But it becomes impossible to hide the strange events when a gigantic mothership appears over Metropolitan, "the capital of Earth," and begins blasting it to bits. It turns out that there's been an alien invasion in the works for years. Fortunately, Earth has two arrogant boy geniuses on its side: Kimura Industries heir Billy Kimura and astronauts' son Penny Carter. When Capt. Clayton enters their lives, still trying to make the government pay attention to his UFO reports, and James suddenly resurfaces, the four become the core of an informal alien resistance unit that always seems to be in the thick of things, whether Billy and Penny are playing Hardy Boys by breaking into and investigating a downed saucer or cooking up a new piece of tech to detect alien infiltrators.

Also among the cast: Billy's often-fainting childhood friend Lotta Brest (the dubs pronounce her last name "breest" to make it less of a ridiculous James Bond girl thing, though on the Japanese-language track it's clearly "lotta breast," which is funny for a prepubescent girl who has none), Lotta's scientist dad and her tutor and guardian, Emely. Curiously, none of these characters is a clear protagonist, and they all share screen time about equally; often, episodes of Project Blue: Earth SOS feel a bit like old episodes of Speed Racer, with Speed off on holiday and the undistinguished supporting cast trying to deal with a crisis without him.

Familiarity breeds amusement

Project Blue: Earth SOS feels like a lot of other things mashed together: the density, boy-detective themes and problem-solving of a Tintin book, the bright but wrenching adventure of Giant Robo and Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and aspects of an old Flash Gordon serial. The series is clearly trying for the serial feel with its big mid-episode and end-of-episode cliffhangers, often narrated with big, excited superlatives. ("Our extra-special grandiose sci-fi adventure, which many will imitate but none will be able to duplicate, will continue!") Curiously, the episodes themselves have almost none of that hyperbolic bravado, but they're quaint and a little stilted, in that serial sort of way. Apart from the crisp animation—not unusually stylish, but modern and pretty—this really could be a jumpy, exclamation-point-filled vintage series from the '80s, or an adaptation of a Robert Heinlein young-adult novel.

None of the characters stands out much, apart from Billy and Penny—Penny's dog sidekick, Washington, has more personality than most of the cast. They're mostly big types, played for familiarity: Capt. Clayton as the big, bluff Pops Racer type, James as the rakish but enigmatic Racer X and so on. What stands out instead are the mysterious villains, the ghost-girl who manifests to spout oblique prophecies and the weird science, which at one point has the characters investigating the theory that the Earth is surrounded by glowing strings of material called "angel hair" and dumping salt into Earth's atmosphere to get rid of the stuff.

And then there's the series' strange blend of kid-friendly derring-do adventure—virtually all the adults are caught flat-footed in every crisis, and Billy and Penny have to save the day with their superior know-how—and grim violence. People die in Project Blue: Earth SOS at a surprising rate. And they invariably die abruptly and violently, without any of the death's-door speeches and farewells that tend to help characters and viewers alike deal with anime death. Still, the series mostly leans on the old-fashioned, upbeat "boy adventurer" elements. Fans of Jonny Quest who wish Jonny had taken on more alien empires would do well to tune in to this one.