119. Iron Virgin Jun

• Iron Virgin Jun (1992: I’m not actually sure who made this to be honest, I know who helped but not who the main studio was) 1/1 eps

Go Nagai is many things. The man who created mecha, the person who helped codify magical girls, the dude who blew the minds of young boys in Japan with Devilman and Shameless School, and of course a massive raving pervert. If you didn’t know that then Iron Virgin Jun might just tip you off to that fact. Before we begin just keep in mind that director Fumio Maezono actually toned down a lot of the sex stuff or straight up removed it, just remember that.

The show begins in a big old mansion where they are having a fancy party, and by fancy I mean serving a whole fucking whale for dinner fancy. It turns out that the titular Jun is turning 18 and so of course that means she needs to marry and so they are throwing a party to find a suitable husband for her. Obviously, she isn’t all that into the idea but when your mother is roughly 8 feet tall and looks like a JoJo’s villain you only have two options: submit or run the fuck away. Jun chooses the latter but is soon being pursued by various employees of the family, including her persona attendant Kurata. This all starts off in a pretty fun way with Jun being surrounded by a bunch of ninja only for her to straight up hulk her way out of her dress, revealing that she has more muscles than the average Fist of the North Star thug. She then proceeds to obliterate the ninjas using a wide variety of wrestling moves, because why not? Things get a bit less fun from here as the mother comes to the conclusion that the reason why Jun doesn’t want to marry is because she is a virgin and so is scared of her wedding night. This is a bizarre idea in and of itself but her solution to it is even weirder: get a bunch of her retainers to gang rape Jun. Let me just repeat that: Jun’s mother decides to instruct her men to gang rape her daughter so that she will no longer be a virgin and so won’t fear having sex on her wedding night. That is just an astounding level of weirdness, stupidity, and insensitivity, even for Go Nagai! What makes it even worse is that her would be rapists have the most bizarre penis censorship I have ever seen. So yeah, Jun and Kurata spend the rest of the show trying not to let Jun be raped and also having a little romance between the two. It is utterly distasteful in every regard and not even in a funny way, just kind of a “this is lame and unnecessary” way. It is also really boring as the OAV really drags with additional plot points in its second half that add virtually nothing to the show.

None of this is helped by the fact that this was obviously quite a cheap production with some janky looking artwork and poor animation. The ninja fight at the beginning is fun but everything after that kind of sucks and by having that peak so early (literally the first 5 or so minutes) it just leaves a sour taste in your mouth for the rest of the show. When it comes to the other areas of the production things are similarly dismal with average voice acting and a painfully generic synth soundtrack, something of a surprise considering Nippon Columbia’s involvement. I suppose the ending theme was alright but everything else was just…

The best way to describe this show is: not exactly Go Nagai’s finest hour. The plot and content are fairly hideous with the execution by Fumio Maezono being quite dull. Maezono has gone onto do quite a bit of episode directing but I’m not surprised to see that they haven’t outright directed anything else. Maybe the manga is so extreme it is worth reading but it is more likely that this is simply a bad adaptation of a bad manga, go watch something else.

Final score: 2F