Dirty Pair

In my last review I covered a highly obscure anime that nobody has ever heard of. Today, I'll be looking at an underrated anime that most people have heard of, but relatively few have actually bothered watching. Dirty Pair is a 24-episode TV anime from 1985. It was animated by Sunrise, which is why it looks a lot like Zeta Gundam and other top tier Sunrise anime from the mid 80s. That's also why it uses stock Gundam sound effects in every single episode. Dirty Pair is considered a classic by Gen X and Millennial anime fans around the world. Sadly, the series never received ... an English dub and never aired on American TV. This is a shame since it would have done very well on Adult Swim. A dub project was successfully kickstarted a few years ago and has been in production Hell ever since. Hopefully it's released in the next couple years.

Rather than being based on a manga, Dirty Pair was actually based on a series of pulp novels. It was created as a love letter to "girls with guns" exploitation films, Golden Age science fiction, and women's professional wrestling. The original novelist REALLY likes women's wrestling. That's why the Dirty Pair have the outfits that they do. It's where he got the name "Lovely Angels". The organization the girls work for is the WWWA, which in real life stood for the now defunct World Women's Wrestling Association. If you haven't guessed by now, Dirty Pair isn't the most highbrow anime in existence. This could explain its unfortunate MAL score and hilariously bad Anilist score. Despite what the haters say, this series is very fun.

Dirty Pair is an episodic action/comedy about 2 female bounty in space. That's about as deep as the plot goes. In every episode, Yuri and Kei are hired to do some ridiculous job, kick serious ass, then accidentally cause an absurd amount of collateral damage. Their tendency to cause disaster is why they are feared throughout the galaxy as the infamous Dirty Pair. By the end of the series and OVAs, they have canonically destroyed at least 10 planets and are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. All of this completely on accident due to horrendously bad luck. It's never really their fault, which is what makes it funny. The episodes have a great deal of variety with a couple horror episodes, a jail break episode, a cowboy episode, a serial killer episode, and of course an episode where they need to find a super powered cat that ate a super strength serum. All of these episodes manage to work because Yuri and Kei have great chemistry together and are just plain fun to watch!

Kei is the fiery loud-mouth and tomboy of the duo while Yuri is the more effeminate one. They manage to play off each other very well and their friendship is rather endearing. Yuri and Kei are far from perfect heroines. They're greedy. They're constantly lusting over hot guys. They don't lose sleep over the immense amount of destruction they cause, which would put most Shonen villains not named Lord Freeza to shame. However, they're also highly competent badasses who are cool and confident in their abilities. They're likeable in the way that James Bond is likeable. Old anime often has a bad reputation for being sexist, but Yuri and Kei are never infantilized or put in compromising situations where they constantly need to be rescued. They're the polar opposites of Yuria from Fist of the North Star. While the series does have some fanservice, it's always done in a very light and playful manner that doesn't come across as lurid or creepy. Some of the most explicit fanservice in the whole series is in one of the first few episodes where Kei shows off a backless dress that's cut so low it shows the entirety of her ass crack. It's actually rather charming and funny that she struts around in that outfit with utter confidence and authority!

Should you watch Dirty Pair? YES! Absolutely you should! This anime is packed with solid comedy, cool action scenes, and very good animation for its time. If you like that classic 1980s anime AESTHETIC, you definitely want to watch Dirty Pair! In fact, just drop whatever seasonal you're watching. Do you really need to watch Overlord S5 when you could watch 2 bounty hunter chicks accidentally blow up a planet? I didn't think so.

I watched the Dirty Pair movie like, 10 years ago and that gave me a pretty good idea of what the TV series would be like.

The main characters, Kei and Yuri, are the Lovely Angels who work for the World Welfare Work Association or WWWA as "trouble consultants", i.e. hired mercenaries who fix issues for profit. As per the movie, they are also known by their popular name, the "Dirty Pair" because every mission they solve results in huge amounts of collateral damage.

The TV series was a little dissapointing in several respects. For one, it didn't bring out the total awesomeness of the Dirty ... Pair's destructive powers like the movies did - there is no "destruction on a massive scale from a relatively minor mission" (except for the first episode). There is destruction, but nowhere in the scale of what is seen in the movies. The TV episodes are also very short so plot development feels very rushed in most episodes.

The only positive is some additional character development. The episode about Billy Galet (Yuri's old love) was particularly well done, but it was an outlier as the rest of the TV episodes didn't go that deep. If you only watched the TV episodes you'd think Kei and Yuri were "girls" only interested in (1) Men (2) Dating (3) New Clothes (4) Bonuses and (5) Vacations. But in reality both women are much more complex characters than that and it didn't come through in the TV series.

Additionally the animation is very sub par and "flat". It might have been ok in the 1980s or mid 1990s but when you take it into the 2000s it falls far short. The music is mediocre also.

Overall, I am a Dirty Pair fan because the girls are "sassy" trouble consultants and it's always nice to see an anime where the heroines are sexy, good at their jobs and feminine without being overly cutesy. The only drawback is the TV series didn't exploit this fully.

I am hoping that the updated "Dirty Pair Flash" or other OVAs will show the Dirty Pair to their full potential because as "we will fix things but oops we blew up (insert item, equipment, building, structure or planet here) something in the process" idea is a good one. All in all, if they made a live action Dirty Pair movie it would probably be great, if the correct actresses can bring the characters to life. The TV series in itself does not fully live up to its potential plot, character or animation wise.

Great vibe; good visual; decent animation; and nostalgic. but I do not recommended it.
This anime followed the classic 80' TV format which is one stand alone story per episode, there is nothing wrong with this format a lot of good animes adapted well but not this one. There is no story line or bigger pictures, it won't make a difference if you watch the 24 episodes in random orders (to be fair there is a story lasted 2 episodes). In short, occasionally there are interesting ideas but Dirty Pair failed to built up anything exciting in a short 24 min(20 min without op, ed, ... and ad break) time spend from start to finish which only makes it feels more unsatisfying and disappointing, and then copy and paste the feeling 23 more times and that is the sum up of Dirty Pair.
If Dirty Pair is going to be re-write in 2023 it will be really interesting cause it got many thing right from setting stand point, the pair protagonist futuristic space setting... man Dirty Pair is a shame.