I wish to make it known that the beginning and ending credits of Central Park Media's DVD release of "Dominion Tank Police" are edited in the following two ways, both of which I find upsetting, the second of which much more so than the first.

1: There are four OVA's. However, there are only two sets of beginning and ending credits -- one set for OVA's #1 and #2, the other for OVA's #3 and #4. This is, I believe, the way CPM released the series on VHS -- two OVA's per tape. With the much larger amount of "space" on a DVD, compared to a VHS, there should be no need to remove the "internal" credits to save space -- not for four 40-odd-minute OVA's, anyway.

2: In the original, Japanese ending credits, we, the viewers, got to see The Puma Sisters swimming naked in what appears to be a snow globe in Buaku's jail cell. They weren't very explicitly drawn (i.e. no genitalia), and also either darted past the viewer's point of view so fast that there wasn't time to really see them clearly, or were seen indistinctly swimming in the background. This is consistent with the other nudity in "Dominion Tank Police": in OVA #1, some of the briefly-seen naked patients in the research hospital are female; in OVA #2, one of the patrol tanks get thrown into a building, in which a naked lady is briefly shown straddling the tank's cannon barrel (and, it's worth noting here, the tank was thrown there by a kind of plastic landmine the turned into something unmistakably resembling huge, neon-colored male genitalia); and, in OVA's #3 and #4, in Buaku's flashbacks, some of his fellow, naked research subjects are female. Overall, the nudity in "Dominion Tank Police" is mild and playful, and doesn't do more than "flash" the viewer.

In CPM's ending credits, the start and finish of the original ending credits (which only contain Buaku and the snow globe) are intact, but, as soon as the view zooms into the snow globe, the "frame" in which the original end credits exist shrinks, seeming to withdraw to the top-center of the screen, while the English credits begin scrolling by on a black background. Throughout the English credits, not only are The Puma Sisters minutely visible, but the original Japanese text of the credits are as well -- all so tiny as to be barely recognizable for what they are. After the view within the original credits draws away from The Puma Sisters and back out to Buaku, the original credit sequence fills the screen again.

Watching CPM's edited ending is, to me, an exercise in frustration. For crying out loud, why effectively cut out those ending credits while leaving in both the other nude scenes AND that rather hilarious tanks-versus-plastic-landmines sequence? (And, no, I'm *NOT* suggesting cutting those too -- perish the thought!) At the very worst, leaving the ending credits intact could mean changing the age-rating from 13 Up to 16 Up. And this would be just fine, because, while both comical and *not* graphically extreme, "Dominion Tank Police" was never intended to be a children's show; in fact, aside from its wonderfully irreverent "Police Academy"-type hijinks, there are underlying concepts in it very like those in "Ghost in The Shell," freely speculating on a subject that practically no Western SF storytellers have ever had the nerve to so far, due to, I think, religious prejudice. (NOTE: For those unfamiliar with these titles, both "Dominion Tank Police" and "Ghost in The Shell" are based on manga by Masamune Shirow.) Like "Ghost," "Dominion" is, in addition to being a great anime, a profound work of speculative fiction, with an underlying concept that few children (and probably not all adults) would grasp. The intended audience for "Dominion" is at least in its mid-teens, rather "cute" character designs notwithstanding -- actually, they're cute because "Dominion" is a comedy, and it's typical for anime and manga characters in a comedy to be drawn cutely (i.e. "Ranma 1/2"), to help create a fun, whimsical mood; it doesn't necessarily mean that the anime or manga is intended for children (obviously).

• If you would like to ever see a U.S. release of "Dominion Tank Police" that has the original, untouched credits for all four Ova's, then I suggest sending a POLITE letter or e-mail to CPM about it. And, also, I suggest doing so *soon,* because CPM has recently talked about re-mastering and reissuing some of its earliest anime DVD titles (i.e. "Project A-Ko")