Hyper-Psychic Geo Garaga

It was a boring rainy afternoon that I found myself watching Garaga. There was nothing else good on and this was an anime title I had never seen before so I thought, why not. The story at first wasn’t too bad, a little boring but not terrible. A cargo ship crash lands on a distant back-water planet (Garaga) which is inhabited by monsters, ape-men and mysterious people who have psychic abilities, who all seem to be engaged in a civil war with one another. We see how the stranded crew struggle against an environment they are not familiar with and try to find a way ... off the hostile planet. Sounds like a typical b-movie you’d find on the sci-fi channel. But then the story begins to go all over the place, with the introduction of power hungry generals in cahoots with the evil psychics and androids who want to take over the world. Half way through the movie, the story transforms into a laughable fiasco. It’s as though the writers had a few story concepts and decided to awkwardly combine them all and then have no idea how to conclude such a story. This ultimately led to a really rushed ending. Well at least the characters should be good right? No, not really. You get a large group of characters but none get much backstory and when they do, it is presented in some pitifully bad expository dialogue. Most of them are there to die or do a 180. It seems that almost everyone has their own agenda for coming to Garaga. The only characters who stick out to me were Jay, Farla, Randy and Min (mostly due to their English voice actors). The villains are barely memorable as they had nothing to them and their motivations are forgettable or never clearly explained. I usually like 80’s music but even I will admit that the soundtrack in this is pretty corny. The animation is dated and the battle sequences vary from lame to entertainingly lame. The only saving grace for this movie has to be the English dub, which actually made this anime somewhat enjoyable. Seriously, I would have dropped this movie 20 minutes in if it wasn’t for that hilarious bad dubbing provided by the one and only Central Park Media.