Pay no attention to the fact that it’s September 14! Here’s the completely punctual and not-at-all-delayed August episode of GME! Anime Fun Time. In this episode, Tom and I join forces with Gerald Rathkolb of Anime World Order to talk about ancient, out-of-print, unloved science fiction cartoons. CLICK HERE or on the Laser disc cover above to download our discussion of Crusher Joe in both its movie and OAV forms.
Final Thought:
Yes, this was the first animated appearance of the Dirty Pair.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
So is CRUSHER JOE like, a classic? It hasn’t shown up on my ITunes yet, Paul, so I haven’t heard it….
Opinions are somewhat divided on that one, Tim.
Both Layzner and Gorg have been subbed recently. There are three or four groups have that are dedicated to the old stuff. Them plus Discotek do indeed make it a good time to be a fan of 80s anime.
Haven’t listened to the whole thing yet, Paul (RL – I has too much of it!), but from what I did hear it sure sounds a lot darker than DIRTY PAIR…..
Aside from everything being covered here, I see the old “Kidpix” dub is never covered, and probably for a good reason, I know it has elsewhere. I hate to say the first I ever heard of Crusher Joe was from Dave Merrill and his “Bad American Dubbing” videos from Corn Pone Flicks! I had to get a copy of the “Crushers” dub just to see how bad it was, the opening alone should be an indication.
I just love the voice they saddled Joe with that makes him sound like any of Eddie Deezen’s roles in cartoons (which is to say the nerdy kid). More info of this abomination could be found here…
http://www.anime-games.co.uk/VHS/anime/crushers.php
Eventually I picked up both the movie and OVA’s when AnimEigo had their final sale of laserdiscs they were throwing out around the beginning of the millennium. It was worth it.
I was certainly aware of Crusher Joe prior to B.A.D. but certainly “I’m the leader of this team, cause I’m the WHINIEST!” and “aah, he shot me with SILENT INVISIBLE BULLETS!” occupy a more prominent spot in my mind than the actual plot and character details of the series.
As Gerald and Paul noted, the strengths and shortcomings of Crusher Joe are in a way the same as that of everything YAS has made. Guy’s a top-rate illustrator and animator, but something vital’s missing from his writing and direction.
It’s actually a little hard to gauge what the most popular AWO episodes are since we didn’t switch over to Libsyn until 2009, about 3-4 years after we’d started. Our Crusher Joe episode was from 2006, so at best I only have half the data for it, but realistically most of the listens come when the episode is newly released. I really should check our download stats more often. Had I done so, perhaps I would have noticed that we lost something like 75% of our listeners over the span of one episode back in November of last year due to a change in the iOS Podcasting app. Perhaps to a lot of people it looks like we hadn’t released any new episodes?
“It’s actually a little hard to gauge what the most popular AWO episodes are since we didn’t switch over to Libsyn until 2009, about 3-4 years after we’d started. Our Crusher Joe episode was from 2006, so at best I only have half the data for it, but realistically most of the listens come when the episode is newly released. I really should check our download stats more often. Had I done so, perhaps I would have noticed that we lost something like 75% of our listeners over the span of one episode back in November of last year due to a change in the iOS Podcasting app. Perhaps to a lot of people it looks like we hadn’t released any new episodes?”
Wouldn’t surprise me.