By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Star Trek is often the last franchise audiences can associate with anime. Not only is the Gene Roddenberry franchise heavily associated with live-action, but its forays into animation (such as Lower Decks again The Prodigy) have apparently been inspired more by the West than by the East. Anyway, two episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (“A Matter of Honor” and “Neak Performance”) managed to sneak in a reference to The Dirty Pairthe most influential anime series of the ’80s.
Star Trek and Dirty Coupling
If you are already pulling Star Trek: The Next Generation to be able to identify these moments with the pause button, be warned: your fingers will have to be faster than the data to stop the frame in the right place. First reference to The Dirty Pair it happens in “A Matter of Honor,” the memorable episode of Season 2 in which Riker works on a Klingon ship as part of an officer exchange program. When a Benzite officer visiting Mendon sees dangerous bacteria on a Klingon ship, his scientific monitoring includes the words OP KEI and OP YURI hidden among all the scientific information.
What do these flashing-and-you’ll-remember words on the Star Trek background monitor have to do with anime, anyway? In both The Dirty Pair manga and anime series, we follow the adventures of Kei and Yuri, two crisis counselors who always catch the bad guys but cause a lot of damage. Like Sylvester Stallone in Demolition Manthe reputation of these gals precedes them, and “The Dirty Pair” is a derogatory nickname given to them due to their tendency to cause major property damage whenever they save the day.
It’s unclear which Star Trek set designer was the anime’s biggest fan, but they took his own The Dirty Pair hints at the next level in the season 2 episode “High Performance.” This is the episode where the Enterprise crew conducted war games, where Picard compared the Federation flagship with an 8-year-old Starfleet ship commanded by Riker. Data once again struggles to beat the visiting adventurer in Strategema, but it looks like it’s over for everyone when the angry Ferengi show up.
In this episode of Star Trek, the first reference to the anime is hidden in the monitor that shows the data systems. Thanks to the amazing transfer of the Blu-Ray program, we can see that one of the android programs is labeled as “Kei/Yuri submodule.” Obviously, this is another easter egg for the fans, but we can’t help but love the idea that Noonien Soong was a great anime legend of yesteryear and has hundreds of years of animation experience for his greatest creation.
Interestingly, this episode of Star Trek hides its very obvious anime reference. Look closely and you’ll see an Okudagram display naming the war games Picard and Riker participated in “Operation Lovely Angel.” In The Dirty Pair“Lovely Angels” is the code name for Kei and Yuri’s team, although their harshest critics prefer to simply refer to them as The Dirty Pair.
Considering that Paramount is in the realm of Star Trek, the powers that be should seriously consider creating an anime series. It’s not just something that fans would love, but like this The Dirty Pair The story goes, the franchise has been created by passionate fans of Japanese animation for decades. Know the fact that animations are more budget friendly than live action shows and we could have a Star Trek anime with two wags of the tag tail.
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