Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki: Long Distance Call v2

Here's another VHS release that needed a new encode: the 1997 OVA Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki: Long Distance Call (Business Fighter Yamazaki: Long Distance Call). Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki was a successful manga by Tomizaki Jun. It ran from 1992 to 2000 and was collected in twelve tankoban volumes

Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki: Long Distance Call is based on volume 3 of the manga. It tells the story of Yamazaki Takurou, a workaholic salesman whose job eventually kills him. A temp staffing agency (!) rebuilds him as a cyborg business consultant. At the start of the OVA, Yamazaki meets a runaway delinquent teenage girl, Kashima Rinko, and saves her from trouble with the police. Despite his determination to have no human connections, Rinko attaches herself to him as sidekick and observer. Yamazaki's assignment is to help Itsutsuba Electrics develop a new telephone product. The market is already crowded with cell phones, cordless handsets, answering machines, and so on; the planners at Itsutsuba despair of finding a new and compelling product concept. Yamazaki, of course, finds a niche and proposes a wall-mounted LCD panel that acts as a voice-operated telephone. This seems remarkably silly in today's age of smartphones, but then again... hello, Alexa? Before he can finish his work, Rinko runs afoul of another cyborg named Suzuki. Yamazaki then finds that his studiously cultivated emotional detachment is not quite as ironclad as he thought.

I'm not sure quite what to make of Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki. It feels like a satire at times, but I rather suspect it isn't. Yamazaki is portrayed as a hero (and a rather tragic one at that), not as an object of ridicule. Japan's insane workaholic culture is held up as something to emulate, not as a crippling burden on the young leading the country to demographic disaster. And these days, Yamazaki's aphorisms are quoted by business motivational speakers in Japan.

The voice cast includes:

• Chiba Shigeru (Yamazaki) played Megane in the Urusei Yatsura franchise and Nezumi in later GeGeGe no Kitarou movies. He appeared in Ai no Kusabi, Akai Hayate, Bagi, Condition Green, and Yamato 2520, all Orphan releases. He is still active, appearing in the recent Overlord series.
• Kawakami Tomoko (Rinko) starred as Akane in the Harukanaru Toki no Naka de: Hachiyou properties and as the title roles in Hikaru no Go and Revolutionary Girl Utena. She also did a marvelous comic turn as Elise, the hard-as-nails assistant to the lecherous ojii-san Stresemann in Nodame Cantabile.
• The peerless Ogata Kenichi (Suzuki) played the put-upon father in Gosenzosama Banbanzai and Maroko, as well as Smee in Peter Pan no Bouken, the crooked casino boss in Okane ga Nai! (an Orphan release), the Hong Kong chef in Yuukan Club (also an Orphan release), and, most recently, Gran Torino in Boku no Hero Academia. However, he's best known to me as the voice of Ranma 1/2's Sataome Gemna, whose alter ego - the grumpy panda - is my avatar on most anime forums.
• Katsuki Masako (Kirika, Yamazaki's maintenance engineer) played Maroko in Gosenzosama Banbanzai and its movie version, Maroko, Mira in Ginga Tansa 2100-nen: Border Planet, Queen Bee in Golgo 13: Queen Bee, and Tsunade (Fifth Hokage) in the Naruto franchise. She also played Kenbishi Yuuri in Yuukan Club and Hojo's lover in Sanctuary, both Orphan releases.

Iri picked up a VHS tape of Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki as part of his regular survey of secondhand media sources in Japan. Sunachan translated the dialog, signs, and songs. M74 timed. I edited and typeset (the repeated shots of the wall phone account for the bulk of the script). VigorousJammer and banandoyouwanna QCed; bananadoyouwanna also styled the songs. The original encode, based on a compressed D-VHS tape rip, had lots of blended frames. For this release, our Intrepid Raw Hunter™ made an uncompressed rip with his vintage All-in-Wonder card and then encoded it. It looks considerably better, although the colors are more muted, and the lines haven't been sharpened. For this release, I redid all the typesetting and reparsed a few awkward lines. Nemesis did a release check.

Kigyou Senshi Yamazaki is an interesting show with interesting characters. If you watched it before, you will want to archive this version. If you haven't, I recommend it. You can download the show from the usual torrent site or from IRC bot Orphan|Arutha in channel #nibl or #news on irc.rizon.net.