Crusher Joe

1983. Movie. 132 min. Science fiction/space adventure. org Haruka Takachiho (novel). dir Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. scr Haruka Takachiho, Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. des Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Shoji Kawamori. -bc

A welcome departure from the heavy drama of Yamato and Gundam and the wistful melancholy of Harlock, Crusher Joe offers fast spaceships, vicious pirates, ray guns, space battles, and monsters, all lorded over by a handsome hero and a pretty sidekick.

In the 22nd century, the toughest jobs in the galaxy are assigned to “Crushers,” private contractors and troubleshooters licensed by the government. Nineteen-year-old Crusher Joe and his team, consisting of seventeen-year-old female copilot Alfin, fifteen-year-old Ricky, and fifty-two-year-old cyborg Talos, are given a rush job to escort a female patient in a cryogenic-suspension chamber to a distant planet. En route, a glitch in the warp drive knocks the crew unconcious and when they wake up, they find their cargo and passengers gone. Determined to get to the bottom of it, they track their client to the planet Lagol, a wide-open colony under the thumb of a pirate gang headed by Boss Murphy. They discover that their patient was a scientist working on a warp system with the potential to control the warp drives of other ships, a device that would be invaluable to space pirates.

With the blessings of Lagol’s president, Joe and his team launch a raid on Murphy’s island fortress, where they rescue Matua, the patient, and manage to revive her. Unfortunately they are all captured, and although Joe and his team manage to break out of their prison, they are unable to stop Murphy from launching to his space station headquarters with Matua. Joe and his team follow to launch an attack and are joined by United Space Force battleships. While his fighters are defending the space station, Murphy is in his control center, forcing Matua to install the new warp system. Murphy then proceeds to use it on the attacking ships, warping several of them back to the planet Lagol, where they immediately crash upon completing the warp. Joe and his team enter the space station and head for the control center in a race against time to stop Murphy’s power grab.

Having done the character design for Mobile Suit Gundam and its crew of disillusioned, war-weary youngsters, director/designer Yasuhiko evidently felt the need to break out and create cocky young leads built for action and fun. Crusher Joe is a remarkably handsome and well-built young hero who even manages to let loose once in a while. He has a pretty partner in young Alfin, a teenage girl who clearly has a crush on him, and the two make an attractive couple on the dance floor of a disco on one of the planets they visit. Among the characters, Joe alone is drawn with great detail, and even though he’s not terribly deep, we can see his shifting moods quite readily in his expressions. There’s a certain look that Yasuhiko’s heroes have, a unique style of linework, and you can see it in Joe and the leads from Yasu­hiko’s later films, Arion and Venus Wars, as well as in his manga creations (e.g., Rebel Sword).

The other characters tend to fall into certain types (muscleman sidekick, hulking henchman, pirate leader, female assassin, corrupt politician, hard-nosed military man, etc.) and are treated with a little more exaggeration, which is just fine as long as realism doesn’t appear to be a high priority and there is a certain amount of broad humor involved. Everyone looks their part, stands out from the others, and does what they’re supposed to do to propel the plot and keep viewers engaged. The one fairly realistic supporting character is the no-nonsense female scientist, Matua, who carries the secret of the warp system.

As for mecha design and space action, Crusher Joe is crammed wall-to-wall with the goodies that fans crave. There are all manner of intricately designed space ships, including the snazzy blue-and-white fighter-cum-freighter craft that Joe and his team pilot, plus all kinds of battleships and small combat craft for the numerous aerial and space battles dotting the film, all beautifully executed with fluid theatrical-quality animation. It’s all set against a dazzling backdrop of gleaming futuristic cities and fortresses on the various planets they visit, with breathtaking space vistas and massive planets streaked with color and atmospheric detail. Since Planet Lagol is part of a three-planetoid system, the sky is often shown with two planetoids visible, including one looming large, as if a full moon was suddenly magnified one hundred times. There are even some imaginative surrealistic effects when the warp drive goes bad and everything goes out of sync. As anime space adventures go, Crusher Joe certainly delivers the goods.

The Ice Prison (1989, OAV, 55 min.)

The Ultimate Weapon (1989, OAV, 55 min.)

After years of portentous space anime like Yamato, Harlock, and Gundam, with their tormented protagonists, weighty themes, and tragic outcomes, Crusher Joe came along and offered an old-fashioned Star Wars–like spectacle of nonstop space action with dashing heroes, cool spaceships, quick trips to different planets, abundant aerial combat, and a climactic battle at a heavily fortified space station. There’s even a John Williams–style orchestral score by Norio Maeda, complete with a stirring, hummable theme that gives the brass section a good workout. Crusher Joe himself doesn’t mope or cry or make speeches, he just flies out there in his spaceship blasting the bad guys and landing on planets to shoot at pirates, jungle monsters, and the robot “hunters” that stalk him. And his partners are with him every step of the way, except for the occasional squabbles, which add a welcome element of comedy to the mix. (If there is any anime precedent for this grouping, it’s the crew of Gatchaman.) At the end of it all, Joe and perky Alfin take a fast air-car ride down a long, winding empty highway, with Alfin clinging to his arm and urging him to step on the pedal and “make it fly!” as the music swells and sends them on their way in a burst of youthful joy.

There’s a distinct distrust of grown-up authority here. Every adult on view either antagonizes the team or has a hidden agenda behind their smiles and good will. Joe and his team provide a perfect vehicle for the kinds of dirty jobs that governments and military officers can’t do, so they find themselves increasingly used by bureaucrats, intelligence agents, and corrupt politicians. Even Joe’s father, the head of the Crusher Council, is not above reproach. Joe barks back at all of them and even lands a punch or two once he figures it all out.

Granted, none of it’s meant to be taken very seriously. Joe and his team get into one scrape after another, but then get out of them with such ease, via a previously hidden weapon or a last-minute out-of-nowhere rescue, that the suspense gradually wears thin, since it’s clear no permanent damage is likely to occur to any of them. But everything moves so quickly and in such high style and light-hearted manner that we welcome this diversion from more overwrought space anime. The only downside is that, at 132 minutes, the constant action goes on just a few battle scenes too long. There are welcome moments of downtime for Joe and his crew, including a memorable disco scene and a sequence at a drive-in movie, but once the real action starts at about the halfway point, there’s no letup and it starts to wear the viewer down. Sometimes, indeed, there can be too much of a good thing.

The movie was followed in 1989 by two fifty-five-minute OAV episodes that concentrate more on action-packed sci-fi story lines and less on the characters and their interaction. “The Ice Prison” mixes a compelling sci-fi premise—how to stop an asteroid penal colony that’s been knocked out of its orbit from hitting a planet—with conspiracy-themed political intrigue and climaxes with rousing space combat that’s as good as anything of its type in competing series. “The Ultimate Weapon” involves an army major transporting a lethal, planet-destroying weapon that’s been captured by renegade officers seeking to disrupt a peace process between two warring systems. Both episodes are considerably more serious in tone than the movie and generate extraordinary suspense. They’re good enough to make fans wish the Crusher Joe franchise could have been continued.

As often as we see spaceships going into warp drive in anime (and live-action space movies in general, for that matter), we almost never see a warp that malfunctions, where colors shift and everything seems to separate as if being pulled apart into different dimensions, as the crew becomes disoriented and falls unconscious. Well, Crusher Joe has just such a scene and it’s a memorable one. (Although later, we find out it was not a malfunction, but a deliberate action by an outside force.) When the ship comes out of it, the crew finds they are seven hundred light years away from where they’re supposed to be, and stunned to learn that their passengers and cargo have vanished. Just at that inconvenient moment, a United Space Force cruiser pulls up to question their presence in the area and demand an inspection.

In another rare sequence for a film of this type, the crew visits a disco, with Joe and Alfin both sporting sexy outfits. Joe drinks up a storm, complaining about the suspension they’ve just received, and eventually Alfin joins in with the drinking and commiserating, much to the horror of Talos and Ricky. Then the two, feeling no pain, head out onto the dance floor to swing and shake and gyrate with the rest of the wild crowd, until, inevitably, someone starts a fight and Joe and his crew wind up tearing the place apart. Given how long in their timelines it took Susumu and Yuki in Yamato or Lt. Noa and Mirai Yashima in Gundam to express their feelings and finally get together, it’s refreshing to see a young couple in space anime having a good time in the movie’s very first half-hour.

Crusher Joe is based on a novel by Haruka Takachiho, the creator of Dirty Pair and a founding member of Studio Nue, which was instrumental in the creation of the Macross franchise. Mecha designs for the movie were provided by Shoji Kawamori, who also created the famous transforming Valkyrie mecha for the Macross series, and later directed Macross Plus. Director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko had previously illustrated Takachicho’s novels for both Crusher Joe and Dirty Pair, and inserted a cameo of the Dirty Pair into Crusher Joe. He designed the characters for the Crusher Joe OAV sequels, but did not direct them.

A scene at a drive-in movie on the planet Lagol provides a few shots of the movie playing onscreen, which constitutes the very first animated appearance of Yuri and Kei, soon to be known as the “Dirty Pair” in an animated series of their own. The voluptuous, scantily clad, bungling crimefighting duo was another creation of Haruka Takachiho, the author of Crusher Joe.

violence Violent action in the battle scenes. Lots of shooting and explosions and some bloodshed. advisory Teenage characters get drunk.