Bubblegum Crisis Is 30 years old

The first FVOs of Bubblegum Crisis came out on 25 February 1987 for a total of 8 episodes, which were published until 1991.

History plunges us into a cyberpunk universe where robots have taken an important place in society with specimens that perfectly imitates humans physically. This same society of the future is under the control of Genom, a multinational that crushes everything in its path, except a small group of resistant outlaws, the Sabers, who thwart the disastrous projects.

Apart from the charisma of his heroines and the armor struggles already drawn at the time by Shinji Aramaki, the director now known for his 3D movies from Appleseed to Albator, the franchise must also be successful in the dark and filling atmosphere Of despair, which was even more pronounced in the AD Police strands. Episode 8, Scoop Chase, is a bit of an exception with a lighter atmosphere and an air of déjà-vu compared to the previous opus, but also a technical quality upward, given the date of its production 4 Years after the release of the first component.

The realization is also very effective with some memorable scenes and an original soundtrack and especially several songs. The main ones are released as clips made up of extracts from the OAVs and visually, it still has its small effect even today when you watch the clips of Rock Me or Hurricane Tonight.

Is this the anime of the century? Obviously not, and some of the mecha designs and concepts have also aged badly. On the other hand, the importance of the title is to be considered in relation to the world of the hobby of Japanese animation, in the West.

Until the 1980s, the general public could only see Japanese cartoons through broadcasts on the different TV channels, with what they wanted to buy and what producers wanted to export. For those who were aware that we had only seen a very small part of what came out in Japan, it remained the option of import more or less direct, in original version without any subtitle. Until the conventions of the early 1990s, it was usual to view anime unpublished without subtitles, see to have someone translate simultaneously.

The least direct option is to ogle on copies of video cassettes or transcodings from Laser Disc, using rare devices that had to retranscribe Japanese video formats in a western readable format. In Europe, it was even more nasty than in North America, given that the PAL / SECAM standards are far removed from the Japanese NTSC. Groups of fans began to translate and circulate their scripts before beginning to subtitle and produce the first fansubs.

In 1991, Bubblegum Crisis was among the pioneering titles in North America to be officially and legally published at Animeigo in this format with subtitles, regardless of the standard channels of broadcast and without the cartoon prejudice for children. In turn, this was one of the first titles released by the initial grinding of Kazé a few years later.

You could differentiate the format fansub from a classic subtitling with the abundance of messages on the screen. There, where a classic and relevant subtitling sacrifices the details to retain that the essential, the fansubber retranscribed everything left to compress his text on 3 lines, while adding on the screen the translation of an announcement on radio radio , Passed in the background. Sometimes it was necessary to be adept of the pause key and the first translated volumes of Bubblegum Crisis was a bit of this stuff but I suppose the shot has been corrected since, especially in the following editions in DVDs and Blu-ray.

Nevertheless, the release marked the new wave of titles found on the Western market, imported directly from Japanese studios, without going through the sacrosanct television box. It has become very common now and even inverted, where an importer publisher then offers his series to a TV channel, but at the time it was new and somewhere the beginning of the dream - come true even if everything does not appear And not necessarily at a reasonable price - from the implementation of anime in American and European gondolas, like any other easily findable videos. It is in this sense that Bubblegum Crisis has so marked our minds.

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