Posted in: Anime, DVD/Blu-ray, Review, TV | Tagged: Bubblegum Crisis

Bubblegum Crisis Blu-Ray Review: When Cyberpunk Anime Was More Fun

To revisit Bubblegum Crisis is a burst of 90s anime nostalgia where the goofy mish-mash of Cyberpunk and Super Sentai was even more fun.

Ahh, nothing like anime nostalgia – Bubblegum Crisis is a burst of 90s nostalgia. It was one of the major anime series of the 1990s that was a milestone on many levels. It helped kick off the OVA (Original Video Animation) boom where short anime series and feature films were released straight to video for sale and rentals instead of premiering on broadcast television in Japan. It was also one of the first anime series to be imported to kick off the anime boom in the West and had a decent English dub that accurately reflected the original Japanese lines. On top of all that, it's also a record of a different and lost era of anime that's left some footprints in today's works. It's also a lot more fun and less grimdark than most of the current anime series that have been running for the last ten years.

Bubblegum Crisis is mainly a futuristic superhero series about a team of female mercenaries in cybersuits who fight "boomers," robots or cyborgs that go berserk in a futuristic Cyberpunk Tokyo. The Knights Saber's secret identities have day jobs – one of them is a rock singer, voiced by real-life popular rock singer Kinuko Ōmori as a cast headliner. The series had a strange, edge-of-its-seat production history. The main staff were major names in the anime industry but there was no real long-term plan in its story. It was originally meant to be a revival of a 1980s future cop series but was changed into a Frankenstein-style mish-mash of genres, tropes, and Hollywood movies like Walter Hill's Streets of Fire, The Terminator, and Blade Runner, along with Super Sentai heroes and transforming mecha. It feels like they threw everything fun and cool into a blender, and it's kind of a miracle the series held together. Each episode was written and made as a standalone with no long-term arc. It feels like episode television form the 1970s and 1980s. The series and production were reputedly beset by creative arguments and legal problems, but that's just background for whether the series can be watched on its own as a piece of pop entertainment.

Bubblegum Crisis: Odd But More Fun After All These Years

Despite the fraught history and politics behind the production which you can look up, Bubblegum Crisis is still a lot of fun to watch, perhaps a bit more fun than a lot of the current anime series out there. For starters, it can get dark and violent but somehow doesn't have the grimdark apocalyptic sense of existential despair that preoccupies a lot of shows now, and Cyberpunk Sci-Fi anime is still in the minority. it comes from a time when the anime industry was looking outward and had more stories that appealed to audiences everywhere instead of the more insular focus on awkward Japanese high school students these days. It's such a relief to watch an anime where the main characters are adults! There's something inherently goofy and funny about a rock singer as a badass superheroine in a cybersuit fighting dangerous robots from a sinister corporation. It's like every trope of superheroes, crime, and Cyberpunk thrown together to keep you watching. To watch Bubblegum Crisis again is to remember a time in school when anime clubs were a big thing and everyone exchanged bad VHS bootlegs and the fun that comes with that, and how different and even innocent the stories used to be.

Bubblegum Crisis is out now available as a remastered Blu-Ray set.

Bubblegum Crisis

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Review by Adi Tantimedh

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9/10

A welcome remaster of the 1990s Cyberpunk urban superhero anime OVA that reminds us how much has changed since, from the different hand-drawn art style and action before CGI took over the industry, and also the different storytelling style, a combination of procedural episodic storytelling, gleefully and unashamedly derivative of different genres like super sentai combined with a post-AKIRA cyberpunk city, J-Pop, post-Blade Runner visuals, goofy humour, future crime and serious Science Fiction.

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