It's Been Long Enough: Bubblegum Crisis
Nov. 22nd, 2025 06:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWatching Patlabor 2: The Movie again, about twenty-nine years and eleven months after I’d first seen it, marked the latest “it’s been that long, huh?” moment in time since I attended my introductory anime club showing at university (one month before they screened that movie). I had been thinking, however, of further iterations on that idea to make a bigger deal of my personal anniversary. Other titles were coming to mind that I’ve seen once yet never quite got back to despite taking some interest in them (and, quite often, having DVDs or Blu-Rays sitting around, many of them unopened...) Those sole viewings weren’t separated from now by quite as much time as the movie, but I was still ready to think that, again, “it’s been long enough.” For the next title in mind, though, I’d still be dropping back in on a different part of my university years.
As soon as I was going to the anime club shows at university and making some first small steps into online discussion, I was conscious of a panoply of titles which, it seemed, everyone else had already seen such that the club didn’t need to show them. Not being in the co-op program to make money from work terms made “buying my own tapes” feel unfeasible. However, I did pick up on the club having donated some laserdiscs to an audiovisual library on campus, and eventually found my way there. The title that stood out for me from the list then was Bubblegum Crisis. (Had I known then what I know now, I might have watched Project A-ko as well...) It didn’t have quite as much fanfiction online as Ranma 1/2 (the seeming “monster title” of that era) or Sailor Moon (which was starting to push past the utter contempt of established fans at the compromises of its “localization”), but the impression of “hot anime women and cool powered-armour action” had indeed got my attention. I managed to watch through all eight OVAs, which marked the one time I knew I was using a laserdisc player. (This far on, I don’t know if the club screened everything it showed off videotapes or if they had a laserdisc player set up during the shows.) I’ll admit one impression I took away was a certain amused disdain for the fanfiction that had men (whether “original characters” or “the college-aged authors writing themselves into the story through transference into the future”) just happening to join the all-women Knight Sabers (and getting a hot girlfriend in the process); I suppose delving into “anime MSTings” was having an effect on me.
That wasn’t the only bit of anime I managed to see outside of the club; I managed every so often to borrow videotapes from acquaintances or sit in on their own personal screenings, and before leaving university I got to the point of finding my way to a quite well-stocked independent video store and the extravagance of renting some of their tapes. Along with first viewings of The Wings of Honneamise, the “movie version” of Macross Plus, that mythic single episode of Urusei Yatsura I’m still waiting to run into again as I work towards the end of the original series now, a few of the “Robotech Perfect Collection” videotapes that also included subtitled episodes of Macross, and an impression I did see the compilation movies of the original Gundam (the nagging question is whether I saw even the first of them before the club began screening Gundam 0080 the fall after Gundam made its legitimate video arrival in North America), I suppose my most memorable experience was borrowing some tapes of the already and immediately infamous final episodes of Evangelion “recorded in Japan” and trying to split my attention between the TV screen and printouts in my lap of stilted “literal translations.” (The infamy of “the TV conclusion” didn’t bother me at the time; I supposed I’d just go on to a certain “fanfic continuation” in which, so I’d been informed, the original characters weren’t suave superheroes more than ready to save the day and land a significant other. Of course, with the way the episodes leading up to the conclusion had been turning out, the third-party continuation still seemed to amount to additional “moping around”...)
Bubblegum Crisis, though, just happened to turn into something I could never quite manage to get back to. I did buy a DVD box set (if not the fabled “first box set” that had a large slipcover over the sort of plainer box some software was once sold in), but it just kept sitting on my shelf. Rather later on I purchased the series again on a “post-Kickstarter Blu-Ray,” but I didn’t quite get around to that disc either until there were announcements from the under-new-ownership AnimEigo that there’d be another Blu-Ray with the episodes split between two discs for the sake of better audiovisual quality and more extras, including a little booklet. When it turned out you could get a discount on the new release by sending in a picture of your previous Blu-Ray I managed that. Then, perhaps more than even that, the nudge of getting back to Patlabor 2 made me find the resolve to get back to these OVAs next. One last thing I managed beforehand was to watch a movie I’d seen mentioned as an inspiration. While I’d known some of the names in Bubblegum Crisis came from Blade Runner, later comments argued the OVAs had a lot more to do with a different stylish cult classic from the 1980s, Streets of Fire. I did wind up interested in that movie, although I have to admit that, as with when I saw The Terminator at last (and the berzerk “Boomer” machines of Bubblegum Crisis might draw some inspiration from there, even if they’re that much more grotesque revealed than the chrome skeleton of the T-800), certain movies in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon might have left me needing to overcome distracting initial comparisons.
Part of starting into the OVAs was just sort of basking in the Kenichi Sonoda character designs, but I was surprised that the first episode ran longer than thirty minutes. I suppose I’d been thinking of how the higher-quality laserdisc format, “Constant Angular Velocity,” only allowed for thirty minutes of video on a disc thirty centimetres wide. “Freezing frames” and stepping through the animation, only supported by that format, might have been supposed a necessary sacrifice. Beyond that, the longer OVAs meant cutting a series out of my viewing plans for these three months. As I went on to further episodes, I did start to wonder about “you killed my friend outside of the Knight Sabers!” recurring as a motivation, and that did bring to mind thoughts of “less substance means a greater reliance on style.” I have to admit to going so far as to think of one particular fanfic I saved a copy of that presented itself as the script of a standalone movie, although maybe some would just shrug it off as “making one interpretation thuddingly obvious instead of leaving it to subtle allusions and everyone’s personal opinion.” Old comments invoking that flavour of the decade “cyberpunk” also came to mind, and those thoughts included how I’d started off supposing there was a lot of just plain “dystopia” in cyberpunk, but now had a current impression that, Boomer massacres aside, things didn’t seem all that desperate in the OVAs. (To be fair, when I took a deeper look at the foundational cyberpunk text Neuromancer in a university elective I did wind up with the impression that it, too, was “an ambiguous dystopia.”)
I’ve been conscious for a long time of judgments that, while eight OVAs is more material than a lot of other productions of the time got, Bubblegum Crisis doesn’t really have a grand conclusion of any shade. I did wonder a bit whether that’s a resemblance to the superhero comics I can imagine many English-speaking anime fans of the 1980s were familiar with. However, I then wound up thinking the “filler” episodes in between and after the two “plot arcs” were more appealing to me. The “revenge” angle did get passed off to characters outside the Knight Sabers in them, anyway (and lightened up quite a bit in the very last episode). I know some more OVAs named “Bubblegum Crash” followed the canonical eight, but have supposed from the moment I learned about them they were in general less impressive in the judgment of most; I did still wind up buying the latest AnimEigo release of them, though. I also know that the crutch of “an established brand name” was in use before the end of the millennium with a Bubblegum Crisis TV series, and I’ve had an economy collection of it on DVD for about as long as the DVD box set I mentioned before. Unfortunately, even before that I supposed the later show was controversial to start with for using all-different out-of-armour character designs and controversial to finish with for an ambiguous and troubling “post-Evangelion” ending. In any case, at this moment I’m thinking ahead to altogether different titles to get back to at last.
As soon as I was going to the anime club shows at university and making some first small steps into online discussion, I was conscious of a panoply of titles which, it seemed, everyone else had already seen such that the club didn’t need to show them. Not being in the co-op program to make money from work terms made “buying my own tapes” feel unfeasible. However, I did pick up on the club having donated some laserdiscs to an audiovisual library on campus, and eventually found my way there. The title that stood out for me from the list then was Bubblegum Crisis. (Had I known then what I know now, I might have watched Project A-ko as well...) It didn’t have quite as much fanfiction online as Ranma 1/2 (the seeming “monster title” of that era) or Sailor Moon (which was starting to push past the utter contempt of established fans at the compromises of its “localization”), but the impression of “hot anime women and cool powered-armour action” had indeed got my attention. I managed to watch through all eight OVAs, which marked the one time I knew I was using a laserdisc player. (This far on, I don’t know if the club screened everything it showed off videotapes or if they had a laserdisc player set up during the shows.) I’ll admit one impression I took away was a certain amused disdain for the fanfiction that had men (whether “original characters” or “the college-aged authors writing themselves into the story through transference into the future”) just happening to join the all-women Knight Sabers (and getting a hot girlfriend in the process); I suppose delving into “anime MSTings” was having an effect on me.
That wasn’t the only bit of anime I managed to see outside of the club; I managed every so often to borrow videotapes from acquaintances or sit in on their own personal screenings, and before leaving university I got to the point of finding my way to a quite well-stocked independent video store and the extravagance of renting some of their tapes. Along with first viewings of The Wings of Honneamise, the “movie version” of Macross Plus, that mythic single episode of Urusei Yatsura I’m still waiting to run into again as I work towards the end of the original series now, a few of the “Robotech Perfect Collection” videotapes that also included subtitled episodes of Macross, and an impression I did see the compilation movies of the original Gundam (the nagging question is whether I saw even the first of them before the club began screening Gundam 0080 the fall after Gundam made its legitimate video arrival in North America), I suppose my most memorable experience was borrowing some tapes of the already and immediately infamous final episodes of Evangelion “recorded in Japan” and trying to split my attention between the TV screen and printouts in my lap of stilted “literal translations.” (The infamy of “the TV conclusion” didn’t bother me at the time; I supposed I’d just go on to a certain “fanfic continuation” in which, so I’d been informed, the original characters weren’t suave superheroes more than ready to save the day and land a significant other. Of course, with the way the episodes leading up to the conclusion had been turning out, the third-party continuation still seemed to amount to additional “moping around”...)
Bubblegum Crisis, though, just happened to turn into something I could never quite manage to get back to. I did buy a DVD box set (if not the fabled “first box set” that had a large slipcover over the sort of plainer box some software was once sold in), but it just kept sitting on my shelf. Rather later on I purchased the series again on a “post-Kickstarter Blu-Ray,” but I didn’t quite get around to that disc either until there were announcements from the under-new-ownership AnimEigo that there’d be another Blu-Ray with the episodes split between two discs for the sake of better audiovisual quality and more extras, including a little booklet. When it turned out you could get a discount on the new release by sending in a picture of your previous Blu-Ray I managed that. Then, perhaps more than even that, the nudge of getting back to Patlabor 2 made me find the resolve to get back to these OVAs next. One last thing I managed beforehand was to watch a movie I’d seen mentioned as an inspiration. While I’d known some of the names in Bubblegum Crisis came from Blade Runner, later comments argued the OVAs had a lot more to do with a different stylish cult classic from the 1980s, Streets of Fire. I did wind up interested in that movie, although I have to admit that, as with when I saw The Terminator at last (and the berzerk “Boomer” machines of Bubblegum Crisis might draw some inspiration from there, even if they’re that much more grotesque revealed than the chrome skeleton of the T-800), certain movies in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 canon might have left me needing to overcome distracting initial comparisons.
Part of starting into the OVAs was just sort of basking in the Kenichi Sonoda character designs, but I was surprised that the first episode ran longer than thirty minutes. I suppose I’d been thinking of how the higher-quality laserdisc format, “Constant Angular Velocity,” only allowed for thirty minutes of video on a disc thirty centimetres wide. “Freezing frames” and stepping through the animation, only supported by that format, might have been supposed a necessary sacrifice. Beyond that, the longer OVAs meant cutting a series out of my viewing plans for these three months. As I went on to further episodes, I did start to wonder about “you killed my friend outside of the Knight Sabers!” recurring as a motivation, and that did bring to mind thoughts of “less substance means a greater reliance on style.” I have to admit to going so far as to think of one particular fanfic I saved a copy of that presented itself as the script of a standalone movie, although maybe some would just shrug it off as “making one interpretation thuddingly obvious instead of leaving it to subtle allusions and everyone’s personal opinion.” Old comments invoking that flavour of the decade “cyberpunk” also came to mind, and those thoughts included how I’d started off supposing there was a lot of just plain “dystopia” in cyberpunk, but now had a current impression that, Boomer massacres aside, things didn’t seem all that desperate in the OVAs. (To be fair, when I took a deeper look at the foundational cyberpunk text Neuromancer in a university elective I did wind up with the impression that it, too, was “an ambiguous dystopia.”)
I’ve been conscious for a long time of judgments that, while eight OVAs is more material than a lot of other productions of the time got, Bubblegum Crisis doesn’t really have a grand conclusion of any shade. I did wonder a bit whether that’s a resemblance to the superhero comics I can imagine many English-speaking anime fans of the 1980s were familiar with. However, I then wound up thinking the “filler” episodes in between and after the two “plot arcs” were more appealing to me. The “revenge” angle did get passed off to characters outside the Knight Sabers in them, anyway (and lightened up quite a bit in the very last episode). I know some more OVAs named “Bubblegum Crash” followed the canonical eight, but have supposed from the moment I learned about them they were in general less impressive in the judgment of most; I did still wind up buying the latest AnimEigo release of them, though. I also know that the crutch of “an established brand name” was in use before the end of the millennium with a Bubblegum Crisis TV series, and I’ve had an economy collection of it on DVD for about as long as the DVD box set I mentioned before. Unfortunately, even before that I supposed the later show was controversial to start with for using all-different out-of-armour character designs and controversial to finish with for an ambiguous and troubling “post-Evangelion” ending. In any case, at this moment I’m thinking ahead to altogether different titles to get back to at last.
no subject
Date: 2025-11-23 09:15 am (UTC)It's too bad the dispute between Youmex and ARTMIC messed up series development so bad, first causing Kinuko Oomori's (Priss) solo songs being halted after episode 3 and instigating an insert of a story arc (Vision) that was intended to kill off and replace Priss – but got changed at the last minute when some compromise allowed Kinuko Oomori to stay on – and everything fell apart before the 13 episodes could be made anyway.
Part of the story is here: Tomichi Suzuki and the Making of Bubblegum Crisis
no subject
Date: 2025-11-23 01:14 pm (UTC)