Bandai continues the humorous Galaxy Angel anime with this third volume in the series.  More mayhem, insanity, and bizarre happenings fill the six 15-minute shows included on this disc.

The Galaxy Angels are a special military unit that is charged with finding lost technology and helping out wherever they can. That means anything from tracking down stolen tanks to running errands.  This comedy show set in the future has a good mix of comedy and SF action.  The episodes on this disc are:

15 – Lost Item Pot au Feu:  Vanilla has been on a hunger strike for two weeks and is near death.  She lost an important item and won't eat until it is returned.  So Milfeuile heads out to find it.  The only thing is she doesn't know what the item is, or where it was lost.

16 – Grilled Girl in a Box:  Ranpha finally had a really cute guy ask her out, but she overslept and missed their date.  Not able to come up with a great excuse, she told him that she missed the date because Forte had died.  But word has gotten around and now Ranpha has to convince Forte to play dead for a few days.  But as the rumor starts to spread, it spirals out of control and soon Forte is having a military funeral with top honors.  To bad she's not dead.

17 – Canned Angel with Gun Turret:  An experimental tank has gone missing and everyone suspects that the local gun nut, Forte, has taken it.  Mint and Milfeuile track the weapon down, but Forte's not in it.  No one is.  But that doesn't stop the tank from continuing to run amok.  This episode ended with a cliffhanger and the notice that it would be continued, but it wasn't!

18 – Monkey Salvage Combo:  Forte, Vanilla, and Mint land on a space station and find that it's filled with monkeys.  Seems that the station was working on a secret biological weapon and it got out and turned all the people on the station into primates.  But will the same happen to the three Galaxy Angels?

19 – Angel Kiss Gateau de Milfeuile:  Milfeuile wins some tickets to a fancy restaurant and decides to take Normad, a hyper intelligent computer chip installed in a stuffed animal, out with her.  On the way there they stumble across a culinary robot that is being chased by assassins.  Milfeuile promises to help him if he'll teach her how to bake tasty cakes.

20 – Special Survival Combo:  Forte and Mint crash land on a deserted island.  Deserted except for one geeky guy who claims to be a Galaxy Police agent, but the suspect that he's a wanted felon.

If you enjoyed the previous volumes, you'll like these too.  There is a lot of goofy comedy, and a good bit of action too.  This volume had more humor than the first (the only other DVD I've seen) but it didn't get too silly.

There still isn't much in the way of an overall plot, which surprises me a little.  The introductions give a lot of background to the series; the political environment, the technology etc.  But much of this never comes out in the shows themselves.  Someone went to a lot of trouble to design this universe, but most of the details are never mentioned, much less explored.

With this episodes running under 15 minutes each, there is not a lot of plot build up.  They jump right in and get the job done.  Each episode seems to center around the punch line at the end of the episode, which isn't bad.  If drawn out to a half hour show, this program might have seemed dumb.  But at a lean and mean 15 minutes, they are great fun.

Audio:

Like most anime DVDs, this disc lets you watch the show in the original Japanese with optional subtitles or with an English dub.  In switched back and forth each episode, and found that I enjoyed both sound tracks.  I have a slight preference for the Japanese, but only a slight one.  The English voice actors did a good job.  They managed to match their dialog to the mouth movements, and didn't use any phony accents.  I've really been impressed with the higher quality of dubs over the last year or so.  If you've previously written all English language dubs off as inferior quality hackwork, you might want to revisit them on some of the more recent releases.

In both languages, there was some use of the front soundstage, mainly with sound effects.  The sound quality was very good, with a nice full rounded sound, especially during the opening song.  There was a good amount of bass present, and the dialog was clear and crisp.  No evidence of hiss or hums.  A nice quality sound track.

Video:

The video quality was also top-notch for this DVD. The colors are bright and the lines are crisp.  There was only a slight hint of aliasing and other digital artifacts present.  Hardly worth mentioning.  The fine lines on the characters did not shimmer and disappear like they do on some discs.  I was very happy with the look of these shows.

The Extras:

Included on this DVD are introductions to each of the shows under the title "Now I get it!  GA Lectures.  These were one-minute pieces where voice actress Ryoko Shintani who plays Milfeulle fills in the background to the show while dressed in a Galaxy Angel costume.  There is no English dub on this bonus; they are in Japanese with subtitles.  These were obviously done in one take, because Ryoko messes up a bit.  But she seems to be having fun with it and is laughing much of the time.  I thought these were fun and was very glad they included them on the DVD.  I only wish there was an option to play them automatically before each show, as they were originally shown.

There are also 5 short commercials that played on TV when the series was released on video, and trailers for Kaze No Yojimbo, Dragon Drive, and Ghost in the Shell:  Stand alone Complex.

Final Thoughts:

I still like this series.  It is light and fun, with a good amount of humor and just enough plot to hold everything together.  The audio and video look good, and the introductions to the shows are a fun extra.  If you need a break from some of the more serious anime shows out there, be sure to check out Galaxy Angels.  Recommended.