2040 #3

Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 #3: Leviathans

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100 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
12/05/2000

When employed such as I currently am, in the incredibly dull world of painting basements, your new mp3 player can only enthrall you for so long and you can only listen to the same Pixies Album or compilation of various artists doing the original Getter Robo theme before you start to get a little bored with the whole thing. So in comes a 13" TV and many, many DVDs of Bubblegum Crisis 2040 for my perusing pleasure. For some reason, the day seems to fly by much faster when cluttered with the background noise of exploding robots and robotic monsters.
As such, I'm probably not getting the full experience of the working life, not this time around anyway. But I figure I've paid my dues a couple times over with the sixty hour weeks and the seven days a week... weeks. It seems to me that if I want to spend a bit of time watching police detectives get picked on by cutesy copgirls and giant claw monsters in between coats of paint then that's my prerogative. My newfound nonsexual crush on Christine M. Auten only fuels my desire. I'm not saying I'm going to stalk her and remove her skin and try to eat it, but I guess I'm not not saying it either.

Anyway, I need to be careful. I don't want to turn into the portly fellow I saw at Otakon that drug poor Tiffany Grant aside and gave her a lengthy monologue comparing the characters of hit TV show Friends to those of Evangelion. I think if I was a voice actor/actress I would love someone like me. Because they'd come up to me and say hello and I'd admit unabashedly that I had absolutely no freaking clue who they were. So Misses Grant, next time you see a pale fellow in a fedora with "Press" scrawled on it who has "Golden Rice Bowl" tattooed in Kanji on his arm, be sure to pull him aside and introduce yourself. I guarantee I'll make you feel better about anime fandom as a whole. Then it's time for hot loving in the broom closet! Or so my sexual fantasies go.
Shit, I digressed again didn't I? Well, I can't say I didn't try. Anyway, the score is big boomers are going crazy in Tokyo and Linna's at home jerking around with some blind date for some reason or other. Hey, listen, blind date guy. I know you had your heart set on tapping that counter cultural round, but she's got a job killing robots. ROBOTS. I know you can't see it right now, but I'm holding my hands out in front of me as if I was weighing the pros and cons of killing robots versus blind date guy. Robots... blind date guy... robots... blind date guy. Sorry dude, at least you tried. Back to Tokyo goes Linna!

Tokyo, where Priss is busy with whatever amorous homosexual flings or giant boomer killings she needs to do. You know, I never really thought about it before, but they've got a real samurai thing going on with Priss when she revs up for a good boomer punching. The lens flare followed by *SCHWING!* is one of the most classic sounds in film history, and if they want to associate hot punk bitches with samurai then I'm all for it. I gotta say that there's no time in the foreseeable future that I'm going to get bored with that. So if they want to continue it for the whole show that's totally cool. They do want to, obviously, and they have done it. This show has been around for many years and I'm pretty sure it hasn't changed one bit.

But there is many, many things about this show I like other than aggressive punk chicks who cause damage and cop out on their team members when they don't like what's going down. For example, the people in it use boomers in ways that make sense. They post them as guards outside gates and use humans inside. That way if an attack comes the expendable boomers die and the humans have a chance to react. They never actually say that, but I like to think that's what it was all about. There's more than that, but I think it mostly revolves around crazy punk chicks.

Midway, Nene shows a bit of cleverness when she discovers that the weak spot of the giant armored monster is his MOUTH. I suppose it's better than her getting knocked into pipes, but it's irritating that classic "show us she's worth something to the team" episode involves her using her 1337 haX0r skills to puzzle out what any observant six year old could guess. Sometime during that episode there's a really sweet piano song played while the giant monster kills boomers. I own the CD so I know I've heard the song, but we all know how I feel about music over action scenes so let's just leave it at that.

Final thoughts. Leon's a badass, I mean, a serious freakin' badass. As much as I want more Priss, I want more Leon. I find their relationship to be kind of like a "best man won" thing. As I briefly noted last review, he's more of a man than I'll ever be. That's not a slight to me, it's just an acclaim to the massiveness of his charisma. And presumably other parts. However, please, in five or six years when the much fabled 2041 comes out, please include less talking and more smashy-smashy. I like the character development as much as the next guy, but I find myself yearning for more giant rifles at times. There's so many things that Leon could do that don't involve blushing like a sissy. Besides, every time a boomer starts to give our heroines "the business" that's like carte blanche for me to put down my paintbrush and soak up some nice, refreshing robot action.