El Hazard

You start out with your stereotyped Japanese school and add several students, a teacher with a drinking problem, and a mysterious artifact found under the school. The artifact, and its effects, propels the students and their teacher into another world, El Hazard.

The problems arise with the fact that one of the students hates another one, and is more than a little ways around the bend. As fate would have it he ends up with the Bugrom, a kingdom of bug-like beings that are trying to take over the planet. The rest of the students and their teacher land with the "good guys" who are trying to hold a coalition together to stop the bugrom advance.

Of course there's a problem of a missing princess who looks exactly like a female version of one of the male students. The princess is necessary for the talks, and guess who gets to impersonate her? And bye the way, there's a satellite-type structure overhead that is the "eye of God" and could apparently annihilate almost anyone or anything, and the good guys are trying to get it to work to stop the bugrom. Unfortunately for them the bugrom and the evil student have picked up the help of a female demon who has enough power of her own to utterly destroy an entire city.

Oh, and yes, you need to add a few priestesses to the mix and you have a rather wild setup. The animation is extremely well done, and a lot of the scenes are very attractive. The characters are played out well, and the story line seems sensible. Somehow to me the word "sedate" applies to this series; even with all the fighting it's still somewhat more relaxed than the average non-shoujo anime.

This is the soundtrack from Wanders, the El Hazard TV series. PICD-1011A with 31 tracks. This was an extremely disappointing CD. Out of the 31 tracks I would say there were fewer than half a dozen that I actually even began to enjoy listening to. Perhaps if I saw the actual episodes the music was taken from it might have meaning to me, but as it is I would classify most of the music on this soundtrack as boring, cheap background music.

This is another El Hazard soundtrack but, unlike the first, this one is worth listening to. The songs are upbeat, the singing is usually good and even the packaging is good with nice artwork.