Street Fighter II: V

with Tesshô Genda, Skip Stellrecht, Kirk Thornton
(Manga Entertainment)
by Eric Johnson

Japanese animation can either be outrageously good or agonizingly bad; for some reason there tends to be little middle ground within the genre and I have been deterred from fanatical enthusiasm for this very reason. I had heard that the Street Fighter II full-length animated movie was extremely well done and so it was with great enthusiasm that I received four ninety minute videos called Street Fighter II V. Ironically, the timing could not have been better, since just a week and a half before I had whet my appetite for animation with a Ralph Bakshi movie I had caught on cable; besides, the little Manga man always tempts me with his knowing grin.

Street Fighter II V is a sore disappointment, a children’s television show repackaged for hungry Americans willing to snap at any morsel of animation dangled in front of them. The story centers around Ryu and Ken, the two worst characters the video game has to offer, the animation is mediocre, and there’s a heartbreaking absence of the kind of bonecrushing action I’d hoped for. I hope it’s not too much to ask that an animated series, based on a video game where the barely human pound one another into submission, would show some back-breaking, soul-stealing, larynx crushing humiliation (I remember all those super cheap karate movies on Fortune Cookie Theater when I was a kid and they were fantastic compared to this). A word to the wise,Street Fighter II V is TV-PG all the way.

I would use caution when shopping for Japanese animation. Since they all have cool drawings on the cover, it’s very hard to tell by the packaging what is good and what is crap. I always get suspicious when TV episodes of anything are sold on video. One could easily drop twenty dollars on the worst episode of a good show; paying through the nose for thirty minutes of exposition between action-packed episodes. A good alternative television series to check out is The Guyver, also sold by Manga. Each tape is thirty minutes of hardcore action with huge mutants getting their arms ripped off by a high school student who happened across an impenetrable suit of organic metal. The bottom line: The good stuff is out there but Street Fighter II V is not it. Keep looking because you are bound to run into some crap, but the good stuff is really really worth finding.