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One part Charlie’s Angels, one part Terminator, and one part Blade Runner, there have been two incarnations of the lovely-yet-deadly Knight Sabers: Bubblegum Crisis, an 8-episode OVA series (30-50 minutes each, and its sequel set of three OVAs Bubblegum Crash) taking place in 2030s Neo-Tokyo, and Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, a retelling of the story in a half-hour TV format. The original series also released a pair of music video collections with some new animation (and a couple live concert clips) called “Hurricane Live!”, named after the first episode’s theme song, “Konya wa Hurricane (There’s a Hurricane Tonight)”.

(Updated from an earlier 2003 version with recent anime titles.)

Story Intro

The nightly grind for our heroines-in-armour — Sylia, Priss, Linna, and Nene — includes chasing down rogue robots called “boomers” and hiding their identities from the AD Police (who now have their own anime spinoff series) and the press. One developing plot point, expecially in the second series, is the relationship between Sylia, her father (the creator of boomer technology), and her younger brother, Mackie. Another is the nature of the suits themselves, quite the “using fire to fight fire” approach.

True to superhero code, each of the main four characters leads double lives. Sylia leads the Kight Sabers from their base in a back room of her lingerie shop. Nene is a AD Police dispatcher by day, Knight Saber by night, and computer hacker on her own time. Priss alternately spends her nights singing in a rock group and disabling rouge Boomers. Linna switches roles in the two series — in the original, she was a personal trainer by day, but in the new series, we delve into her office and home lives as well. “Doc” Raven (younger Nigel in the new series) and Mackie help repair their bikes and “hard suits”.

Other Notes

Since the two series span two different decades, the biggest difference in the two series are the music (80′s pop/rock in the original; 90′s techno/rock in the new one) and the character design. Nene, for example, changed from a bright-red “Farrah” hair style to a short-cropped blonde. I’d have to prefer the original, as I’m a big fan of Kenichi Sonoda, the character and mecha designer for the original as well as Gunsmith Cats, Riding Bean, and work on other ARTMIC shows such as Gall Force.

This series, in both incarnations, is also an homage to a favorite SF film, Blade Runner. Check out the huge pyramids of the Tyrell and Genom headquarters, the special police units dealing with replicants and boomers, and characters named Priss and Leon (even Priss’s rock group, The Replicants, in the original OVAs).

The spin-off series AD Police, focusing on the police department’s own battles against the boomers without appearances by the Knight Sabers, similarly has both ’80s (video) and ’90s (television and video) versions.

Original Versions:

Bubblegum Crisis (1987-91, 8-episode OVA)
AD Police Files (1990, 3-episode OVA)
Hurricane Live! (2-episode music-video OVA)
Bubblegum Crash (1991, 3-episode OVA)

Reworked-Continuity Versions:

Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 (1998-99, 26-episode TV)
AD Police (1999, 12-episode TV)
Parasite Dolls (2003, 3-episode OVA)

A nice encyclopedia of information from the original OVA series is available at Raven’s Garage.

(Bubblegum Crisis © Artmic/Youmex. Image use provided by AnimEigo (US licensor). All rights reserved.)