hen 19-year-old Joe and his crack team of Crushers -- space-roaming mercenaries -- are hired to transport a comatose woman to a doctor a mere 5,000 light-years away, they obviously don't think much of the job. It looks like a milk run, a job so dull and simple it would be better handled by the stodgy United Space Force.
But their contact, a secretary to the ultra-rich, ultra-powerful Scorian family, says bringing in the USF would make the event a public matter. If the universe knew the Scorian heir was close to death, public opinion of the Scorian business conglomerate would plummet. So the matter has to be handled under the table -- which means a hefty profit at no risk for the Crushers.
Or so they think. Joe and his team have barely packed up their ship and entered warp when they encounter an inexplicable, seemingly impossible space anomaly. The ship seems to fall apart around them as they lose consciousness. When they come to, their passengers, contract, and advance money are missing -- as is their comatose cargo. Worse, their ship is adrift in a commercial shipping area, the USF is accusing them of piracy, and the Crusher Council is suspending their license. It doesn't take much of a logical leap to figure out they've been set up. For some people, the real questions would be who, how, and why. For the Crushers, it boils down
to "How do we get revenge?"
Stereotypes and space-fights
The cast of Crusher Joe: The Movie is about as archetypal as they come. The Crusher team consists of the pretty-boy hero/leader, the frothy-but-brave girl, the cocky hulk, and the precocious, underage smartass. This could be the cast of Speed Racer, Voltron (either version), or any number of popular Japanese teens-in-space TV series. The whole film is less about people than the trouble they can get into.
That said, this particular teen crew's trouble is on a grander scale
than most. They can't even go to a disco without causing a full-scale
battle royale; it's pretty much inevitable that they're not going to have a quiet time on the surface of a pirate planet. From hand-to-hand laser battles to Star Wars-sized space warfare, Crusher Joe: The Movie is packed with space-opera action that rarely lets up for more than a few moments. The characters may be staid, but the universe around them is decidedly not.
Nor is the animation, which is simple but fluid, incorporating more
depth and incidental motion than usual for anime circa 1983, when this first came out in Japan. (Ignore the video's dust jacket, which makes the characters look like fuzzy Hobbits.) In many ways, the broadness of both the animation and the galaxy-spanning story suggest a small-screen series brought to film by enlarging everything -- except the stars' personalities.
