Bubblegum Pop Electric Crisis

When I was in my early high school days - yes, before the Internet consumed my life - my family had this little Saturday night ritual. We'd go to church, have dinner then sit down and watch AAAAAAhhh it's the Mr. Hell Show!!!!! and then I'd watch Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 while everyone else would watch something weird like The Bill.

For those that have yet to experience the Mr. Hell show.. don't wait any longer. This is must see television. Or rather, DVD. Which I glomped the second I saw it in JB HiFi, having almost come to the sad realisation that it wasn't going to ever live in Australia.

'Yeah, we're superheroes. You love us.'

I used to rent anime from the library and video store, but all they had was the one VHS of Bubblegum Crisis OVA. It was really eighties, even in the nineties/early noughties and I didn't bother getting into it very much because as a kid without the eBay, what chance did I have of ever watching the rest of the series?

I remember the songs from that one, they were pretty good and I still listen to 'Tonight, a hurricane' a lot. Of the actual show, I don't remember too much. I liked Tokyo 2040 when I watched it though. It was different, shiny, futuristic.. okay, I hadn't seen that many anime at that point so it was all new to me.

Earlier this year, I took my little brother for a driving lesson and we decided to pick up some Chinese before he dropped himself off at home. While we waited, we mooched in the nearby video store - lo and behold, there it is! All the DVDs of Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040!

So I signed up as a member and hired them out. The music from this one was still good, designs impressive and I was able to watch it in Japanese, which was much better than the dub. It wasn't as epic as I remember but still enjoyable.

A few points I'd like to clarify.

I HATED the part where they decided to trash the suits and get new ones. Well, you run around fighting Boomers all day, you're bound to get smashed up and need repairs. Especially when the suits kind of.. merge with stuff. Usually the new suits would be more impressive but these ones... they sucked.



What idiot - when the next part takes place in freakin' SPACE - decides to send out their recruits in belly exposing suits. Heck, even into combat?! What were you guys thinking? Oh wait, thaaaat's right, these new suits require the girls to get nekkid and be covered in some weird.. goopy...stuff. I know right, those previous skin tight, low cut pre-suit suits were soooo unsexy.

What's more, the suits lose all of their personality and just become differently coloured carbon copies of each other. When did this turn into Mortal Kombat? The new suits aren't as visually effective and look creepy.

I liked Nene and Mackey's relationship, it was adorable and in a way kind of impossible but that's what made it interesting. By the end of the series though.. everybody had a counterpart. One scene where an underground swimming pool's glass is cracked by rogue boomers had all four girls each holding a guy and zooming off.

It sounds picky, but this is the kind of thing I notice in movies. When we saw Fast and Furious 5, I was sitting there rolling my eyes at a few things but mostly the end-of-the-movie-aww-everyone-gets-loving scene. Really? Everyone just happens to have a date? That's so romantic.....ly convenient. Bleh.

Sylia is the most annoying thing to hear in the Japanese version of this show. I mean, Tokyo 2040... TOKYO. Can at least one of your characters have a Japanese name? I like her back story but man she was annoying. Emotional outbursts due to physical pain and past trauma you can forgive, but sheesh, pushing skanky designer outfits on women who just said that they weren't comfortable exposing that much skin? Come on, Sylia.

For a futuristic boutique owner, she sure had a lot of WTF is she wearing!? moments. Seeing the future was pretty cool. The boomers for one thing were interesting but it was the little touches, like how Linna puts her magazine in a hole in the wall and voila! New issue: How to look chic while avoiding Boomer mauling (like the one coming out of our pages) that made it.

Mason was a smarmy villain, but the type you don't mind watching. You even sort of feel something while watching him in his lowest moments. His motivations are pretty simple and his means effective. Classic bad guy with a strange half-dead overlord....thing guy. And his sidekick, the crazy nekkid glowing robot girl!

I really liked the arc where Nene and a few co-workers were trapped in the Police HQ with the zombie-boomers. It's always fun to watch a rogue robot search for her life's ambitions as well. This kind of stuff can only happen in anime, if it was a film by any other nation the star would try to reason with it but end up tricking/outsmarting it and destroying it.

The opening theme is worth watching but the end credits... okay. Intervention time. Yes, you're cyber-punk. That's fine. We can deal. But what's with the creepy clown thing head rolling around all the static and character lookalikes dancing? Seriously. You've ruined the end song for me now, thinking of that odd compilation of... whatever that was.

Still, it's not a bad show if you don't look too deeply into it. I know they have to put power and time constraints on mecha these days but longer and more productive fight scenes would have been so awesome. That 'Archille's Tendon' bit in a suit of armour? Shouldn't really bring you down.

Favourite Character: Nene Romanova.

 

Cute, funny, quirky and a computer genius who hacked her way into the Knight Sabers - what's not to like? She's young and brave but honest and kind, a rare mix. Her interactions with Leon-poo and Mackey are the bomb and I love her little email ferrets.

Best Hardsuit: Sylia's silver death machine.

Violent and rarely seen, Sylia knows how to make an entrance. I like how she saves all the good bits for her own suit, like the reliable katana and the invisibility button.

Stupidest Drama Moment: The revelation that the hardsuits are kind of boomers.

Really? What gave it away? The fact that they're robo-suits, or, the fact that they're robo-suits? Maybe it's because they're robo-suits, and you all investigated Sylia's history.

Biggest Crisis in Crisis: The heels.

Women - fighting crime is generally done best in heels. You know, those shoe things that you can't really run in but look fantastic? Yeah, those. The things that tend to break at inopportune times, cost a lot of money and have been proven to mess up women's legs/spines? Yup. Don't tell me it's just something to help the suit work - NIGEL spent a lot of time making sure they all wore different fashion styles.. for some reason.
We have yet to see Transformers, Gundams or Evangelions wear ties, hats or similar..