Created alongside the Nuku Nuku TV series in 1998, All Purpose Cultural Catgirl Nuku Nuku DASH! (or Nuku Nuku Dash, for the sake of helping the review sound less redundant) is yet another side-story created to build upon the success of the original six episode Nuku Nuku OVA series. Like it's television counterpart, Nuku Nuku Dash has nothing to do with the original series other than the names of its characters... and that Nuku Nuku is an android in every series. Where Nuku Nuku Dash truly differs from its predecessors, however, is the somber mood that surrounds each and every episode.

I could tell right from the very beginning that Nuku Nuku Dash was going to be a lot different from the two series that came before it. The obvious difference is that in this series Nuku Nuku has grey hair instead of white, but the other differences lie in the characters themselves rather than a mere superficial difference. For example, Ryuunosuke is no longer a little child in this series, but rather a boy that's about to enter high school. Akiko is not an evil head of the equally evil Mishima Industries that's always trying to get Nuku Nuku, but rather a housewife that's concerned for the safety of her family... while spending the rest of her time trying to hunt down Nuku Nuku. Okay, so maybe she doesn't seem that much different, but trust me on this, okay?

However, there are a lot of problems that result from the changes made to a formula that had already been established. For example, rather than being a little brother that Nuku Nuku tries to protect, Ryuunosuke falls in love with Nuku Nuku (that's no big spoiler - it happens in the first episode). Now, normally a bit of romantic tension thrown into the Nuku Nuku formula would seem like a good idea, but in execution it's a fairly bad idea. Like nearly all male teenagers in anime, Ryuunosuke is angsty. In fact, he probably has even more angst than the king of angst himself, Shinji from Evangelion. Another problem is that Nuku Nuku Dash attempts to create an intricate, intelligent story with its highly episodic format, and all it manages to come away with is a fragmented story with an ending that makes less sense the more you watch.

The main problem I saw in Nuku Nuku Dash was that it just couldn't seem to decide what kind of series it was. At some points it breaks out the tried and true Nuku Nuku comedy, and yet in other times it's as melodramatic as a daytime soap opera. Woven into all of this are action scenes that take all of ten seconds and we're left with a series that just feels like one giant mess. The pacing of the story doesn't help, either. When Ryuunosuke isn't fantasizing about making out with Nuku Nuku or being scolded by an eight-year-old named Noriko that's suprisingly intelligent about relationships and sex, we're treated to pretty much absolutely nothing. The only thing more annoying that the aforementioned scenes are the ones involving Ryuunosuke stumbling around Nuku Nuku.

The animation and artwork in Nuku Nuku Dash are extremely disappointing considering this OVA series (which usually have a pretty fat budget) was created in 1998, a time in which animation quality was making leaps and bounds. What little quality animation is in Nuku Nuku Dash is usually wasted on the physics of breast bouncing because the creators seemed to do a lot of concentrating on making Nuku Nuku's breasts bounce as fluidly as possible. The action scenes, if scrolling still frames can even be called that, is even worse than what I watched in the 1991 Record of Lodoss War OVA series. Every episode features the same exact fight scene, too: Nuku Nuku transforms after finding a human/cat/dog/building in danger, charges her hands so some kind of electricity starts flowing out of them, and then punches the enemy once. It's rare to see anything else happen after Nuku Nuku transforms. The only difference in each episode is what causes Nuku Nuku to transform.

The artwork is also some of the blandest I've ever seen. There is more color in Ryuunosuke's hair than in nearly anything else in the series. Backgrounds and foregrounds alike are nearly colorless, save for a couple shades of gray or dark green here and there. If it's a well-lit area like the inside of a house, there might be a picture on a dimly colored wall, but that's about it. The character designs are also pretty lousy, too. No, they're not colorless like the rest of the show. They're actually TOO tacky and colorful for their own good.

It's kind of difficult for me to actually justify the rating I gave this series. Other than the surprisingly good music (the vocals were done by Megumi Hayashibara, but I don't know who does the background music), there really isn't anything that's really all that great about Nuku Nuku Dash. It's one of those mysteries of the Nuku Nuku series. You're either drawn to the trite, quirky stories or you hate all of it. For some bizarre reason, I belong to the former, and even though there is almost nothing good about Nuku Nuku Dash, I still enjoyed watching it to some extent. However, because of how different it is from the other two Nuku Nuku series, I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone that isn't a die-hard fan of Nuku Nuku.