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Dig back into your collective consciousness to the last time you remember Adam Warren actually doing anything Dirty Pair rel—huh? Oh, you actually have to have had read Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair before you can recollect back to when… gotcha.

At the end of his tenure, before he was lobotomized and became a one page wonder over at what is now the second Official Playstation Magazine (formerly the unofficial magazine known as PSM) he used to do so much more… like actual titles… long titles… like his take on the Dirty Pair series. Well, one of the last things he did with that before vanishing into MARVEL then obscurity (give or take the chain of circumstances that even I am not entirely sure of) he did a colorized re-release of Dirty Pair : Sim Hell… but then he didn’t stop at just colorizing it as he plastered every inch he could with holographic graffiti and the added in fresh pin-up art, covers and a few page fresh story at the end.

So, it 2006 and as Gold Digger hit it’s 15th Anniversary, Fred Perry decided to revisit the Golden Age of Gold Digger in a few ways. One being the Gold Digger Original Animated Video series (of which we are still waiting on OAV 3 of 3—and waiting to find out who is going to be voicing Britanny in that version) and the other, the one that SHOULD have been the topic of Gold Digger the OAV… Gold Digger Color Remix (reprinting the four issue mini that came after the one shot beginning).

Come on, Lord of the Rings 15 minute intro and the entire Dreadwing thing is explained away and the OAVs could have gone right into this story without any muss or fuss.
Entitled “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Lost Cities” we find (after the introductions by Fred Perry that is actually quite informative) Gina & Britanny are not in good circumstances… again. Seems they’re headed on down to Peru and have picked up a large pursuit force of choppers on their tail. Why? Well they (along with Ace who is doing all the evasive maneuvers piloting) are looking for a lost temple of gold (because Britanny is in deep on her credit card abuse again and she hopes her bank accepts gold in pure brick or ancient currency coin form).

However they don’t get very far as they run into Britanny’s future husband Stripe, and they somehow end up going with him to his home turf of El Dorado (ending up saving the city even if a certain Miss Penny Pinc(h)er shows up along the way)… and yes, thus begins the long long long wedgie war that rages on throughout the Golden Era, and probably right into the Second Era as well. Right. Grow up you two.

Speaking of grow up note the cover is fresh, and it’s colorized but… hmm… well note how darn different the series is today as it was back then! A lot of evolution of character design and drawing went on in 15 years! (And yeah, third sister Brianna won’t show up until she’s cloned into existence in awhile and we’re only beginning to see several secondary cast show up in this run)… where was I? Oh, right, the series.

Issue #2 it’s off to the city of Atlantis! Why… I don’t know, someone is still broke.
Actually they’re less on just a money securing trip (through if you can grab it during the trip do so). Seems the guy (Gyphon) who caused trouble in El Dorado has retreated back to Atlantis and now they’re after him (have to fetch some stuff of Stripe’s and take away Gyphon’s mystical weapons of mass destruction without a UN order and whatever).

After some misadventures underwater (including a change of clothing for Gina and Mesha) we find that the gang is… too late in stopping Gyphon from summoning a monstrous creature known as Armageddon… oh, nice. So now in order to find a way to stop Armageddon Gina needs to take a trip up from the sweltering heat of Atlantis to the frigid cold of the Himalayas in order to visit the grand library of… wait, she’ll get to the library if she doesn’t freeze to death first… or end up as a guest star on Law & Order Special Victims Unit after waking up naked with a bald muscular guy lying on her naked… no, no, I’m sure there was no “Who’s The Father of Gina’s Baby?” plot during the Golden Age so fuhgeddaboutit.

Well, after a particularly embarrassing entry into the third issue (which could get Khan either killed, arrested… or married) we find that Gina is right where she wants to be… and apparently it was also where Gyphon wanted to be at one point since he borrowed a particularly nasty tome from the library at one point (the library has a wee bit of a gray area on policy towards borrowing universe shattering tomes to evil—why just last Simon Cowell was allowed to take “How To Use Music To Influence People”)… Oh, and this is the issue when hot yet totally messed up in the mind Lynn returns from points unknown with her little spherical robotic sidekick (and yet to date she has yet to garner enough interest for her own mini series!!)

Issue #4 wraps things up (but not before a certain married couple of werewolves appear for the first time while Gina and company look for the final ingredient in her plan to bring an end to Armageddon (the monster, not the movie).

Overall I liked it the first time (from Graphic Novel 1), and now in full color it’s just that much more cheerier and bouncier than before. From what I can see, however, there’s no true bells and whistles in this one. I won’t minus points from it (because it’s my favorite read and I always have a soft spot for Gold Digger) but at least Adam Warren added content onto his Remastered version of Sim Hell, which doesn’t seem to be present here. Sad, but I would have wanted to see something more out of Perry’s redo of this four parter. Heck, while I’m on the topic I would have loved to have seen Fred Perry use this as his basis for his OAV because this is a better story (with more cast, more fun, more quirks, more joy, more everything… and I mean that in both a naughty and nice way all at the same time).

Otherwise… as far as specials for anniversaries goes it is… meager dealings.
I loved it, you’ll love it, but I still could have done for more. There is several items just for the 15th Anniversary and all, but somehow I still feel like I needed more.
Well, when it comes to this concept since Fred Perry wasn’t adding fresh content to the titles from what I’ve seen he could delegate the colorization of the whole Golden Age to other people (who we can have an ongoing reliving of the grand Golden Age of Gold Digger… in color no less).

But we only got this, and it’s good to go. So enjoy (in both individual issue and by now graphic novel reprint version).

Five naked Ginas (To quote Yakko Warner, “Heeellllllooooooo nurse!”) out of Five

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