Bubblegum Crisis:
Remastered Edition #1
AnimEigo
75 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 11/09/2004
Reviewed: 07/12/2005
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Bubblegum Crisis:
AnimEigo
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I can only go so long without writing something about Bubblegum Crisis. I've already covered how lame anime makes you, how I'm addicted to these shows, and even how scared I am to write about it. I figured this time I'd just get it all out into the open. I am in love with this show. Literally in love. If this show was a human being I would marry it. And it seems that nowadays that isn't even a requirement. Suffice it to say, the date of our impending union might be sooner than you think. But for the time being I'll just go all out and wax nostalgic, that's what that sepiatoned icon up there is for anyway. Bubblegum Crisis is certainly not the first anime I ever saw, but it sure cemented my love of the genre something fierce. At the time I was a youth of thirteen with precious little in the way liquid assets. I had, however, just come into the possession of a $15 gift certificate to our local mom n' pop video rental outlet. Rentals were steep at $3 a pop, but it was a bit more reasonable than paying $30 for 30 minutes of video. I had exhausted most of Doomed Megalopolis (even at that young age I realized something off with that show) and rented Vampire Hunter D twice, which left only Bubblegum Crisis and those tapes with the little "Absolutely No Kids!" stickers on it. At my nascent adolescent stage I still believed those stickers held some credo, so I went for the appealing 80s character designs of Kenicihi Sonoda. |
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From the very first riffs of Konya Wa Hariken my world was changed. And this was just the English dubbed version of the song, imagine how badly the doors were blown off my reality when I finally heard the original! The first seven minutes of Bubblegum Crisis are excellent bar none. The soft montage of the city soothes you into a false sense of security before Konya picks up and a giant blue robot starts rocking the shit out of underequipped police officers. The rest of Bubblegum Crisis is a little less visceral than its opening moments, but to the burgeoning teenager it was basically the end-all-be-all. I was too young to recognize things like Mackie's incestuous indiscretions (peeping in on his older sister changing, ew). My sense of plot and character development hadn't expanded to a point where I could understand that every tape of the show basically boiled down to Priss swearing to get revenge for a random character whose fate was sealed the moment they appeared on celluloid. I couldn't grasp that maybe this stuff wasn't as highbrow as I believed (nay, wanted) it to be. |
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All I could express was how much I was in love with these girls and their robot suits and their ridiculous 80s pop music. Without the vast primer of titles I have at my fingertips and the cold, callow demeanor of a practicing alcoholic all I was able to do was get swept up in the moment. All the pretty colors and sleek hardsuits dashing across the scene was more than enough to satisfy my curious intellect. Bubblegum Crisis offers relatively little to the discerning customer. I don't know who slapped the label "cyberpunk" on it, but it's not. The characters don't have deep emotions, many of them are xeroxed out of a booklet of handy clichés and slapped right onto the page. The songs are chinsy little numbers, some of them of lower quality than what's playing on 80s stations even as we speak.** But for whatever reason, Bubblegum Crisis has more than it's fair share of heart. This clumsy little number, a first attempt for many of its directors, certainly had enough going for it to worm its way into my young heart. Here we are, ten years later, and I'd like to think that there's more to it than the fact that Mad Machine is the best song ever made. Well duh, that should be a priori by this point. It's MAD MACHINE. |
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Animeigo's treatment of the show is not as special as I would've hoped a special edition to be, especially after the way they gave Macross VIP care. After four or five times buying this series I guess I was just hoping for something more than a paper box. The extras on the first disc are barely enough to be considered as such. The same lame "music videos" that have been thrust upon with very re-release and text based commentaries that are enlightening, but a total pain in the butt to root through. Supposedly there's a Dolby mix stuck in here somewhere, but I wasn't catching any of it. So far, this box set is essentially the same set of DVDs I bought four years ago. But I guess it's okay, I would've bought it even if it was the exact same DVDs. As I've intimated so many times, my sense of nostalgia regarding this show is like a bear... a bear that ate another bear and gained its bear powers. It's a given that I love 80s anime, I once made a sign about what I'd be willing to do for it. When these things include robots and robot-hunting police and chicks in ties then the battle's been lost before it even started. Bubblegum Crisis is undeniably a classic, it hooked me and countless others. I guess the question is whether or not it's actually good. |
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