A title where the girls are suddenly in college and your average teacher is now a professor…
What They Say:
A hot new couple is being talked about all over campus. When a prurient professor is giving a sexy swim team star some very special lessons during their private sessions together, it’s a learning experience all around. They’re doing lots of work with figures, and she’s learning the hard, hard way that one plus one equals one. Their horizontal curriculum is being covered in and out of the classroom, and nothing is keeping the insatiable educator from seeking out new pupils, not even other teachers!
The Review:
Audio:
Kitty Media has retained the original English language adaptation for this release, done by the infamous Dick Tripwire, so we get a decent bilingual presentation here. The release features a pair of fairly standard stereo tracks, both of which are encoded at 192kbps. Throughout the show, we didn’t notice any distortions or dropouts on this track. Dialogue and other sounds from humans were mostly through the center channel, though they did a good job of filling up the entire soundstage on occasion. Music and ambient effects were nicely placed without being too obtrusive and went well overall.
Video:
Originally released in 1999 and 2000, the transfer for this four part OVA series is presented in its original full frame aspect ratio. Though the show looked quite good back in the day and on the setup we had, it’s flaws show through more here now. The colors in this show are nice and vibrant, there’s a great depth to the coloring, and most importantly, hardly any cross coloration. There are a lot of solid colors throughout, especially blues, but they manage to avoid any serious macroblocking. What’s more noticeable this time around on our setup and larger display is the grain in a lot of the scenes which adds a bit more noise to it. It’s certainly representative of its time of release though and it has a bit of a natural feel to it so it doesn’t distract heavily..
Packaging:
Teacher’s Pet has a cute cover to it as it features Chitose with her head to her knees as she’s got on her school uniform and her hair is flowing around her. The colors for her are appealing, but the background doesn’t help because of the yellow filter used for it. The actual artwork in the background is pretty busy as well with various images of Chitose in states of being used. The logo is cute though as it’s the leash and color woven into both words. The back cover uses the same yellow design but with less for the background itself. It’s given over more to shots from the show at an angle and some character artwork spread around. The summary runs through things well and the remainder is given over to the standard production credits and a very good technical grid. No show related inserts are included nor is there a reversible cover.
Menu:
The menu design uses elements from the cover which is pretty normal as it has the front shot of Chitose along one side while the navigation is along the left in rather small size. The background, unfortunately, uses the same yellow scheme which is really unappealing, but the menus are simple and straightforward and easy to navigate. Kitty provides for quick access to the submenus, which is really the basics of scenes, setup, and some trailers, so getting around is quick and easy. Our player presets weren’t checked for playback as it defaults to English language with sign/song subtitles.
Extras:
The original Anime 18 release contained some sketches, an image gallery, and a storyboard to animation segment, but there are no extras included in this release.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Teacher’s Pet is a rather fun and fairly well self-contained four episode OVA series. It boasts some great production values, has a decent sounding cast and has all consensual situations for the most part. And no tentacles!
The show revolves primarily around Chitose, a young college girl who is madly in love with Haruhiko, who used to go out with her sister. Haru’s come back from college himself where he’s now a professor. He’s taking up residence at this particular college where Chitose is going, so as can be imagined, things are going to be fun.
Amusingly, the script is kept the same from the original in that they “upgrade” where everything takes place. It’s not uncommon with some older shows that have been done but there’s always the hope that they’ll tweak it if they re-release it, especially under a different company. Things are different if you listen to the Japanese and ignore some of the subtitles; it’s clearly not a college and Chitose calls Haru her older brother constantly, and never by his name. That changes the relationship dramatically, but we’ll go with what’s subtitled.
Back when Haru and Mariko were dating, Chitose would tag along constantly since she had a massive crush on Haru. With Haru and Mariko now broken up, and him being one of her teachers at college, she’s intending to win him over and do anything to gain his love. He tries to resist a bit early on, but eventually he succumbs and gets into things full force and sways her over to the dark ways that she never even thought of.
And this includes several encounters at school, where they’re seen by one of the female teachers, Mrs. Tagami. I found her to be the most attractive character in the show, so when she caught Haru and Chitose fooling around in the locker rooms and found herself really interested in both of them, it proved to lead to some more interesting situations. When Haru gets busted for fooling around with a student, she jumps in and claims it must be false since she and Haru are engaged.
Haru only smirks at this and sees it as yet another woman whose fallen to his charms and someone else to add to his list. He’s definitely a casual confident player, and his style through the show bears it out as he generally doesn’t go far out of his way, if at all, to really try and get anyone. They all fall very easily for him.
Teacher’s Pet has some really nice character designs to it, which isn’t a surprise considering I liked Natural 2 that was released by Adult Source Media. Chitose is the highlight as she’s very appealing but Haru comes across well as a fairly confident guy with an edge but without that darkly brooding aspect that’s really disturbing at times. The animation for the show is pretty good as well which isn’t a surprise as this was a time period where I liked a lot of what Green Bunny was doing. There’s a lot of good detail to things, the settings are natural looking and the characters have some good designed and detail to them as well. It’s showing its age, but there’s an appeal to a show from this particular vintage.
In Summary:
At the time, it had been awhile since Natural 2 was brought out and the old Anime 18 label was dead at CPM before a large chunk of it made its way over to Critical Mass Video. So it was a no-brainer to go for the first part and haul it out for audiences. Some of that is going to be lost because of the change in the name, but fans of the show will know what it is and talk about it. The show is rather straightforward but it has a lot of great eroticism to it combined with appealing character designs and some very good pacing to bring it all together. I enjoyed it the first time around and enjoyed it just as much this time. It’s made me want to pull out Natural 2 again and settle into something a bit more recent as well. Definitely worth checking out for fans of good adult anime.
Features:
Japanese 2.0 Language, English 2.0 Language, English Subtitles
Content Grade: B
Audio Grade: B+
Video Grade: B+
Packaging Grade: B+
Menu Grade: B
Extras Grade: N/A
Released By: Kitty Media
Release Date: February 17th, 2009
MSRP: $29.99
Running Time: 120 Minutes
Video Encoding: 480i/p MPEG-2
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Review Equipment:
Sony KDL70R550A 70″ LED 1080P HDTV, Sony PlayStation3 Blu-ray player via HDMI set to 1080p, Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver and Panasonic SB-TP20S Multi-Channel Speaker System With 100-Watt Subwoofer.
