#Bubblegum crisis armor full#
Even though its popularity in Japan was only a fraction of the reception it enjoyed overseas, it’s my contention that without Bubblegum Crisis there’d have been no Akira film.īut is it any good? On one hand, detractors can say that this is a messy blending of many things that have already been done a Blade Runner city with a flavour of Neuromancer-come-Alien-come-Aliens dystopian griminess and high-tech evil and full of Terminators and Robocops, filtered through that anime staple, mecha. Today, Bubblegum Crisis is one of those \'classic\' titles that anime fans need to know about, a Terminator or Star Wars of the anime canon. Bubblegum Crisis was the leading edge of that cyberpunk anime, taking the elements that worked for the rest and expertly marrying it with many of the elements that make anime unique. Cyberpunk anime was as inevitable then as live action western versions of anime have become now. Where one media succeeds, others will follow. And William Gibson’s famed 1984 novel Neuromancer gave the world a fevered, lavish nightmare of clashing technology and humanity embroiled in a tale of global tech businesses up to no good, in the process giving this burgeoning genre a name: cyberpunk.
The seminal Blade Runner stunned 1982 with the visually amazing concept of a huge, grimy neon tech-sprawl future LA of totally mixed ethnicity and robots that behave more like humans than humans do. Alien, in 1979, brought the world a vision of space travel in the future that for once was filthy and corrupt and run by giant corporations with no morals. Science fiction, ever the barometer of public fear, reflected this in books and film. While some revelled in the abundance, others feared it. The first and third world had never seemed wider. For the first time socioeconomic concepts like the multinational corporation and the global market became realities, and the division between Japan, and much of the first world was getting rich quick and advancing technologically in leaps and bounds but at the same time, other countries were still stuck in a past age, unable to keep up. In 1987, amid the boomtimes in the west, the rise of Japanese industrial and corporate power appeared to be potentially endless and the west seemed unable to match it. Given that this is Bubblegum Crisis\' 20th anniversary year, I\'m going to start with some historic background.
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