AniMayday #3: MD Geist

Today I contribute my own mini-review to AniMayday, our collection of bad anime reviews in celebration of the beginning of May. Get ready for ... MD Geist.

Ah, the legend. Quite possibly the worst-regarded production in anime history, MD Geist has actually become a cult classic simply for being so bad. The main reason why this hunk of turd is anything more than a footnote in American anime fandom is that John O'Donnell, founder of now-defunct anime distributor Central Park Media, had an unshakable love for Koichi Ohata's awful two-part OAV, and promoted the heck out of it in the early 1990s.

Despite Mr. O'Donnell's high praise, MD Geist a show that is literally awful in every single facet of its production. The first episode opens up on generic wasteland planet Jerra, upon which two armies are fighting about ... something. There's some sort of super-soldier dude codenamed "MD Geist" (for "Most Dangerous"), and he blows up a helicopter.

Before you even have time to register the cheesy text crawl opener, Geist has joined a gang of thugs and met up with some soldiers who need to destroy the supercomputer in their former capital, "Brain Palace." Why? Well of course, because the computer is about to activate a program called the "Death Force" that will wipe out all of humanity. Did I mention that the army actually wrote this program themselves?

Clunky animation and silly mech designs (shaped like winged football uniforms and giant horse penises) plague the show, while Geist himself — an almost completely mute killer devoid of emotion, personality, or motivation — proves himself more and more to be an utterly unlikable protagonist. Of course, MD Geist was graced with a classic CPM dub job, complete with lame pick-up lines, high-speed dialogue, and comically overemphasized line readings.

Worth watching with a group of friends, if only for its disregard for simple coherency and character motivation, MD Geist is truly one of the worst things I have ever seen put to film. Often bad anime can cause some raised eyebrows or disdainful chuckles from the viewer, but I can honestly say, without exaggeration, that I sat in front of the TV for the hour and a half of MD Geist and MD Geist: Death Force with my jaw completely agape, stunned by the cinematic atrocity being committed before my very eyes.

That said, MD Geist is now available on Hulu, absolutely for free! That's, like, a whole dollar more than you should probably pay for it, but it's all good.