A sure sign of anime's open-endedness is the way any number of genres are represented within it. Consider cyberpunk, the love child of high-tech science fiction, noir thrillers and slam-bang action movies. There's a whole roster of cyberpunk-inspired anime to choose from: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Mardock Scramble, Burst Angel, Eden of the East. But the vast majority of them owe a debt to one anime that's also responsible for seeding a fair amount of grassroots anime fandom in the West: Bubblegum Crisis.
Originally conceived in 1987 as a direct-to-video series, BGC (as it was commonly abbreviated) followed the adventures of the "Knight Sabers," a cadre of women in powered armor protecting a future Tokyo from the rampages of the "boomers," synthetic lifeforms employed as human slave labor. Boomers have a nasty tendency to go mad, break their shackles and attack everything in sight -- which leaves the Knight Sabers to swoop in and clean up. Kenichi Sonoda, of Gunsmith Cats fame, did the character designs.
The original BGC didn't fare well in Japan and had its plug pulled midway through its projected run. But it did appear Stateside on home video, and was one of the first titles to spark anime fandom here. Ten years later, one of the very distributors that had helped kick off the anime boom in America, ADV Films, co-financed a 26-episode remake for TV: Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040. The new BGC doesn't just feature updated graphics, hardware, music and animation styles, but a deliberately darker and grittier storyline (which isn't to say the original isn't good in its own way, just a different flavor of story).
So how well does Tokyo 2040 hold up after over a decade? Thanks to a new reissue courtesy of FUNimation, you can find out -- along with our review of Tokyo 2040 as well, of course.
Image: Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040. Image courtesy Pricegrabber.
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