Note: The series most commonly referred to as IGPX is actually the second series to bear that name. The first, a series of five 5 minute shorts animated in 2003 by Bee Train and Studio I.G. for Cartoon Network's Toonami block, is referred to in this release as the “IGPX pilot.” Hence any future references to IGPX in this review should be assumed to be to the full-length main series from 2005.

The 2005-06 series IGPX is a true rarity in anime, or at least it was at the time that it was made: a full co-production between American interests and a Japanese company. In this case the team-up involved Cartoon Network and Production I.G., and the involvement by Cartoon Network was much more than just monetary support; Sean Akins, the Cartoon Network creative director at the time, is listed in the credits as one of the series' planners, and he and fellow Toonami co-creator Jason DeMarco clearly state in one included interview that they had significant say in shaping the series, and not just on the English adaptation end. That is why IGPX has somewhat of an Americanized feel even in its base story: it was, after all, fully intended to be accessible to American youths who might not necessarily be anime fans while still mostly retaining anime style and sensibilities.

The series is also a rarity in other ways. Though it does use mecha (here called TSFs) for its racing vehicles, and those mecha do fight each other during the races, it is actually much more of a sports series in format and disposition than a true mecha series. Rather than a tournament format used in a lot of fighting anime or a war setting used in mecha series, it takes place in an apparently-peaceful era (if there are major international conflicts, they are not brought up in the series) and functions on seasonal schedules, with the first 13 episodes composing the 2049 season for the IGPX and the second 13 episodes composing the 2050 season. The fights are also pure slugfests, with no lethal weaponry allowed – although as one second half episode shows, injuries are not out of the question even though rules and TSF designs stress pilot safety. The races even adapt in a fancy version of the pit stops seen in auto racing, which involve vehicles called “running skeletons” coming onto the track and doing maintenance (most commonly limb replacement) while the race is under the equivalent of a caution flag.

The concepts behind the IGPX are quite cool, and the format of the races helps generate plenty of dramatic and intense fight/racing sequences. In fact, at its best the series can be thrilling to watch, with good action animation, well-choreographed race and battle scenes, and a broad swath of variety in the scenarios all contributing to the spectacle. The series also does an excellent job of having each opponent present a different challenge for the featured Team Satomi: one team focuses on tightly-coordinated defense, another on dirty tricks, yet another on overwhelming with talent and experience, and so forth. Even when Satomi faces some of the same teams again in the same season's playoffs or the second season, the challenges posed by the foes and even the tactics used by Satomi (whose strength seems to be its adaptability) can be quite different.

The clearly-defined personalities are pretty typical for a sports series. Takeshi is an immensely-talented pilot but also annoyingly lackadaisical and unfocused, a trait which generates friction with teammate Liz and his team's reserve pilot River and even becomes a problem in a romance that Takeshi strikes up with a rival female pilot. Liz is the brash athletic girl who tries to keep Takeshi in line and may or may not have a thing for him, while Amy is the soft-spoken genius who, through a lame contrivance, is able to telepathically communicate with her cat Luca when the two are hooked up in her TSF's cockpit. (Another team has a member who does this with a dog, which leads to a predictable cat/dog telepathic squabble during their race.) Luca is shown to be smart enough to provide tactical advice and even partly reprogram the OS of their TSFs on the fly at one point, which seems especially silly since he is not a specially-bred cat but just a random stray Amy once encountered. Backing them up is a fairly standard lead mechanic named Mark, laconic middle-aged coach Andrei, relatively young team manager/owner Michiru Satomi, Ms. Satomi's chirpy assistant/veritable team cheerleader Jesse, and discontent back-up pilot River, who has issues with Takeshi's mentality which later lead him to join a rival team as a starter. Most rival teams have at least one colorful and clearly-defined member, too.

The off-track drama is also pretty typical for sports series. Personalities clash over their roles and responsibilities on the team, challenges are issued between rivals, long-past rivalries continue to haunt some of the adults, and so forth. Early on finding sufficient sponsors for the scrappy Team Satomi is a regular problem, trouble dealing with the notoriety which comes from being a star pilot occasionally surfaces throughout the series (but especially in the second half), and potentially-complicating romance arises. A significant portion of the second half also involves once pilot who misses some time due to an injury and has to recuperate both physically and mentally to get back in the game; naturally this eventually involves ignoring medical advice, as many true competitors would. Rival teams have varying but pretty standard motivations by sports show standards, such as one pilot who is in danger of being replaced by younger and fresher talent, another who is so supremely-talented that he is at least as interested in getting a good challenge as actually winning, and another who aches to challenge an opponent whose approach to the sport he hates. In a nice touch, the series also delves into the commercial endorsements which can go hand-in-hand with top-level sports success.

While the strength of the series is indisputably its dynamic races, one of its weaknesses is that too many of the supporting dramatic efforts seem half-hearted. When problems arise, characters can often work through them a little too easily, with the only real exception to this being the romance between Takeshi and Fantine. (But again, this series was meant to be accessible to younger viewers, so a reduced level of complexity is understandable.) The premise of the series also falls apart if examined in any depth. As cool as the IGPX is, nothing about it is practical. How are the TSFs able to move at such speeds with no apparent propulsion systems? (They don't use wheels, either.) What the TSFs do at speeds supposedly over 300 mph often seems like an even more gross violation of physics than mecha normally are, and many of the TSF designs seem much too fragile for what they are doing. And let's not even get into to the whole animal telepathy thing, which seems shoehorned in for cute factor. A whole city was apparently built around the IGPX track, but nothing about where or how it came to exist is ever explained. Official sources list the Satomi pilots as initially being between 14 and 16 years old, but the two who aren't geniuses (Takeshi and Liz) are never shown having anything to do with school. Still, most of these problems only manifest if you actually stop and think about the series, which was clearly never intended.

While there isn't much fanservice in this all-ages show, the true fan service here is all of the allusions in the naming conventions and artistry; rival pilot/love interest Fantine Valjean is a double-reference to Les Miserables, for instance, while another pilot from the same team is named after a character from Pygmalion and Team Satomi captain Andrei is named after a Renaissance-era Russian painter. Certain characters are virtual lookalikes for Neon Genesis Evangelion's Gendo Ikari and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED's Patrick Zala, too. Also watch for a clear reference to Ghost in the Shell in one episode.

The artistic effort on the series varies. While the CG-animated action scenes are usually sharp and well-staged, the character renditions are often rougher and suffer from frequent problems with quality control and limited animation. The only character design which really stands out is the red-haired, perpetually-deeply-tanned Liz, who also seems like the biggest (though not only) concession to a more Western style of character design.

The English dub for the series was produced by Bang Zoom! Entertainment. Staple anime voice actors like Steven Jay Blum, Kirk Thornton, and Kari Wahlgren populate the supporting and minor voice roles, but significant-name Hollywood talent was pulled in for most of the major ones: a teenaged Haley Joel Osment as Takeshi, action star Michelle Rodriguez as Liz, Lance Henriksen (of Aliens and Millenium fame) as Andrei, and Mark Hamill as Yamma, the scarred leader of rival Team Sledge Mamma. All of them had voice acting experience with cartoons and/or video games by the time this series came up, so they all acquit themselves pretty well even though the delivery styles sometimes vary markedly from the Japanese performances; Henriksen in particular, with his gravelly voice, is an excellent fit. In fact, the only weak performance is Karen Strassman's Fantine; she was apparently trying for a vague French accent but did not pull it off, instead making Fantine sound like she had a weird and irregular speech affectation. The English script is significantly different, with changes sometimes going beyond just being adaptive.

Up to this point everything I have said applies to both the Toonami broadcast version of IGPX and the “Production I.G. Cut” (essentially the unmodified version), both of which are fully included in this release. Aside from changing the eyecatch, the major production difference between the two is the musical score. The dramatic, typically orchestral sound of the I.G. Cut version is a definite strength of that version, as it contributes a lot to the intensity of the action scenes. The Toonami Cut, on the other hand, uses an all-techno mix that I find decidedly inferior; sure, it has energy and attitude, but it comes up shorter on dramatic impact. Energetic J-Rock opener “Go For It!” fits the attitude of the series well but is replaced in the Toonami Cut by a series overview and recap, while the music for more sedate closer “Believe yourself” is replaced by an unremarkable techno sound backing the same set of visuals. Interestingly, the original Next Episode previews in the I.G. Cut version are not dubbed, presumably because Toonami was using its own Next Episode previews at the time that the series was dubbed.

The two versions also differ markedly on the features and Extras that they offer. The Toonami Cut has only the English dub in 2.0 and 5.1 stereo tracks but sprinkles a plethora of Extras across its five disks: both version of the opening overview, the pilot version of episode 1 displayed at Comic-Con that year (which seems to differ mostly in not having the intro and being presented in letterbox), English audio commentaries for almost half of the episodes, 2015 interviews with DeMarco and editor Sara Hardy, and various versions of the IGPX Pilot, along with promo trailers for it; see below for more details on that. The I.G. Cut has 2.0 and 5.1 stereo tracks for both the English and Japanese dubs, a “signs-only” subtitle option, and numerous but entirely different Extras across its five disks, including promo clips, audio commentaries for three early episodes, clean opener and closer, a 28 minute featurette on the 2005 Comic-Con panel promoting IGPX (during which the pilot episode debuted, although that is cut out here), and several 2005 interviews. The latter include ones with each of the Hollywood voice actors, who make obvious that have differing levels of awareness of what anime is but also provide insight into some of the decisions made in creating English voices for the characters); one with Toonami's Akins and Demarco, which is easily the most insightful one; and one with Bang Zoom! ADR director Eric Sherman. Both sets of disks are supposedly remastered, but that did not help much, as these disks are definitely not as sharp as some other recent DVD remastering efforts. In fact, at times the transfer looks pretty poor; this always happens during the closers on the I.G. Cut disks and varies from disk to disk otherwise.

Overall, this offering is designed to simultaneously cater both to those who came into the series via anime fandom and to outsiders attracted to the series without fully appreciating that it is anime. Regardless of which of those audiences is considered, the series works well as a lightweight thrill ride. Just don't peek behind the curtain!

IGPX PILOT: Unlike the main series, this earlier version is a more old school-looking (i.e., not CG) mecha series which has a more traditional in-terrain battle theme rather than a race theme. It features some of the team names (Sledge Mamma and Velshtein) seen in the main series and at least some form of most of the characters who would later populate Team Satomi in the main series; the only notable absence is an equivalent to Andrei. The haphazardly-executed plot involves League 3 Team Suzaku being randomly-selected as a replacement for Team Velshtein when their pilots are incapacitated by an accident before a quarterfinals match against Sledge Mamma. They have to scrap for weapons after leaving theirs behind but are lent some by the Sir Homgra, who later uses that as leverage to make Team Suzaku his group's junior team. Takeru eventually wins the showdown by (literally) going ninja on the Sledge Mamma cyborgs. Its value strictly exists as a curiosity piece, as its storytelling is borderline-nonsensical and its look is nothing special. Nearly all of the changes made for the main series were definite upgrades.

Additional Note: The Music grade below is for the I.G. Cut. The Toonami Cut grade would be one full letter lower.