Anime of Yesteryear Presents: “That little ‘ol OVA: Metal Skin Panic MADOX–01

Merry (late) Christmas to all you good little boys and girls out there. It has been a while since I wrote well… anything for the site. But now that I got some time off before school starts again (and jobless once more), I have all the time in the world to waste away at drinking and watching cassette based anime, oh what a joyous waste of time and life that is. So, there I was Christmas Eve, munching on cookies served with spiked egg nog that made my heart glee. As I was getting half wasted, my butt firmly glued to the couch, I heard a large “thud” on the roof that awoke me into a drunken grouch. Getting pissed off from the footsteps up on top of the roof, I reached for my .44 Magnum, hoping to put a silver bullet in this dudes tooth… and his head. With the barrel pointed at my chimney, gun fully cocked, saying to my self “Let’s get ready to Rock!”At the bottom of the chimney, I saw a red and white hat fell, when the next words I heard echoing was “Ah, what the hell!”It was the fat man himself, stuck in the stack, who had a hard time moving, because his butt was a bit fat. And in a flash he landed head first at the bottom, getting himself together where he’d had fallen. I said “Hey Santa, you doing ok Bo’?” As he looked at my TV and said “Hey, whats this show?” I told him I was watching an anime called Madox 01, a show about a dude in a robot suit, reeking havoc in Tokyo for fun. Santa sat his huge butt down on my couch, pouring some Egg Nog and nodding “I gotta check this crap out!” So Santa and me chilled out to some Japanese cartoons, which takes us to our tale of what our adventure came too.

Ok, that is enough rhyming for one paragraph, there is no way I can keep that up for the rest of this review, but I at least tried to do something cool. So yea, Madox 01, to sum up, is a guy who wants to meet his girlfriend at the edge of town while being stuck inside a military mechanical suit. Cool premise isn’t it? And to be honest, this OVA isn’t that bad. It’s down right entertaining to see, from the easy to follow plot to the action scenes involving our protagonist trying to avoid the military from getting in between him and his girlfriend since he has their property that he just can’t seem to get out of. Well, that right there is the “easy plot,” dead serious. But if this tickles your fancy, I’ll give you my brief lowdown of what happens. So, let me and Santa cram in our robot suits while going down Tokyo in this review of Madox 01.

Madox 01 starts out with some cool looking animation with wire frames of robot legs, machine guns and rocking synth 80’s OVA music. We then go to an abandoned backwater town, filled with nothing but dirt, sand and isolation. But before you know it, 3 tanks are coming into the town and split up upon entering. Within a couple of minutes, a lone military mech suit takes out each tank one by one with set traps while demonstrating its raw firepower of its arsenal of machine guns and missiles. Once the last tank goes down, we see it was nothing short but a computerized simulation. We then hear the disappointed growl of one Lt. Kilgore, the tank commander who was completely humiliated by the military mech and, none the less, the woman piloting the machine, Ellie Kusumoto. Kilgore later approaches Ellie to not only give her his personal congratulations, but states ,in a since that in real combat, she wouldn’t stand a chance against him, and walks off.

Later that evening, we see the military transport truck driving along the Tokyo highway when a drunk driver in front of the transport losses control and crashes, which causes the cargo on the transport to somehow fly off the highway and land in a transport truck down below, which belongs to a mechanic on his dinner break. We then cut to our main protagonist Kouji, who likes to spend his days working part time at a mechanic shop fixing cars and staring at military planes that fly over, when we get introduced to his boss (or co-worker I guess) by the name of Onose. Ono gets Kouji to check something out in the bed of his truck, which turns out to be the cargo of what the military transport truck was carrying last night. So, they both get the great idea and take it over to Kouji apartment to figure out what it is.

While that is going on, we go back to the military base to get an idea of how everyone in the military is handling this, which is not very well as you could imagine. Ellie is wanting to retrieve her robot mech, but not if Kilgore has anything to say about it, since he is in charge of finding and bringing back the robot in one piece, presumably. While the military is in a fit, Kouji and Ono load the the cargo into the house, where Kou looks at the instructions on the side, and the label listed on the box, that read “Madox.” Ono sees a picture of Kou girlfriend, Shiori, and begins stating that she will be leaving for England for school and that she left a message for Kou to see her at the NSR building 8pm that evening. Ono decides to head back to the shop while Kou begins to fiddle with the box. After unhooking a few giant screws and pressing some buttons he obviously should not be pressing, lo’ and behold, the box transforms into our robot, Madox. I am pretty sure you guys saw this a mile away, I did say paper thin plot now did I? Kou decides to hop into the mech to satisfy his curiosity, which he finds out the mech has locked him inside, kinda like walking into a lions mouth, only it has pretty lights to look at, and its a robot really not a lion.

But chaos ensues, as the go go gadget robot begins to activate and starts to jets through a bath house and some residential blocks of the city, giving a debris ensued path right to the culprit, in case you wanted to know why there is a hole in your crummy apartment all of the sudden. Kou and his robot land in a convenience store, which Kou only save to get him out of trouble is to buy microwavable shrimp. I am not kidding, he buys vacuum sealed shrimp and rice and that’s it. No cops, no angry mob, no consequences for what just happened to him, as he tries to enjoy some shrimp while in his robot suit sitting on a bench in the park while he considers seeing his girlfriend at the NSR building by 8pm. Oh trust me, it gets even better from here folks. Back at the base, we find that Kilgore is going all out to get the Madox, as his intent is to destroy the machine than to capture it. Ellie confronts him, but he let’s the tank cannon of his gun get his point across, as he he points it at her point blank in her face as his way of saying “Piss off, this is my show now!” Ellie decides to take matters into her own hands and suits up to go into a prototype Madox unit to get ahead of Kilgore and capture the unit herself before any damage can be done to the city.

We then get back to Kou who stops at a gas station to fill his robot suit up with diesel fuel, asking the attendant for assistance. Of course, other than a hand full of on lookers, he gets help in fueling up his robot suit and is off to the NSR building. Of course on the way there, a bunch of no good punks want to drag race with Kou and his robot (oh dear god, this is just gold) which ends with Kou using the chainsaw blade feature of the machine to chop the car roof of the punks car. But not before the military stops in to use there way of putting and end to Kou, by shooting at everything around him while trying to shoot him. With the military hot on Kouji’s butt and with Shiori headed to the NSR building, can Kouji get his chance with Shiori before she leaves for good? Can he get past Lt. Kilgore and Ellie as well? Your just gonna have to see that for yourself now.

I will admit, this show has its dumb moments when you put into context of what is really going on, but it is highly entertaining in its own right. This is a Shinji Aramaki anime, so you can either love or hate his directorial pieces, coming from someone who is a master mechanical designer. The character designs are more or less alright really. Its like I want to like Ellie character design and I do at some points, then at others it just seems a bit off depending on the close up or the angle. This was also the first release title (or license actually) from AnimEigo back in the early 1990’s, sometime before they got Bubblegum Crisis. And also to note, there has never been a dub track for this anime, since all the releases have been sub only, including both for VHS and DVD.

But yea, all in all, I do like Madox quite a bit. It’s not to be taken serous by any means, its just a nice little fun show to sit down and relax too for about an hour. But yea, hopefully I should have some more reviews ready since I am out of school till the next semester starts in mid January, so I should have ZERO excuses to write more things by then, which I should… which I better do anyways. Well until next time, Happy New Year!!!!!!!

If you enjoyed this review, check me out at Anime of Yesteryear!!