Back in 2019, I received an animation cell from the Crusher Joe OVA as a Christmas present from a friend who collects animation cels. (I'd intended to write about this sooner, but projects and other events intervened.)

Crusher Joe is one of my favorite anime from the 1980s. It's space opera, and of the kind with a strongly positive view overall of the future, but still filled with challenges, both technological and personal. Each of the OVA stories and the film itself are adventure tales, set in a vaguely distant future where humans have colonized other planets and flying between stars is no more or less inconvenient than an intercontinental flight, which obviously relies on some judicially applied faster than light travel, so I hesitate to call it hard sf.

But science fiction it is; filled with 80s-era hardware designs by Shoji Kawamori (who worked extensively on Macross as well as many many other properties) which had enough charm to have some of the designs tapped for inclusion in first edition Battledroids and Battletech (though unintentionally on the part of the rightsholders for Crusher Joe). Still, it served to have introduced some of Kawamori's designs to the west, albeit sans context—though, personally, by the time I became acquainted with any BattleTech, I was already pretty well steeped in Crusher Joe, Macross, and the other properties the game borrowed from.

The film was my first introduction, on LaserDisc, and I only became aware that there were OVAs produced when I acquired the DVD of the film which as a bonus included them. 

This cel comes from Crusher Joe: The Ultimate Weapon: Ash.