A lot of people like to tell me that moe didn’t exist in the 80s, but if you believe that you also have to believe that nerds weren’t desperately lonely and willing to fall in an empty, merchandise-driven mockery of love with one-dimensional fictional characters in the 80s. Unfortunately, I have evidence to the contrary: Cosmos Pink Shock.

Cosmos Pink Shock is technically a parody– as indicated by opening narration from Norio Wakamoto and some robot baseball– but unfortunately, though genre caricatures frolic onscreen at all times, nothing funny ever actually happens. There isn’t a joke here you haven’t seen before, from the panda-faced rocket to the overzealous fan club to the typical pretty-boy character with the typical army-of-squealing-fangirls gag.

And, of course, Cosmos Pink Shock has a perfectly moe heroine: 17-year-old Micchi travels space in a stolen super-rocket in search of her childhood boyfriend Hiroshi, who was abducted by a UFO when they were four. “Hiro-chan” appears for about three seconds in flashback and has no distinguishing features of any kind. Pointlessly and inexplicably devoted for life to a blank-slate audience substitute? This is dictionary-definition moe! At the end she’s saved by her own fan club (okay, I guess that part is decent parody) and the viewer is asked if he, too, will cheer for Micchi– or if, god forbid, Hiro will be the one.

The show gets further bogged down when Micchi is stopped on Jupiter and the jokes just stop coming, opting instead to show us the process by which woman-hating Captain Gatsby (the pretty boy from before) comes to decide that Micchi is the only good woman in space, on account of her bizarre obsession with Hiro-chan. Micchi escapes execution, speeds off in her rocket, and that’s about the end of it. The aimlessness of the material makes sense when you find out that the show originally ran as a serial packaged with an ill-fated anime video magazine. I wouldn’t have bought the next issue either.

Perhaps our bar for parody has just been raised over the years: maybe Family Guy-style Macross gags were total gutbusters in ‘86. From where I stand, though, this hardly even qualifies for the genre. Dragon Half had jokes, you know? Cosmos Pink Shock is simply dull and a chore to slog through at 35 minutes. If you’re truly desperate for your 80s OVA dose of lovingly drawn spaceships and robots, or you’re really curious about Kenji Kawai’s first anime soundtrack– or in a worst-case scenatio, you’re an AIC completist– you could watch Cosmos Pink Shock. However, such rash action is not recommended by the experts here at Colony Drop Medical. You could seriously hurt yourself like that.