21/30 Panzer Dragoon (the full digital animation)
Panzer Dragoon is undeniably one of the Saturn’s iconic franchises. The first episode, released in March 1995 in Japan, was the console’s first original killer app, the first Saturn game to show something original (rather than an arcade port like Virtua Fighter or PC port like Myst) and completely unimaginable on previous generations.
Started in early 1994 by defectors from the arcade division and a few fresh faces from Sega CS1, Panzer Dragoon was among the twelve games shown and announced at the Tokyo Omocha Show in June 1994, during the console’s first official presentation.
(I’ll skip right to the part in question, but I recommend you watch the whole video if you have time this weekend, it’s a great time capsule of 1994 Japan.)
Panzer Dragoon ended up being the sixteenth game in the release history of the Saturn in Japan, and that version made such an impression that Sega of America made Panzer Dragoon the console’s third pillar of the console’s infamous “shotgun release” in the USA in May 1995, treated on the same level as Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA.
Digital Foundry has already released a pretty good video on the technical smackdown this game was at the time. Just to complement the video, I will add that its sequel Panzer Dragoon Zwei, released a year later in March 1996, fulfilled the first game’s promise with a slightly more robust gaming experience, which has aged better as a result.
But that’s not why you’re here today; you’ve seen what I opened the post with. Following the game’s success, and no doubt motivated by their recent savvy bets in the world of animation (Blue Seed → RayEarth → Evangelion), Sega commissioned Production I.G., our pals from Ghost in the Shell a few posts back, to make a 25-minute Original Video Animation for Panzer Dragoon.
I’ll spoil the bad news immediately: there is no Video CD or Photo CD of this OVA. It was only released on VHS and Laser Disc, in October 1996. Boo!
The OVA is by the numbers; a safe but boring adaptation, solidly produced by a team of veterans who had worked on the Blue Seed series, the Patlabor 2 film and, of course, the Ghost in the Shell movie, which had mobilized the whole Production I.G. team. The thing was released in the US two years later. It went relatively unnoticed.
Nevertheless, Panzer Dragoon’s OVA does justice to it’s originator’s status as a technological and artistic pioneer, as it does have a historic distinction: it’s the very first FULL DIGITAL ANIME in the history of Japanese animation, or if you prefer, the first commercial Japanese cartoon produced entirely with digital tools.
There’s an excellent retrospective, unfortunately all in Japanese, of the evolution of digital tools at Production I.G. available via this long article by Kifune Tokumitsu, one of the pioneers of digital japanimation.
In which I learned, for example, that it was the positive experience on Panzer Dragoon that enabled Production I.G. to produce the famous intro to the PlayStation game Ghost in the Shell. Rats, Sega’s got the short end of the stick yet again…
Anyway, I’ve set the scene, but you’d probably like to see the OVA in question. A few years ago, in the midst of the COVID19 stay-at-home fun times, a tiny circle of film and animation fans named Vulgar Daikaiju remastered the VHS in 1080p and dumped it on the Internet Archive; here’s a copy on Youtube.
