Company head - and Kyu's wife - Akiko Natsume does not take the news well and sends henchwomen Arisa and Kyouko to bring her husband, the stolen android and her son back. They decide to do this in a helicopter gunship (because they're idiots) and in the crossfire mortally wound Ryuunosuke's newly acquired cat. Kyu looks at the cat, looks at his currently brainless android, and thinks "Hmm..."
And that's how Ryuunosuke ends up with a new big sister. A big sister who can throw treetrunks around and who has to be stopped from chasing mice. With Akiko hellbent on retrieving her son and her stolen hardware Atusko "NukuNuku" Natsume has her work cut out for her.
To sum up the three episodes on this tape
1. Nuku Nuku goes to school and ends up fighting a helicopter gunship.
2. Nuku Nuku goes to the beach and ends up fighting a bloody great mechanical octopus.
3. Nuku Nuku visits the inlaws and ends up fighting a heavily armed Mech.
After Akira had introduced UK audiences to Anime the newly formed Manga Video began capitalising on the attention, releasing a string of titles that tended towards OTT violence and dubious sex. (In all a fairness, they also released daft comedies Project A-Ko and Dominion: Tank Police to significantly less media attention) Naturally the British press were appalled but having managed to convince young British men that "cartoons weren't just for kids" and racked up respectable sales figures in the process, Manga saw no reason to change the winning formula.
Even so, from quite early on there were attempts to introduce the lighter and fluffier side of anime to British audiences and that's where Crusader Video made their one and only attempt at an anime dub.
To the best of my knowledge it's the only dub ever to have featured a Scouse accent and on it's premiere at 1994's Aukcon I can remember it going down very well indeed. Certainly Crusader video were doing a brisk business in Nuku Nuku t-shirts and posters.
Unfortunately the video itself doesn't seem to have fared quite so well. The Manga video "tits n tentacles" crowd weren't interested and the Anime-UK reading hardcore fanbase might have been enthusiastic but there just wasn't enough of them. With one video to their name, Crusader disappeared into the same black hole that would eventually claim Animeigo, Kiseki and Western Connection, among others.
So is the dub any good?
Weeeeelllll...
Honestly, there is no way to describe it beyond "flawed"
There's no attempt to match the lip movements up with the audio, to start with. None whatsoever.
I'm sure I read somewhere that some UK dubs were notorious for having the actors see the script for the first time only when they were in the recording studio and I wouldn't be surprised. It does rather come across like a bunch of fans decided to have a go at dubbing.
To give them credit, everybody concerned does try hard and it pays off more often than you'd expect giving the vid a certain goofy charm. I still think making one of the sidekicks a Liver Bird was a stroke of genius, by the way. She steals every scene she's in. And the source material is entertaining regardless of whatever is going on on the audio track.
If I have a major grip it would be: Who the hell decided to replace the original opening music with what sounds like a pub covers band? The girls in question played live at Aukcon by the way - they were rubbish.
Check it out here:
