Sixth Anniversary Special: Oban Star Racers Mini Review (multi-nation anime)
July 24th, 2008 by Bad Jew
This is All Ages stuff; official series website
This website started six years ago. I try to avoid thinking about this. That means for 25% of my life, I’ve been feeling guilty about not writing enough for it. I really try to avoid thinking about my terrifying, terrifying age. But when my thoughts turn to my own mortality (such as when I watch VH1’s I Love the New Millennium and watch Hal Sparks try to come to grip with 9/11), my memory reaches back to the summer of 2002 when we started this site. Oh, what times they were, our heads filled with mild anticipation for the 2002 Winter Olympics and post-Dot-Com-Crash excitement!
While me, Lianne, NotHayama, and the less-involved staff members were coming up with the idea for this site, we were all excited by something else as a collective: a short, two-minute preview of a show called Molly Star Racer. We had to watch a terrible RealPlayer version of it, but through the magics of the youtubes, you can go back in time and watch what we watched, hear what we heard.
What was unique about the Molly Star Racer trailer we saw in 2002 was that it was a French production, but one that took about 9 metric tones of influence from Japan. Besides the action-packed nature of the show, it featured a host of traditional anime tropes: chibi transformations, a plot that revolved around tournaments, and most importantly, a Japanese-language song.
Then came 5 long years of production hell. I’m not exactly sure what happened; Wikipedia says some things, the production company’s webpage says some things (mostly in French), and crazy people on the internet say some things. Along the way, Molly Star Racer transformed into Oban Star Racers.
Oban Star Racers, which currently airs on JetEx in North America and which has been released on DVD, is the eventual outcome of Molly Star Racer. What’s interesting about Oban is that it follows a traditional shounen story arc: tournament after tournament to become the best x (in this case, x = best racer in the universe). If the main character, Molly, and her team win the most Dragon Balls…I mean races, they get one wish! I think the plan is for Earth to use the wish to destroy some enemy alien species that’s attacking the planet or something.
I think it’s interesting that while the plot is traditional shounen, it has a female lead. It’s an interesting mix and it’s probably a good thing to have more strong girls on children’s television. That’s not to say that Molly is a perfect role model for the young ‘uns. I like her fashion, but she might be bearing a bit too much midriff for a 15-year-old in space. Also, she has torpedo boobs - not that I’m looking at these kinds of things. She also gets crushes on everything single thing resembling a man (including various aliens). Of course, this makes sense; Molly has daddy issues up the wazoo. It’s actually kind of awkward, these daddy issues, considering that her father - the manager of the racing team - isn’t actually aware that Molly is his daughter. It’s not that he doesn’t know he has a daughter, it’s just that he’s a busy man and might have forgotten what she looked like since he sent her to boarding school a few years earlier.
What impresses me most about this show is that it isn’t entirely predictable. The show looks predictable for just long enough before pulling a really good switcheroo. I know of very few shows that will do that, and I’m a fan of anything that keeps me on my toes. I know I’m not the only one, since Oban has a pretty strong fanbase…although when I did some Googling, out of 426 fan fics, 35 of them are rated M. God, I hate people. Luckily, I found no count-down timers ’till when Molly is 18, or else I would have had to destroy the internet and all who have ever touched it.
Educated impression: Look, I understand this is a kids’ show. Kids’ shows have one purpose: to fill time between toy commercials. But if you’re going to watch a kids show, it might as well be a good one. I think we all believe that the kids’ shows we grew up on are the best. I firmly believe that X-men taught a generation of kids that (1) racism is bad and (2) fear Apocalypse like nothing else you’ve ever known, and Batman: The Animated Series gave me a lifetime love of art deco and square chins. But Oban Star Racers is frankly a great show for both kids and people like me, who still think they’re 16. (Bad Jew)
I genuinely loved this show as it had loads more substance than a very similar american attempt @ the whole anime thing, Avatar: The Last Airbender. Not that I didn’t enjoy that show,either.
Generally, the characters were what drove this show along during the kind of forgettable and far to quick racing sequences and generic tournament storylines of the earlier half of the series. Molly is an angsty teenage girl but she feels like a realistic angsty teenager and her voice actor does a great job in the dub of making her sound angry but confused and sad, isntead becoming this obnoxious rebel without a cause sorta kid. Also the character dynamics were all pretty well done and interesting, specifically the relationship between Molly and her father.
And yeah, I did get surprised by the developments in the show. Mostly, I didnt expect a certain scene between Molly and her father until MUCH later in the series/the end of the series but it happened pretty early on. Also I expected something way more predictable and unpleasing to be the resolution between the love triangle but ended up being completely pleased with the way it ended. I was really impressed by how all the characters were handled and the level of drama this show had for something that has such a youthful looking art style. I was expecting Beyblade and I got Slam Dunk!