Force To Prefecturally Earth Defend

Prefectural Earth Defense Force aka Kenritsu Chikyû Bôeigun came out of nowhere into our anime club screenings of the late 1980s. Back then it was all new and exciting; Prefectural High School Earth Defense Force, as we mislabeled it, was shown with as much fanfare or anticipation as Urusei Yatsura or Vampire Hunter D or Dirty Pair or Zeta Gundam or Macross or Madox 01 or Bubblegum Crisis; it was all new to us.

What made PEDF stand out, even to our profoundly uneducated eyes, was very simple; it’s plain crazy. The thing is funny in a very specific cartoon fashion that transcends language, culture, class, creed, race, religion or national origin.  After 20 years I’m still dropping it onto unsuspecting audiences and getting laughs; a video like that is a rare beast indeed. Sure, it's full of specific Japanese pop-culture references, the kind of references that fill most modern "comedy”.  But here it’s a bonus, not the main attraction; PEDF succeeds in spite of the Varan the Unbelievable sequence or the Rainbowman aside, goofy enough without rubbing your nose in your own otaku stink. 

Chikyû Bôeigun was the original title of Toho's The Mysterians, arguably the first science fiction film highlighting Japan's flavor of mecha-infused SF - spaceships, ray guns, evil aliens, giant monsters, robots – that we’d see parlayed into legions of rubber-suit monster films and silver-suited giant-hero TV shows. Kenritsu Chikyû Bôeigun, on the other hand, is the flip side of Japan’s love of science patrols and sentai teams – a low-budget defense force financed on a small municipal budget, composed of a failed baseball team, a foreign exchange student, and a morally suspect faculty advisor.  Luckily, their adversaries are just as goofy; wanna-be world dominators perhaps equipped with super-scientific weapons and legions of faceless minions, but hamstrung by melodramatic ineptitude. 

1986’s Prefectural Earth Defense Force OVA was, like so many other OAV, based on a manga: Koichiro Yasunaga’s PEDF ran in Shonen Sunday from 1983 until 1985, with a subsequent 4-volume reprint. Yasunaga’s later work includes Kaseijin Deka (Martian Detective) and the superhero spoof Chō Kankaku Analman, which is just as unfortunate as it sounds. He has a fun, active anime-manga style that fits right in with 80s Shonen Sunday, kind of a cleaner, less raggedy version of what fellow Sunday artist Kazuhiko Shimamoto was doing in his contemporaneous Blazing Transfer Student. Both the PEDF comic and the cartoon are infused with an infectious sense of fun, the same kind of nonsensical goofball whack-a-doodlery that you get in the best Urusei Yatsura or Sasuga No Sarutobi comics, infested with nerd-culture shoutouts like chapter titles parodies of Ultra Seven episodes or naming a major character after the composer of Godzilla’s theme music. 

If you’re familiar with the OVA, you know how the manga begins. Warned by a threatening pay-phone call, the governor of an unnamed Kyushu prefecture needs a defense against the world-domination plans of the Phone Pole Team, who have decided to start small and begin their world dominating from the vicinity of the local high school. Thus:  Prefectural Earth Defense Force. Promises of a fat expense account convince high schoolers Morita, Sukekubo, and Akiko Ifukube to abandon their dreams of Koshien glory and instead become an Earth-defending justice league, overseen by math teacher Roberi.  But can their combined strength and clearance-sale uniforms withstand the onslaught of lumber dynasty scion Kisoya Chilthonian Bunzaemon Jr and his Phone Pole Team?  Phone Pole tactical commander Baradagi enlists the super ESP powers of Marker Light – whose psychic abilities are limited to vegetables – to open the assault on decency and good government. Yams fly thru the air and the war for mankind begins; an ever escalating whirlwind of unguided cyborg missiles, beach parties, flying vegetables, mohawked musclemen, faceless minions, and Party Beams. 

Indian exchange student and accidental 8,000 horsepower cyborg Kami Santin escapes from the university hospital and is found by faculty supervisor Roberi, who mistakes Santin for a drunken co-ed.  Santin is duly enlisted into the PEDF, in spite of his hatred of all things Japanese. Before this newcomer is even properly scoped out by our nosy heroes, Baradagi arrives with the Phone Pole Team’s top agent Scope Tsurusaki to try and talk Santin into switching teams, resulting in missile-firing, nose-punching, house-destroying hell breaking loose. 

Santin becomes the focus of the Phone Pole Team’s efforts but world domination is overshadowed by the day-to-day antics of the goofs on both sides. Baradagi goes undercover as a high school student named Ryuko Hara – well, okay, she actually IS a high school student named Ryuko Hara, working part-time for the Phone Pole Team – to create a scandal by seducing Roberi. The Phone Pole Team’s own cyborg-gal Yuko arrives to destroy Santin, who doesn’t want to fight but whose missiles are not always under his control. An after-hours Morita and Baradagi put aside their day-job difference for a date. Ifukube meets her ideal, the Mohawk-sporting beefcake Battle Japan, the PEDF is menaced by the Japanese-language-deficient, crossdressing Baltimore Boys, and Masked New Year blasts his Party Beam which instantly transforms any group of people into a wild New Years party.  Yuko is turned back into a normal human, albeit of a different sex, then changed back into a girl and cloned, while Santin also gets the Christine Jorgensen treatment. 

The PEDF defeats Glycogen X in hand-to-hand karaoke battle, Santin’s lumber exec sister Pamela arrives to sell Santin on the glories of the Phone Pole Team, Baradagi is forced into bicycle tofu delivery hell, and inevitably, everybody visits Los Angeles. Suddenly it’s 1985 and time for the manga to end (apart from a doujinshi sequel). The story doesn’t end there, however; Japan was in the middle of an OAV boom and what more deserving property could there be than Kenritsu Chikyû Bôeigun, I ask you? None, that’s what.

We join the (directed by animation veteran Keiji “Future Boy Conan” Hayakawa) PEDF in the middle of Morita’s earthshaking super science-fiction dream which is helpfully described in the lyrics of the rockin’ theme song by Japanese power pop trio Johnny, Louis & Char (Johnny Yoshinaga, Luis Kabe, and Japan’s national guitar jagoan Char). While Morita and Sukekubo snore, an angry Santin escapes from the local university hospital, our prefectural governor gets his world domination phone call, and all the pieces for Prefectural Earth Defending fall into place. With animation talent like Urusei Yatsura veterans Katsumi Aoshida and Shichiro Kobayashi it’s no surprise we’re in store for UY style bonks, booms, grunts and pows as Santin’s missiles meet Scope Tsurusaki’s Ultra Scope, milk-drinking Chilthonian plays host to the Prefectural Governor’s cute secretary, and nobody’s safe when Santin spots Roberi with Baradagi. 

Santin has a masalah with going off too soon

Before you know it, Santin and Yuko are waking up with all-new aftermarket parts and Morita and Ryuko/Baradagi are walking the streets hand in hand to the wistful sounds of Johnny, Louis & Char as the credits roll.  The direct-to-video format seems perfect for titles like PEDF; the material may not stretch as successfully into a 2-hour feature or a TV season but as a 50 minute OVA you’re left entertained and sad there isn’t more.

PEDF was released on VHS, Beta, the shortlived VHD format, and Laserdisc. As much as it made American fans laugh, it never achieved the status of fellow ’86 releases like Guyver, MD Geist, Megazone 23 part 2, or Gall Force.  However, when the North American anime boom finally hit in the mid 2000s and everything else was getting an American release, PEDF was always on the top of our wish list. Finally in 2006 ADV decided to take some of the money they were throwing at that live-action Evangelion movie (how’d that work out for you?) and spend it on releasing Prefectural Earth Defense Force as a limited edition subtitle-only DVD, sold direct through ADV’s website.  Promotional and advertising for the release was apologetic and/or nonexistent; news sites claimed it was of interest only to old-school die-hards who might have seen it fansubbed back in the day and that modern audiences would not understand all the references or the parodies, and henceforth would not enjoy it. This is of course complete nonsense; audiences completely unfamiliar with any sort of Japanese animation have been laughing themselves stupid over PEDF for years, and the practically top-secret ADV release sold out in about ten minutes. Try buying it today for less than $100. Go on, try. I’ll wait.

The cyclical nature of history is proved anew with the story of the Prefectural Earth Defense Force, a video that came out of nowhere, made us laugh, vanished, came again out of nowhere, made us laugh, and again vanished. Will it ever return? Have we seen the last of Morita, Santin, and Colonel Baradagi? The answer is on the wind, blowing past Imazuru High School, whistling forlornly through the phone poles.