­mos, and they’re on short sup­plies. Aboard is our main female char­ac­ter, the princess Deianeira, and she has cer­tain psy­chic gifts that she uses to scan nearby space for the mys­te­ri­ous object of their labo­ri­ous quest, while fol­low­ing the usual cryp­tic clues and a related dis­tress bea­con sig­nal. 2 facts become salient, that Deianeira is rul­ing over her crew/nation in matri­archial fash­ion and she and the crew are des­per­ately search­ing for sal­va­tion in a lop­sided war (no, there are no Vipers around. At least, not in this ep.) In a turn of events very con­ve­nient to the viewer, they’ve dis­cov­ered the planet they’ve been look­ing for, and an armed scout­ing party are sent down with the princess.

In the ruins of a ship (dum dum dum DUUUUUM) they dis­cover a wild-haired child alone that whim­si­cally refers to the mal­func­tion­ing ship AI as Mother (either through being left alone too long or out­right adorable insan­ity), but no real clues as to who he is or why the ship is there, beyond the yet-to-be ana­lyzed ship log. We also get a glimpse of our hope­fully non-Odious Comic Relief pair­ing, the psy­chic twins Malyl and Talyl and aides to the Princess (one of them being voiced by the fami­lar kender voice of Rie Kugimiya) as well as the token male side­kick, the Junos Knight Iolaus. Before the search party can ques­tion the wildling, the plot moves onto the gatecrashers.…

.…who are the delight­fully named Bronze Tribe, who seems to be at least a com­po­nent of the war effort that’s act­ing against the humans. Tak­ing a page from the Borg Rule­book for Geo­met­ric Star­ship Con­struc­tion, they take to the cos­mos in mono­lithic plan­e­toids, and the Arg­onaut, caught in orbit when one such ship bears down on them whilst the party is still earth­bound, retal­i­ates in typ­i­cal space opera-ish fash­ion: sat­u­ra­tion fire. It doesn’t work on the plan­e­toid, and enough grunt units slip through the point defence blan­ket to enter the planet’s atmosphere.

The search party are soon sur­rounded by the aliens, who look to have escaped from a Star­craft or Star­ship Trooper movie set. Things look grim, but it’s only the first episode! Pre­dictably enough, the wild­ing turns Hulk and invokes/summons/becomes pos­si­bly the wanki­est giant walk­ing bag of bolts in anime since Ideon and the Gun­busters. Run­ning amok, the metal beast soon clears the ring in a mat­ter of speak­ing, and Deianeira con­firms our big, lethal Iron Giant is what they’ve been look­ing for, whilst leav­ing quite a few ques­tions unanswered.

QUICK VERDICT: There’s noth­ing out­stand­ingly orig­i­nal about what is on show in this dish, but it does blend together space opera-ish ele­ments (the­matic, visual and plot-wise) from Star Wars, BSG, Gun­buster, Ban­ner of the Stars and even Lens­man with mixed suc­cess. The action cer­tainly moves along in a brisk fash­ion (usu­ally the case given it’s the first episode for a non-franchise series), and there’s a refresh­ing lack of any­thing remotely emo-ish, but that may change once the series devel­ops. The series does have major pluses in that the plot and cer­tain ele­ments of the mecha are intrigu­ing enough to draw in view­ers and it’s evi­dent that the sto­ry­board­ers don’t take the char­ac­ters too seri­ously, which always helps in a pulp set­ting that has inde­ter­mi­nate quality.