Cyber City Oedo 808

CPM

149 minutes
English/Japanese
English Subtitles
Released: 04/20/1999
Reviewed: 05/10/2005

As you might well know, I'm quite enamored of a certain website and its webmaster. The forums of this website, on which I frequently lurk, a topic came up recently on whether or not cursing improved the quality of a dub. Now, the poster of this topic is a moron bereft of anything we could even aspire to call infantile intelligence and the topic was as similarly functional as he was, but it brought up some fun replies. Out of my dank and dirty banks of memory, I started dredging up recollections of dubs I had watched in times gone by, especially ones that figured in copious and violent amounts of profanity, frequently stuff that wasn't in the in the original language. And, like any good boy, I came to a singular conclusion...

Every single of these things was dubbed by Manga. Manga in the mid-90s, a time that no anime fan would exactly consider a hallmark development period in our hobby.

Cyber City Oedo itself is just indicative of when it was made. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but doesn't it seem like you see many shows about space criminals with 400 year life sentences being given a second chance at life and then going down to Earth in order to stop vicious ruffians from committing "cyber crimes", the end result of which being for each nefarious deed they stop a few years are subtracted off of their sentence. It seems like a decade ago we couldn't take a step out the door without tripping over ten of these shows. Am I right, here?

Probably not. But anyway, Oedo falls prey to plenty of the foibles of OVAs of its time. Fortunately it manages to skirt the really big ones. There is no background story or plot to get used to in the show, so you narrowly skirt the pitfall of not understanding the world because nobody will tell you what "Event 22-A-C" or "The cataclysm of the 23rd century" is. No, these are criminals in the year 2808 whose job it is to shoot people (and, in the dub, curse a lot, usually at a robot). You don't need to know anything else.

Like a nimble running back, Oedo can skirt the big heavies on the front line only to be taken down by the men in the backfield. The show has enough positive gain to make it worth your while, but little niggling doubts keep sneak their way in. This is mostly due to the timeline. I don't understand why in 2808 people are still using revolvers. They have giant buildings they call "starscrapers", but they can't make me a freaking laser gun? Hell, I'd settle for a laser revolver. I would suppose the Oedo scientists are spending so much time making androgynous police officers that they don't have time to upgrade their military hardware.

The final of this show's minor flaws is that it just has those horrendously atrocious 80s synth music, which is to be expected. A.D. Police, it's contemporary, shared this problem and it turned out alright. Despite all these, I mean, you could probably find worse things to do with your time than two and a half hours of space-cop drama. It's really just the amount of profanity that this show spews out at an impossibly hyperbolic rate, like a recently vasectomied sailor or something.

There's nothing more jarring than coming into a delectable OVA and hearing stuff like "You wouldn't know a fuckin' vampire if it jumped up and bit the tip of your dick", "Just fuckin' let me enjoy my fuckin' hangover in peace you fuckin' robot" or -- what vies for my personal favorite -- "Eat this dicksplash!" There was a time when anime dubs didn't strive to be as legitimate as possible and instead thrust themselves into the mucky quagmire of who could avoid every major plot point with the greatest finesse. You could get extra double super points if you could do it in a way that included at least their euphemisms for copulation. Triple word score for the "S-word" and it's various iterations.

In a way, I think it's sort of funny. I listen to this stuff now and I laugh at how people complain about guys like Steven Foster mucking up dubs like Super Milk-Chan and Trouble Chocolate. Sure it sucks, and he probably has mansex with David Williams or some other high up ADV mucky-muck to secure his position, but fifteen years again all the characters cursed anyway and all the female cyberterrorists talked with accents like Jewish girls from Hoboken, New Jersey. As far as I'm concerned, we've come a long way baby.