Assemble Insert OVA | Retro Japanese Media Retrospective
Anime is an incredibly popular and prolific medium, and such as with any popular and prolific medium, someone, somewhere is poking fun at it. In modern times, 2015's One Punch Man is incredibly popular in large part due to its humorous take on the current "it prints money" juggernaut that is superhero stories, Sorachi Hideaki's Gintama has maintained an impressive stronghold on MyAnimeList.net's popularity chart for years thanks to its constant mockery of other anime and manga, and Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku wo! from Studio Deen saw great success by cause of its parody of anime's recently explosively prolific genre, isekai. These types of works are not a new phenomenon by any means, however, as the 90s saw similar kinds of works such as Irresponsible Captain Tylor and Blazing Transfer Student. In 1985, a mangaka named Masami Yuuki threw his hat into the parody ring with the one volume manga Assemble Insert, published in AniParo Comics. Four years later, the small subcontracting studio Studio Coa created a two episode OVA of Masami's manga, which we will be discussing today.
Now Masami Yuuki may not be a name that all old school anime fans are familiar with, but his work definitely should be. As the original creator of the 1988 Mobile Police Patlabor manga, Masami is a member of the anime collaboration group Headgear, which has worked on every anime adaptation of Patlabor as of the time of this writing. If Patlabor doesn't wring any bells, one of the other members of Headgear is one Mamoru Oshii, best known for directing the 1984 film Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, Jin-Rou in 1999, and of course, the legendary Ghost in the Shell film from 1995. Aside from Patlabor and Headgear work, Masami also authored the manga Kyuukyoku Choujin R and Birdy the Mighty, both of which received anime adaptations. The Birdy the Mighty anime would go on to be quite popular in the early United States anime community. Production for the Assemble Insert anime was headed by Toyomi Akimoto from Studio Coa, and one Tarou Maki from Touhoku Shinsha. While Studio Coa is credited as being responsible for work overall on the OVA, some talent was pulled in through connections with the much larger Touhoku Shinsha, such as the Sound Director Date Yasumasa, Mechanical Designers Yutaka Izubuchi (main mechanical designer of the anime Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986) and original creator and director of RahXephon (2002)) and Sadayoshi Morikawa, and Music Director Kawase Akira. The director, however, was in-house talent for Studio Coa, Ami Tomobuki. She would do storyboards for Patlabor works both before and after Assemble Insert, and she was also selected to direct the 1991 OVA adaptation of Masami Yuuki's aforementioned Kyuukyoku Choujin R. However, her most interesting credit is that she would go on to direct the 2003 anime F-Zero Falcon Densetsu, and would actually storyboard the final episode, from which comes Captain Falcon's signature Falcon Punch move. So if you've ever thrown out the burning bird impact in Super Smash Bros., in some small way, you've been touched by her work. Music this time was handled by more friends of Tarou Maki and Touhoku Shinsha, being written by the legendary tag team of Kyouko Matsumiya and Kouhei Tanaka. Together, fans of Studio Gainax will know them best as the duo behind the soundtrack to the 1988 OVA Aim for the Top! Gunbuster. Kouhei Tanaka is a name anyone interested in the music side of the anime industry should know, being the writer of songs such as "We Are!" and "We Go!" from the anime adaptation of Eichirou Oda's landmark manga One Piece, "Makafushigi Adventure" from the original 1986 Toei adaptation of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball, and "JoJo: Sono Chi no Sadame" from the 2012 anime adaptation of Hirohiko Araki's Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Comparatively, Kyouko Matsumiya has a less illustrious career, with her final credited work being a cover of the 1983 Hidemi Ishikawa single "Hey! Mister Policeman", which was used in the 2010 anime Heaven's Lost Property: Forte. However, funnily enough, readers of this blog will actually know her as the writer of "Tomoe" from episode 37 of Cardcaptor Sakura, which I wrote about (in retrospect, in less depth as I should have) in my discussion on that show. Last but not least, the screenplay was adapted from Masami Yuuki's writings by the late Michiru Shimada. Michiru would be best known to anime fans of the early 2010s, as the lead for series composition for the 2012 adaptation of the Studio Key visual novel Little Busters! and the 2017 TV anime original Little Witch Academia, but the bulk of her work was in the 80s and 90s, where she scripted roughly a fifth of the episodes of the anime adaptation of Akira Toriyama's 1980 manga Dr. Slump, 20+ episode of the 1986 Dragon Ball anime, and a third of the anime adaptation of Nobuhiro Watsuki's 1994 manga Ruroni Kenshin. Interestingly, of this main staff, Michiru was the only one to not work on any other Masami Yuuki manga adaptations.
Assemble Insert is a series that is both really hard and really easy to recommend to people. On one hand, it's a short two episode OVA with a pretty high quality voice cast on both sides of the pond, fairly good animation, a fun story with tons of dumb jokes that aren't lost in translation, and is overall a pretty fun time. On the other hand, the story is also one of the most "product of its time" pieces of media I've ever watched, and not all of those products are going to strike a chord with people who didn't sit through one hundred and fifty three episodes of Dragon Ball. Even aside from the very specifically 80s anime and Japanese pop culture tropes the short is written around, Assemble Insert is just kind of a weird piece of media. I haven't found any writings in magazines or anything about it, but from breaking down the staff list, it seems like the guys at Touhoku Shinsha found Masami Yuuki's old goofy one shot manga while they were working the Mobile Police Patlabor: Early Days OVA (the first episode of which was released in April of 1988) and thought it would be fun to adapt it. Now, why they chose to adapt this random manga one shot instead of Masami's other actually popular manga, Kyuukyoku Choujin R, is anyone's guess, especially considering that Studio Coa went ahead and did just that a year later without the Touhoku Shinsha guys' involvement. So just the fact that this OVA was even made is strange, but that's to say nothing about the strangeness of the actual content of the project itself. A part of me wants to believe that the entire thing was made just to justify having Hiroko Kasahara (VA of protagonist Maron) and Maria Kawamura (VA of rival idol Kagiri Sonoba) film a sports drink parody commercial. The other part of me knows that the accordion joke from about halfway through episode one was turned into a seven minute gag on the official Assemble Insert soundtrack release.
The fact that I even found about the this OVA the way I did is an anomaly. YouTube randomly decided that I would really want to watch TopDanoAnime's "25 Anime to watch in Quarantine" video, and while they weren't wrong, because of course I'm going to watch a video with Misty May from Otaku no Video as the thumbnail, it was weird since I haven't watched a "top anime to watch" type video in years and years. As if I need my backlog to get any longer than it already is. But entry number 8 on his list caught my eye; an energetic looking OVA from Winter 1989 with a style that felt vaguely familiar. A quick Google search told me that both episodes were on YouTube, and an hour later I had officially begun my trek into the rabbit hole that is this obscure piece of media.
So far, I really haven't talked about the actual show itself, save for the little blurb at the beginning. It's not that the show itself presents nothing to discuss, but the fact that everything surrounding its existence is much more intriguing. But the story of Assemble Insert really feels like a mashup of what would eventually be Masami Yuuki's three most popular works; Mobile Police Patlabor, Birdy the Mighty, and Kyuukyoku Choujin R. R's part of that is the most surface level, as the OVA adds three cameos from the series (the show that Buka Ni and Buka Shi are watching in the video shop at the beginning of episode 1, the guy with the bike at the beginning of episode 2, and the quick shot of the two guys sitting in the front row with cameras during the music awards show). According to an uncited Wikipedia entry of an untranslated manga, these cameos are apparently in turn, since Chief Hattori actually appeared in the first volume of the Kyuukyoku Choujin R manga. But the strings that would eventually become Patlabor and Birdy are pretty clear cut. "A story about a group of low level government employees" and "a story about about a girl with super strength that fights evil" isn't explicitly indicative of the direction that Masami's later works would go (especially in the case of Birdy the Mighty), but it does show that as early as 1985, these ideas were somewhere in the mangakas brain. That makes it interesting to look back on in retrospect, and its not implausible that this is what the guys who pitched adapting the manga were thinking about. After all, the first Patlabor OVA had already come out by this time, and perhaps someone thought it would be cool to adapt the "spiritual predecessor" of sorts. But unless I find some interviews or articles, that's just another theory with about as much weight as the "they just wanted to do a Lipovitan D parody" one.
Now, a last interesting bit of note actually ties this OVA into the somewhat theoretical central topic of this blog, otaku culture. Anyone who's typed "Assemble Insert" into the YouTube search bar will know that a single cover of the opening song of Assemble Insert exists, by legendary voice actress Kanae Itou playing as her character Elsie from the anime adaptation of The World God Only Knows from 2010. This cover was included in The World God Only Knows: Character Cover Album 2, the second of a two part album of covers of classic bishoujo songs, such as Motto! Motto! Tokimeki! (Tokimeki Memorial, PC Engine, 1994), Platinum (hello again Cardcaptor Sakura, anime, 1998), Dancing Star (Urusei Yatsura, anime, 1981), and Do You Remember Love? (Super Dimension Fortress Macross, anime, 1982). This is super super weird to me, because even among the other left field picks for the albums (of which Album 2 was mostly comprised of), this one was the most out there. It would have made more sense to me to have Kanae sing something from one of the Birdy anime, since she actually played a character in both seasons of Decode. As far as my (truthfully pretty limited) research goes, no one from the Assemble Insert staff worked on anything to do with The World God Only Knows, so it seems that this random inclusion was the work of one of the ten fans of the work who weaseled their way onto the production team.
This ended being a lot longer than I thought it would be. I kept thinking to myself, "I really don't have much to say about Assemble Insert as a piece of media," but the more I thought about it, the more I released I just really wanted to talk about how weird this piece of media is, setup my blog for talking about more Masami Yuuki things in the future, and kinda-sorta-not-really talking about something related to otaku culture for once. Hopefully next week I'll actually have another post out, but we'll really just have to see.
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