The four volumes of Angel Links. © Morning Star o Sunrise.

Angel Links. V.1, Avenging Angel. V.2, Fallen Angel. V.3, Broken Angel. V.4, Eternal Angel.
TV series, 1999. Director: Yoshikazu Yamaguchi. DVD (bilingual), v.1, 4 episodes/100 minutes; v.2 - v.4, 3 episodes/75 minutes each. Price & format: DVD (bilingual), $29.98 each. Distributor: Bandai Entertainment.

If you liked Outlaw Star, will you like Angel Links: The Stellar Angels? Bandai (sponsor) and the Sunrise animation studio followed up the former (their popular 1998 TV 26-episode space opera adventure serial) with the latter, a prime-time (Wednesdays at 7:00 p.m.) 13-episode series from April 7 through June 30, 1999. Angel Links is "set in the universe of Outlaw Star." It is not a sequel but it shares the same colorful background (postulating a space colonization led by China rather than the West) and costume and architectural designs. Some of the minor characters from Outlaw Star appear briefly in walk-on roles.

There is one big difference. Outlaw Star is a typical boy's adventure serial. Angel Links takes the same elements and turns them into a girl's romance adventure, with (hopefully) enough elements to also hold an adolescent male audience. In America, boys don't mind a Wonder Woman-type protagonist as long as she is easy on the eyes but acts like a typical male action-hero. A space adventure with a woman's romance plot -- that hasn't really been tried in America yet.

Angel Links begins like a preadolescent girl's wish-fulfillment fantasy of teenhood. Li Meifon is 16 years old; beautiful, wealthy and with a figure to make Lara Croft look flat-chested. She is commander of Angel Links, an anti-pirate security force that provides protection to space merchant ships; in other words, she has a socially acceptable reason to spend all her time patrolling her Oracion star system in her super-dreadnaught battlecruiser, blasting bad guys. She was handed this when her fabulously wealthy business-mogul grandfather died and set up Angel Links in his will for Meifon to command. She picks a crew weighted toward athletic, independent young women like herself, commanded by her brisk Tactical Officer Valeria Vertone. The only males in her inner circle are Duuz, a reptilian Dragonite warrior (the obligatory colorful alien sidekick), and Kosei Hida, a young man written into her grandfather's will as her guardian. (Meifon uses him as her major-domo.) In the first episode, Meifon saves the life of Leon Lau, a handsome young patron of an orphanage, thereby both proving her mettle and acquiring a potential ideal boyfriend.

The emphasis of the first few episodes is on Meifon's inexperience and Kosei's efforts to make her take her leadership responsibilities more seriously. The plot turns darker as hints emerge that Meifon's grandfather had guilty motives in setting up Angel Links, and that Leon Lau is not really the benevolent philanthropist that he poses as. The audience's point-of-view gradually swings from Meifon to Kosei, who becomes aware that Meifon has her own secrets linked to a grave that mysteriously appeared next to her grandfather's, with her name and next year's date on it. Meifon becomes simultaneously an action-adventure heroine and a damsel needing to be rescued by her true friends among her crew. Much of Angel Links is straight-faced exaggerated romantic melodrama (notably Episode #5's replay of Romeo and Juliet as a tragic romance between a space pirate's daughter and a handsome space patrolman) aimed primarily at adolescent women, but there are enough space battles and futuristic secret agent-type skullduggery to appeal to teen boys as well.