Sherlock Hound: The Complete Series (Review)
Friday, 29th January 2010, 18:40

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Sound
Sherlock Hound gets an excruciating English dub. I’m not all that keen on dubbed anime in the first place, although I have been known to change my mind with some modern productions. Even the worst modern production, even Love Hina is a work of thespian genius compared to this antiquated mess. Things really were bad in the eighties, and it shows in Sherlock Hound, which apparently has just four actors portraying the entire cast. They all put on horrible English accents, and some of the characters, particularly Watson are all but incomprehensible. To make matters worse, there are no subtitles. Still, it has to be said that I did eventually get used to it. It’s a DD 2.0 track for what it’s worth, although it sounds pretty mono to me.

Conclusion
It’s hard to do the nostalgia thing if you have no prior experience with the subject material that is being waxed lyrical about. You invariably wind up approaching it as you do any other new product, and with Sherlock Hound not making it to terrestrial television in my recollection, it’s likely that few will approach this series with gold tinted spectacles in place. I did give it my best shot though, as Sherlock Hound most certainly looks as if belonged on television back when a sock puppet was upstaging Phillip Schofield. It almost worked as well, as I did feel the smallest of warm glimmers begin to swell in my chest, that faint scent of hot chocolate and cheese toasties that my mum used to make when I got home from school, and the vague sense that Grange Hill should follow after watching one of these episodes, or John Craven’s Newsround.

But it was a fleeting feeling, and try as it might, Sherlock Hound didn’t manage to fan that sputtering ember into the blazing inferno of ‘things were better when I were a lad’ accompanied by the music from a Hovis advert. And without that nostalgia, you have to take this show at face value, and it’s very much a product of its time, in terms of character and episode structure, and in terms of the stories that it tells. Sherlock Hound is an episodic series, repetitive and formulaic, and it’s a formula that doesn’t bear a marathon viewing session. You can see it making better sense at one episode a week though, which is no doubt how it originally played. Somewhere a crime happens, Moriarty is responsible, and Sherlock Hound and Watson must solve the dastardly crime, hampered in their efforts by Inspector Lestrade and his Keystone Cops. Of course Moriarty and his browbeaten henchmen always escape at the end to return another day. Of the characters, as usual it’s the villains that shine the most, with Moriarty akin to Dick Dastardly in his overblown schemes and moustache twirling villainy, while his minions Todd and Smiley are there to receive his ire and carry out his whims, as well as flatter his ego when required. Sherlock Hound and Watson are fairly nondescript as hero characters go, pretty much without flaw or nuance, but amiable and watchable nonetheless.

But it has to be said that the formula did begin to wear on me near to the end of this set, and to my embarrassment, I fell asleep during more than one episode. Worse than that, I had no desire to skip back and find out what I had missed. It’s inevitable that Sherlock Hound would be successful, and Moriarty would be humiliated, but escape to offend another day. The real draw of this collection no doubt will be the Miyazaki name, and it’s more than just an idle connection. He was the co-creator of this series, and originated many of the stories. Far more interesting are the episodes that he personally directed, six of them in total, and it must be said that the difference shows immediately. The obvious one is the difference in colour scheme, as the character of Smiley is a rather sickly green in the six stories, but the imagination and vibrancy of the animation is significantly greater. There are more quirks and little touches to the animation, and these six episodes are a joy to watch, leagues ahead of most of the other stories on this disc. They are episodes 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11 if you are interested.

They are fairly early on in the run, and it’s certainly in the first half of the series that most of the stronger episodes are. It’s also early on that you find a smidgen of continuity between the episodes, something that is quickly forgotten as the series progresses. You can also see little touches that crop up in later Miyazaki works like Porco Rosso, The Castle of Cagliostro and Kiki’s Delivery Service. The most striking thing is that this Sherlock adaptation gets relocated in time to the early twentieth century, where biplanes, zeppelins, cars and electricity, supplement the horse and carriage and the steam train. That fascination with flight that so permeates Miyazaki’s films also shows up here, with Hound’s housekeeper Mrs Hudson a retired aviatrix, and many of Moriarty’s plans requiring use of a propeller driven pterodactyl of a monoplane.

Sherlock Hound is entertaining enough for the younger members of the family. At least it has been deemed suitable by the BBFC, who have given it an appropriate U certificate. No doubt a killjoy at OFCOM will be red-faced in a fit of apoplexy at the sight of a main character who never removes a pipe from his mouth (and worse, smokes it), as well as a villain who on occasion threatens violence to children, kidnaps them, and is prone to using firearms against the police and Sherlock Hound. It will also be tempting indeed to Miyazaki completists, and it must be said again that the episodes that he directed in this set transcend the other stories. A few years ago, the RRP for six episodes would have been around £40, so when you look at it that way, this set is still worthwhile for those six episodes alone.

Long ago back in 2002, Geneon in the US released Sherlock Hound, and they did so in both English and Japanese. Unfortunately those discs are long out of print, and now fetch 3-figure asking prices 2nd hand on sites like Amazon. I can understand Manga Entertainment’s thinking on this. It’s a children’s show, aimed at a demographic that will not exactly appreciate reading while they watch. It’s also why the Tamagotchi movie was dub only last year. Also, with no terrestrial broadcast of Sherlock Hound back in the eighties, the nostalgia market will be comparatively smaller. So it makes sense not to have the original language track. If only the dub wasn’t so bad…

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