In the fall of 1996 turn spring of 1997, I was thirteen, and we had just moved from a town I had grown up in for the last twelve years about five hours west in the next state. I did my best to adjust to not being able to see any of the friends and classmates I grew up with, and having been stuck in a Catholic school for half of seventh grade prior after leaving public elementary, I also had to part with at least a half-dozen horny Catholic schoolgirls who were all too eager to jump my nuts. Of course, I didn’t realize this at the time, because my neurodivergent mind was obsessed with video games and science fiction. No teenage pregnancies for me, thank god. Airing at the time however was one Kidou Senkan Nadesico in Japan. A seemingly lighthearted mecha series about a guy and a girl who were friends on Mars, separated, and then reunited during a war where she was a starship captain and he becomes the starship cook. Only, he then ends up being a mecha pilot when they needed to defend themselves against “Jovian Invaders”.
Nadesico became an unwilling sensation among XEBEC’s other catalog of popular shows around that time frame, such as Bakuretsu Hunters, Zoids, Love Hina, and Shaman King. It especially enjoyed popularity in character polls, where Hoshino Ruri sat in the top ten for years, along with Misumaru Yurika. Although the show riffed on popular mecha series like Shinseiki Evangelion, Uchuu Senkan Yamato, Getter Robo, Mazinger, Mobile Suit Gundam, and other mecha, it also did an episode riffing on the 1990 film The Hunt for Red October as it weaved its own plot of scientific exploitation, political strife, tragedy, and war. It’s an amazing classic mecha series more people should watch.
Although I was heavily into Cartoon Network’s “Golden Age” of cartoons, colloquially referred to as the “What-a-Cartoon” era, I was not fully into anime. It would be another three years before I got into anime, and one of the first shows in Japanese with subtitles I was handed on a compact disc, in RealMedia format, was Kidou Senkan Nadesico, by a friend in high school during my junior year. By this time we moved again, 1500 miles east, my parents divorced, and I hated high school with every fiber of my mortal being. So I took this show and watched the first thirteen episodes overnight, barely sleeping. I was engrossed in every aspect of it. My autistic ass mind shoved everything else I gave a fuck about out to accommodate this amazing series, and it stuck with me for a long time.
When it came time to make a theatrical movie, XEBEC partnered with the company who would then take it over in 2019, Production I.G. Satou Tatsuo (Uchuu no Stellvia, Tobe! Isami) reprised his role as director as he did for the TV series, as was Habara Nobuyoshi who did most of the character designs for the show, and the former president of XEBEC, Shimoji Yukinao as producer. Satou also did the script for the movie, and without being able to find much of any old interviews, my guess is that for this movie, they had to kind of raise the stakes a bit in this universe, make it more interesting, and not just parody existing works. A tall order.
The Prince of Darkness immediately opens up to three years after the end of the series, and depicts a massive space battle involving an unknown attacker. You see Jun Aoi, a character from the previous show, XO to Misumaru Yurika and butt of most jokes. But he has no idea what is going on. So what does Yurika’s father and the other admirals do? They dispatch the Nadesico. The Nadesico B, to be precise. Her captain? Hoshino Ruri, the child prodigy and ship’s operator from the series, flanked by two new-ish additions, Saburota and Hari. Together they travel to a colony that is to be the hub of all boson jump space travel under the new United Earth and Jovian Federation truce made after the war. But as Ruri works the inside and Hari works the outside hacking its systems, he accidentally sets off several systems that begin fighting each other, spamming communication windows all over with OTIKA.
Sure enough, Ruri begins to piece together what is really going on in this colony, as the mysterious attacker from before shows up, and begins descending into “Gate 13”. With Subaru Ryoko chasing after, our black-clad hero is revealed to be none other than cook-turn-pilot Tenkawa Akito, who had marginally more balls than Ikari Shinji but was still a big dumb idiot throughout the series. Now, he is our stoic last-action-hero big-guns-guy in a fast mech dubbed the “Black Salena III”. It’s here he unveils the movie’s first big plot twist, Yurika is alive. Well, sorta.
Now, if you were like me when I first saw this movie, which wasn’t too long after I saw the series twenty-five years ago, you are probably confused as to what actually happened with this timeskip. Fortunately for you, they made something that depicts the time between the TV series and the movie. Released on Sega Saturn in 1998 shortly after the movie was the game The Blank of Three Years. Except, it’s all text-based… and it never got localized and released in the west. Huah.
Thanks to modern-day amenities like Youtube playthroughs and ROMs, you can in fact play and experience this game, though no fan translations exist, so you either need to know Japanese, or know someone who can translate as you go. I couldn’t even find a script for it. The TL;DR that I got from some wikis is that most of the Nadesico crew returned to their previous jobs or lives. Yurika and Minato had a bit of a tug-of-war match to see who would take in Ruri, and Yurika won. Akito, Yurika, and Ruri lived together and ran a ramen cart. Akito wanted to marry Yurika, but her father initialed refused, until he challenged him to make him a bowl of ramen worthy to marry his daughter. Akito did, and succeeded, eventually marrying Yurika. However, as the movie notes, their shuttle exploded during their honeymoon, and they were presumed dead.
While it would have been nice to have known the game’s plot going into the movie, it’s not required to watch the movie. Enough exposition is made for you to at least get the basic gist, that there is a cult cabal out there doing weird science on the ditzy captain, and her husband is big mad and coming after them with a ridiculous mech aided by another genetically-modified human girl. Undeterred, Ruri also hatches her own plan to stop the Martian Successors and save Yurika, in the way she knows how. And herein lies some of the rub. If all she needed to do was get the Nadesico C to Mars and hack everything on the planet, why go through the trouble of reassembling the old crew? Obviously to run the ship, but if Omoikane can run the ship, the minimum number of people they really needed to execute this plan were Inez, Rokyo, Hikaru, and Izumi, one to jump them and the three Aestivalis pilots to fight. Alas, it was done largely for nostalgia, and the bit there where Megumi and Co. ran interference and decoy added some spice. But, the ending does feel rushed and kind of short. They kind of imply Ruri is a little too good at her job, and just kinda wraps the thing up quickly, rescues Yurika, but Akito just up and leaves with Lapis, whom we barely meet all of twice in the film with no explanation as to who she is, or even how Akito began working with Erina and Nergal again. This movie really could have benefited from either a followup series, or an OVA that either animates The Blank of Three Years, or expands on the ending of the movie.
Despite the movie having a convoluted plot and bizarre middle section that feels riffed from The Blues Brothers of them trying to get the band back together, I always enjoy a periodic rewatch of this film for a number of reasons. First off, the newer restored Blu-Ray version looks fantastic, just as they did with the series, and makes it much more watchable for little details I never noticed before, like Ruri’s Spock-like facial expressions and gestures in some scenes. Second, although sassy deadpan twelve-year-old Ruri is still the king of drip, fifteen-year-old Captain Ruri can still dish out, and then hack your Gibson for breakfast. She does not play games. Third, despite the plot being convoluted, once you put it all together in your head, perhaps after four rematches, it makes for a pretty fun film when you get down to the starship and mecha combat. You’d almost be pressed to want more.
Instead, the most unlikely source of new Nadesico material we have seen over the past twenty-seven years since this film released is by the people who write the story and dialogue for the Super Robot Wars games. Nadesico has been featured in seven games since debuting in SRW:A in 2001, and The Prince of Darkness has also been in seven games since debuting in SRW:R in 2002. Both titles were on the GBA, and R especially was also the debut of After War Gundam X. The soundtrack slaps.
Because the SRW games mesh together different series plots and characters, you often get some interesting and well-thought out improvements to characters you wouldn’t expect. Evangelion’s Shinji, for example, get the love, care, and attention he deserves while being taught how to BE A MAN by the fucking Shin Getter Robo team of all people. Likewise, Dark Akito gets some lessons in humanity in SRW:V. The fact that they keep going back to Nadesico though a lot shows there is still tremendous popularity with the franchise, and always gives me hope that maybe Production I.G might consider a revival. At quick glance on MAL, most of the principal VAs are still alive and/or active, save for Ichijou Miyuki who played Howmei who passed away in 2023. But even if we just got a new cast and crew and a couple of favorites like Ruri and Yurika, I’d be down for that. At a time when Ranma 1/2 is making a comeback, and other franchises are seeing the potential of rebooting, I am down for this tiny little universe that is still being sustained by mostly giant robot video games.
