Oops! There have been a variety of spinoffs, but the original Bubblegum Crisis consists of 8 direct-to-video “OVA” installments released between 19. Unbeknownst to mc chris, the rather counterintuitive name “Bubblegum Crisis” ostensibly refers to a situation stretched to its limit and about to burst the way a gum bubble is when you put too much air into it, though this is never stated at any point within the anime itself. The tagline stuck because of the visual cues lifted wholesale from Blade Runner… as I’d learned on the Internet! In an era before DVDs and streaming video existed, it would be many years until I could see Blade Runner and Streets of Fire, the two American movies that primarily inspired BGC. Despite being marketed as “the Japanese animated cyberpunk classic” it’s perhaps not quite cyberpunk seeing as how society is merely on the verge of collapse instead of already demolished, but whatever. Bubblegum Crisis was-and remains-everything that a 12-year-old geek boy (or someone with the mindset of one!) could ask for out of their cartoon entertainment: robots, girl-powered armor outfitted with railguns, blood, cops getting dismembered, constantly exploding helicopters, laser beam-firing satellites, and even some brief female nudity for good measure. This cool-looking thing that I’d seen only glimpses of via videogame importer advertisements in the backs of print magazines was, after all, what the anime fans on Usenet were talking about the most often. The centerpiece of one-time US anime industry leader AnimEigo’s catalog, back then it was to them what Dragon Ball Z is to FUNimation today, and while it wasn’t the first anime I ever saw, the very first thing I did upon finding a local store that rented out anime tapes was get all 8 volumes of BGC and watch through it all in a weekend. In the early 1990s, during the birth of the World Wide Web which today encapsulates what is commonly referred to as “the Internet,” Bubblegum Crisis was one of the single most popular anime titles in America. But little about Bubblegum Crisis was “common practice,” and that’s what makes it so fascinating to look at nearly 25 years later. Hey, remember back when they used to release anime and the Japanese would include professionally made AMVs of their own stuff, such that when the show got released in the US, companies would just use the AMV as the trailer to sell the show? And then they’d sell those AMVs separately? You know, stuff like this? Yeah, neither do I, because that wasn’t exactly a common practice and it didn’t catch on.
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