The Mike Toole Show

SNK-Hole

It took me ages to track it down. I'd been after this particular ONA that was briefly broadcast online, but region locked to Japanese s. The eventual DVD release wasn't sold as a stand-alone product, but included as a bonus item with a related video game. One big wrinkle: when the game was released, the DVD, intended as a pack-in for customers at GameStop, wasn't finished, so it didn't arrive with the game. Something like two months later, copies finally showed up for buyers of the game, but in drastically short supply.

So, how did I finally obtain King of Fighters: Another Day? eBay, actually. The Japanese DVD wasn't sold separately from the game, but some enterprising reseller had separated the two, and so for the princely sum of about fourteen dollars, I had my prize. There are actually a number of pack-in anime like this, brief OVAs or featurettes sold exclusively with other products like toys and games. They're almost uniformly a huge pain in the ass to find, be they the .hack OVAs that came with the SNK's anime based on fighting games.

Street Fighter, the 1987 video game from CAPCOM, features one playable character, Ryu (two if you count Ken, the palette-swapped player 2 version) and ten bad guys to punch and kick your way past. The story is extremely rudimentary, with only occasional character background details revealed. Street Fighter II, the 1994 animated film, features sixteen major characters from the sequel. Its story concerns a pair of nomadic shotokan karate champs teaming up with an INTERPOL agent and a revenge-seeking air force pilot to topple a southeast Asian drug lord. I'm fascinated by this progression, by this compulsion to take these absurd ciphers and walking stereotypes and give them a complicated backstory. I'm most fascinated by the way this pattern repeats, with very little deviation, across more than a dozen separate anime based on fighting games. See, it's not just Street Fighter II. A lot of people think, “well, Street Fighter II is the first anime based on a fighting game, right?” Nope, that was actually Fatal Fury.

Most people who've watched these things will tell you that the Fatal Fury anime OVAs and film are amongst the best in the genre. Masami Ōbari, who retooled SNK's iconic character artwork for animation and directed the Fatal Fury theatrical film, isn't exactly a story guy, but he knows how to animate a big fight or chase scene. The plot, based on a 1991 video game where you can only actually play as three characters, is about a tough guy with a baseball cap (we'll call him “Baseball Cap Man” even though his name is Terry) and his brother, a fellow tough guy with long hair (“Long Hair Dude” aka Andy) must get revenge from their father and mentor's rival, a dangerous, amoral martial artist named Geese Howard (no clever nickname for him—“Geese” is rough enough). They're aided in their grim journey to bring down their father's killer by a boisterous muay thai practicioner and a busty lady ninja.

I'm a fan of this stuff—Viz's old VHS release of these Fatal Fury shows was an early favorite of mine, when I was just starting to really get into anime. Both of the OVAs and the movie are dumb and repetitive, but fun and flashy. What's interesting is that, in the past couple of years, I've had the chance to talk to multiple people who'd worked on them. Hiroyuki Kanbe, who'd worked on both the second OVA and the film, spoke of a show that really helped him develop his action animation chops. Both men spoke highly of Masami Ōbari; Kanbe, in particular, was emphatic about how much he liked working with the famed animator, and how much he learned. So in a few surprising ways, these Fatal Fury animations have carried some influence forward.

There's a long held rumor related to Obari (and this is just a rumor; it kinda sounds too amusing to be true, so I tend to doubt it) that, at a convention party, an inebriated Battle Arena Toshinden, where it was his job to adapt Kotobuki's character designs for animation, which is why the line's got that sense of truthiness. There's a grain of truth there, at least in of Obari's character designs. Just look at key art from the first Fatal Fury OVA, compared to the film.

It's pretty drastic, isn't it? Chins and noses narrow, and eyes get progressively huger. And then there's Obari's later character design work on Virus Buster Serge.

I've read these character designs described as “insectoid,” which sounds about right. Amusingly, Kotobuki's changed his angle; his recent work on Gundam: The Origin is completely different from his old style. It's refined and sharp and not at all cartoony and bug-eyed. How about that story about Nakazawa's little jab, though? Do you think it's true? I read it on the internet, so it must be.

But we were talking about Battle Arena Toshinden, right? Yet another fighting game anime, Tōshinden is a notorious shitshow that seems to have suffered something just short of a staff revolt between episodes one and two. Just take a gander at Ellis in episode one versus Ellis in episode two:

Yeah, you can see that something broke along the way; Obari's credited as series director, but he only actually directed the first one. Tōshinden protagonist Eiji isn't seeking revenge, but that's okay—his rival, Duke Rambert, totally is! Other than that, the Gundam Build Fighters Try. I like his action cartoons, but I think robots are still Obari's greatest strength.

Fatal Fury's success as an adaptation meant that producer SNK (that's Shin Nihon Kikaku, or “New Japan Project,” not Studio Comet rendered the animation—they'd handled some duties on the Fatal Fury stuff, so you'd think they'd do a great job again, right?

Yeah, not so much. Art of Fighting is one of those productions that was so troubled that the original off-air TV broadcast version is highly prized, because a number of cuts had to be thrown out and re-animated for the home video release. It's nowhere near as egregious as champions of the “fix it for video” race like YouTube is the one that features Hamasaki as Yuri. Yep, there's here name right there.

Art of Fighting's dumb-looking characters and improbable plot twists have kinda conspired to make it a cult favorite. Part of the reason why illegal copies are all over YouTube is because it's the choice of shouty YouTube dudes everywhere (I will never understand these YouTube dudes, and deeply envy their seeming popularity). It's easy enough to see why—the main duo, Ryo and Robert, are an obvious ripoff of Street Fighter's Ryu and Ken, and the climactic battle involves Ryo using a swimming pool diving board to leap 20 feet in the air and grab onto a fleeing helicopter. Ryo and Robert aren't out for revenge—they're just small time detectives in the fictional American city of South Town, until a zany mix-up sees them trying to get Ryo's sister back from a crime boss. So I guess later on, they're going for revenge, alright? I'm sure there's some revenge in there somewhere.

SNK kept going with the TV specials with 1994's Nakoruru remain unreleased, a scathing indictment of just how drab the franchise is. After all, we got Gowcaiser, but not all of Samurai Shodown?!

So how did that King of Fighters anime turn out? It's actually got some pretty good bona-fides—its animation comes courtesy of Production I.G, and the action scenes are top-notch. Unfortunately, it's nature as kind of a sidecar to the video game is really evident—the whole thing is cut into four ten-minute chunks, and each chunk only has about seven minutes of footage, with the rest being a credit reel with a tune by Japanese-Canadian rockers Dakota Star blaring in the background. Still, if you like this stuff, it's good to see characters like Terry Bogard (aged forward here, in his “Dad Version” Mark of the Wolves incarnation) and Mai Shiranui back again. But like many fighting games, the sprawling cast is a little too sprawling. My favorite bit? In the dubbed version, the characters pronounce the name “Soiree” kinda like a Canadian guy saying “sorry,” which made it a lot more fun. Also, I couldn't stop looking at Iori (who wants revenge, natch) and his huge head.

That's troublingly large, right? He oughta get that looked at. There's about half a dozen more fighting game anime, too. On the CAPCOM side of things, there are a multitude of spinoffs and follow-ups to Virtua Fighter, which rises above its rudimentary source material (it came out in the wake of Virtua Fighter 2) by being a zany, Scooby Doo-esque globe-trotting adventure. I own cels from this series, and I'm not sorry.

I guess what fascinates me about these productions is that they're almost never any damn good at all, but they just keep getting made. Some of them sell well, sure, but not all of them, right? Are there other fighting games ripe for anime adaptations? Do you look back and mourn, as I do, the lack of a cheesy OVA version of World Heroes or Fighter's History or Fighting Vipers? Are you hoping that a deal is struck for a Skullgirls anime, because let's face it, that'd probably be pretty damn cool? Kick in a comment!