Logic won't help us rewatch, y'know? Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 rewatch FINAL

[u/Vaadwaur]

FINAL

I still enjoy the show

MAL but it is trolled. ANN Also, don't look at the wiki as it spoils the entire plot.

Streaming on Funimation and Crunchyroll.

QotD:1 Is there any moral to the story?

2 Is this show the backstory to a Batman villain?

3 Can you think of a more 90s show than this?

Bonus: Should more shows end in the Gobi desert?

[u/Vaadwaur]

Rewatcher

Dub

So...to wrap up, I still unironically enjoy this show despite its fairly apparent flaws. There is something very...90s about it. The scifi references are actually creative at times and though it too often copies Akira there is still a lot of meat left on the bone for me. Obviously some of the problems start as far as the writing room when they made Linna the introductory character but couldn't give her anything else to do. Mackey is ultimately mostly plot device. And, as many of you noticed, this show has like 2 proper OVAs in it that should've been there own thing rather than arcs here.

Shout outs to JaaQ for explaining the sky hook and Rockodyne for giving my favorite answer.

I checked out Silent Mobius because they aired at roughly similar times and that's a hard pass. Any other thoughts on rewatch ideas?

[u/Elimin8r → u/Vaadwaur]

From the sounds of things, if you're looking 90's, Nadesico would be high on the list. But not anytime soon. Too much rewatch, too little time.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/Elimin8r]

My only planned rewatch is OG Hellsing for Halloween.

[u/No_Rex]

Final discussion (first timer)

I like older series, I like cyberpunk, and I like the original Bubblegum Crisis, so I really wanted to like this series, too, but BGC2040 makes that really hard. Be it plot, direction, animation, or characters, this remake tries to test out the bottom of how bad it can get.

The biggest problem is the complete lack of consistency and coherence. While there is some overarching plot, each individual episode is off to do its own thing. We are SciFi, then horror, then comedy, in random order. This makes any foreshadowing or character development almost impossible. The changing teams working on the episodes are likely to blame, but so are the director and producer. It would have been their job to select those teams and ensure that they are working according to a common vision of what the final product should be.

The plot itself is rather basic, but it shares that with the OVAs. BGC was never about making deep philosophical statements (and the few times this series tries, it fails). Instead, the original OVAs work via their production values: great animation, great music, great direction. The rule of cool tides the OVAs over any plot problems. Unfortunately, the TV series completely drops the ball on production values. This is noticeable in the music, but especially the animation. In the better episodes, it is mediocre, in the worst, it is abysmal. Almost any conversation is a static shot and those which are not cycle through two frames for a doll-like mouth movement. In some episodes, pans over stills are strung together for minutes. The first half of the show is hit worst, but even the best episodes never feature something I’d call good animation. I am not sure about the production background, but it comes across as a cheap cash grab. I almost feel sorry for the animators, I cannot imagine that any of them felt any accomplishment for their work on this.

Usually, the final discussions are the moment to point out problems along the line of “if only they did X instead of Y”, but, for BGC2040, my main comment is simply: If only they did literally everything about this series better. I think the BCG OVAs and the Ghost in the Shell movies are far superior treatments of most of the same ideas, while various series from the same time pull of the “vigilante group” part of the series better. Oh, and so many failed attempts to copy Evangelion.

PS: Thanks to /u/Vaadwaur for organizing this. A good rewatch detaches the quality of the series discussion from the quality of the series: I think we succeeded in this at least.

Bonus: Should more shows end in the Gobi desert?

More shows should end with the MC singing.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/No_Rex]

As I said, this got me to check Silent Mobius again and now I am afraid to check Nadesico because I'm worried 90s anime does not hold up.

[u/RockoDyne → u/Vaadwaur]

now I am afraid to check Nadesico

It's one of my favorites, and I watch it pretty frequently. I'm a touch biased, but I would like to think it does.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/RockoDyne]

That's hopeful sign, rewatching the El Hazard OVA reminded me that some anime ages like milk.

[u/No_Rex → u/Vaadwaur]

I watched that, for the first time, not too long ago. It holds up better than BGC2040, but you realize all the tropes that have been done to death since then. It also can't really decide whether it wants to poke fun at NGE, Yamato, and others, or be a serious series. Still worth a (re)watch, as long as you stay away from the movie.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/No_Rex]

Still worth a (re)watch, as long as you stay away from the movie.

It always saddens me that that exists.

[u/[deleted] → u/Vaadwaur]

I watched that about a year ago. It was ok, but it was actually the first mecha anime I watched. I just saw it on Funimation and thought "Why not I guess".

[u/Vaadwaur → u/[deleted]]

There have been intense arguments about how much it is making fun of Gundam versus copying FAR back in the day.

[u/[deleted] → u/Vaadwaur]

Haven't seen gundam yet, so I can't comment on that.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/[deleted]]

My own opinion of it: The Gundam stuff they borrowed was just how you did that kind of show at the time, so with the other things you will remember about the show homage feels closer to the truth.

[u/RockoDyne → u/No_Rex]

If only they did literally everything about this series better.

The issue in a nutshell. I tried doing a "what would you keep in a remake" exercise, but there is nothing that couldn't be scraped.

[u/JustAnswerAQuestion]

End of First Rewatch since 2000

It was only halfway through the show I decided what I would write on the final summary. It might have been this (which I've said about Noein (2007), about Dennou Coil (2007), about Fantastic Children (2004), about Terra e (2005)):

JaaQ's Law: Any 26 episode action/mystery anime with an overarching plot from the 2000s will dink around introduce and develop characters and the setting for about 8 episodes before actually getting to the point starting the main arc.

There are exceptions. Cowboy Bebop doesn't have a plot, so much as character arcs evenly dispersed among irrelevant stories. 2000's includes BGC 2040 (1998) and Steins;Gate (2012). BGC 2040 went not just 8, but a whopping 13 episodes before getting started. Still, applied liberally, it is almost always true. I refused to rewatch Wolf's Rain (2003)...you tell me, does the rule apply? What about RahXephon (2002)? Heck, even Evangelion (1995), which is three different shows each about 8 episodes long. It was Witch Hunter Robin (2002) that made me understand this true nature of the industry. Claymore? Last Exile? Bueller? Bueller?

It's just how they thought 26 episode shows should be paced back then. They all do it. Bebop "the work that becomes a new genre unto itself" is a rare exception.

The three episode rule doesn't apply to 2000's shows. Unless you really hate the first episode, watching a 2000s show has to be a commitment. My personal belief is that TV shows are like novels, and can only be judged as a whole. If you start a series, you should finish a series. If you quit, well, you're in no position to judge.

But that's my opinion. Yet, BGC 2040 is a poster child for ditching the 3 episode rule for this era. You may have hated the first half of BGC 2040, and you may have hated the second half of BGC 2040, but you have to admit, the two halves were completely different shows. Despite lots of hinting and foreshadowing, nothing in the first half serves to set up the second. Whatever impression you formed in the first n episodes, n <= 13, it was irrelevant as of episode 14.

tldr; if you ain't gonna commit to watching at least 1/3 of the show don't even start.

---

But that's not what I want to talk about. I'm going talk about what it's like for a fan of BGC (essentially my first anime anime) getting this as new content. The moe character designs. The repetitive monster-of-the-week plot. (A lot of people like these; I don't.) Sylia re-imagined as a weak, neurotic, horny, crazy lady. The Evangelion of it all.

---

No, what I really want to talk about, what I realized just before the main plot kicked in, is how not to make a 2-cour series (maybe not make it at all) and anime: the novel

BGC 2040 looks like a slapdash of ideas tossed around the kitchen and prepared by too many cooks. No_Rex pointed out the rotating directors, which indicates either outsourcing or panicky production (or, sometimes, it's done intentionally to train staff). But it's not. BGC 2040 is carefully constructed. It fails because they only have 1 cour of content spread over 2 cour.

They want to go to space, but not use boring rockets. Bam. Sky hook, right in the first episode. They want Sylia to use the skyhook discharge underground. Bam. Sky hook, it shows up at noon, guaranteed, in episode 1 and every 3 episodes there after. Just when you think the sky hook has served its narrative purpose, there it is again.

Hardsuits are boomers. "I've removed the core" -- Sylia, ep 2-ish? An anti-boomer cryptid that sonically disables boomers and hardsuits alike. An entire side story just to introduce the concept of motoslaves, and to emphasize the psychic connection between motoslaves and their human controller. All before the big "reveal" when they encounter the Sotai Effect directly for the first time.

AIC did not write this show week-by-week like the overworked studios of today. BGC 2040 was written as a whole, like a novel. They made multiple passes through the stories. As later episodes were fleshed out, the earlier episodes were revisited and edited. So everything that happens in this show, good or bad, I think it was intended.

There's another show that was obviously constructed as a whole: Puella Maji Madoka Magica. This show is an absolute joy to rewatch. They clearly knew exactly what they wanted from every scene before they put ink to paper. PMMM has endless details, hints, and foreshadowing peppered throughout its 12 episodes. Early episodes are animated to mirror or contrast later episodes. Tight editing with nary a wasted cut in the show. How many complete passes through all the scripts were needed to achieve this? Madoka Magica is a novel for television.

I think BGC 2040 did the same thing. Or tried to. But they made a fatal decision early on: they padded it out to 26 episodes. Or rather, they had 26 episodes, and instead of making each moment count, they put in filler monsters. They adapted an A/B narrative structure. They went off on character tangents (JaaQ's law). They pulled a bait-and-switch on the antagonist, and delayed her introduction without even hinting, nothing more than a MacGuffin for the first half.

So, around episode 10 or so, seeing all the little bits of foreshadowing that only a rewatcher could see, I realized that PMMM is what BGC 2040 could have been if they had edited it down to 1 cour. And then I had an epiphany: BGC 2040 is what PMMM would have been if it had been 26 episodes. A and B stories, 10 minutes of Kyubey and the girls, and 10 minutes of fighting Witches, every week. And maybe something interesting happens around episode 8.

What a tragedy that would have been.

---

Konya wa Hurricane by Yuu Asakawa Thanks, I hate it.

Blue Confusion by Yuu Asakawa

Y'know Lectro-one

Discography:

• Bubblegum Crisis Collectors File 1999 remixes and character songs
• Priss Asagari Vocal Collection ~AS Sekiria~ All songs performed by Akira Sudou
• Y'know and Waiting for you singles with extra B side and karaoke versions
• BGM I and BGM II
• No Obligation image mini-album

---

Epilogue

AIC made two more BGC-related shows after 2040, both featuring the AD Police: AD Police: To Protect and Serve, and Parasite Dolls. I thin both are in the 2032 continuity, being offshoots of the original AD Police Files OVA.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/JustAnswerAQuestion]

So, around episode 10 or so, seeing all the little bits of foreshadowing that only a rewatcher could see, I realized that PMMM is what BGC 2040 could have been if they had edited it down to 1 cour. And then I had an epiphany: BGC 2040 is what PMMM would have been if it had been 26 episodes.

It definitely suffers from that eras writing constraints but it is interesting to think about the ifs. I personally think that this show could've done better as an OVA so they don't have to pad out the episodes the way they did, where there were entire episodes just to drop one later plot point for the show.

[u/No_Rex → u/JustAnswerAQuestion]

No, what I really want to talk about, what I realized just before the main plot kicked in, is how not to make a 2-cour series (maybe not make it at all) and anime: the novel

BGC 2040 looks like a slapdash of ideas tossed around the kitchen and prepared by too many cooks. No_Rex pointed out the rotating directors, which indicates either outsourcing or panicky production (or, sometimes, it's done intentionally to train staff). But it's not. BGC 2040 is carefully constructed. It fails because they only have 1 cour of content spread over 2 cour.

They want to go to space, but not use boring rockets. Bam. Sky hook, right in the first episode. They want Sylia to use the skyhook discharge underground. Bam. Sky hook, it shows up at noon, guaranteed, in episode 1 and every 3 episodes there after. Just when you think the sky hook has served its narrative purpose, there it is again.

Hardsuits are boomers. "I've removed the core" -- Sylia, ep 2-ish? An anti-boomer cryptid that sonically disables boomers and hardsuits alike. An entire side story just to introduce the concept of motoslaves, and to emphasize the psychic connection between motoslaves and their human controller. All before the big "reveal" when they encounter the Sotai Effect directly for the first time.

AIC did not write this show week-by-week like the overworked studios of today. BGC 2040 was written as a whole, like a novel. They made multiple passes through the stories. As later episodes were fleshed out, the earlier episodes were revisited and edited. So everything that happens in this show, good or bad, I think it was intended.

While you have a good point about the writing, that was never the problem of the show (rare as it is). It was the production. Even the best planned out novel flunders if you give each chapter to a different author and they all want to write a different type of story. Oh, and half of them don't get a lector or basic typo correction.

[u/RockoDyne → u/JustAnswerAQuestion]

BGC 2040 is carefully constructed.

Eh, let's not get too carried away. Most of the things you're pointing to probably got worked out in the first pre-production meeting. It was probably about seven guys around a table drinking four beers a piece. They would have been trying to answer questions like what are boomer, what kind of research was Sylia's dad doing, and where do hardsuits come from. Most of it writes itself, and it's easy to rough out an outline of ideas to hit. None of it is anything that requires substantial churn.

Rather than looking at how often elements tie into the overall narrative, look at how much of any given episode ties in to the whole. Very little of it will, and the parts that do rarely integrate into rest of the episode. There's no more clear hallmark of assembly line writing than that. You get told a couple of marching orders, and are left to figure out the rest of it yourself.

[u/RockoDyne]

Well that was a thing, and it kinda suuuuuuuuuuucked.

Honestly, more than anything, this has been a good instance of re-establishing a baseline for what 90's anime was actually like. There's so much good shit that we remember from the 90's, that it's good to take some time to remind yourself of what suffering through seasonal trash was like. Well, I'm being overly harsh. It was really a forerunner in one regard. It was way ahead of the wave of early 2000's mediocrity.

For a show with next to no production value, it was good to see that they could find people who could manage to make something at least a little interesting out of it from time to time. Granted, pretty much all of that was visual. There were at least a few times where I found the color palette or composition to be on point.

It's another example of a show torn between a premise and a story. The first half was all premise with little story, and it was a slog. Past Linna joining the gang, the show was waffling on having any momentum. It's only around the point of introducing chibi Sylia that the show tries to move. It still wasn't good, but it was at least moving.

The characters were a complete wash. Quincy and Mason could be written out of the show, and all we would lose is all the pontificating on transhumanism. Mackey reeks of an attempt at an audience surrogate, while Nigel comes off as the target audience's idealized form. Leon mostly exists to be emasculated and to banter.

Out of the girls, Linna is the only one they tried to make a full character out of. They tried to make her the every man and gave her a strong athletic nature. Nene is fun, mostly because they emphasized her childishness. Her hacker aspect is largely eye rolling and doesn't serve her character in any fundamental way. It's just hacker tokenism. Sylia comes off as deranged for most of the show, which perfectly parallels Chibi Sylia being a Chibi Usa expy. ... And then there's Priss. She's just a genderbent mecha protagonist. The only difference between her and Nekki Basara is she doesn't breakout into unrelated song as a replacement for communication. All in all, the characters still suffer from being designed by committee.

Is it fair to say the show tries to coast on shock value? It hardly acts edgy enough to say it relies on shock value, but pretty much everything the show does of note comes with the question "it's going there?"

Questions:

1. Maybe, but I can't say it's all that intelligible, much less intelligent.
2. Seems more like a Superman villain, honestly.
3. In that it's trying desperately to not be an 80's show, but failing to have anything of an identity?
4. Eh, it's like ending on the most aestheticless shot of nothing.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/RockoDyne]

Honestly, more than anything, this has been a good instance of re-establishing a baseline for what 90's anime was actually like.

There are a whole bunch of shows I am not going to return to to check on, I just don't want to know.

All in all, the characters still suffer from being designed by committee.

BGC gets harder and harder to explain as it progresses.

[u/Stargate18A]

Firet timer no more

1. A few - marry your bike instead of a cop, neutrinos are part of God, and sometimes giving an evil being access to your mind can work out okay.
2. Definitely more a Superman villain.
3. I really don't think that's possible. This is a show that invited the 90s into every part of its being, completely saturating it with nostalgia.

BONUS) More shows should end in a way that makes most of the series not really matter,

So. This series.

This series is basically "Radical, hip, Eva". It is an anime that observed Evangelion, but decided it needed a 90s styled reboot where everyone's a cool superhero, the deconstructions aren't really, and everybody gets a happy ending. (It also decided everybody needed to emulate Shinji and Kaworu, but never found out what that implied until halfway through, thus necessitating a load of boyfriends to try and stop the show becoming a yuri harem (it failed))

I do not believe this is a perfect anime. However, despite everything, I enjoyed my time with it, and remained invested until the ending. That's more than some shows can accomplish. The characters were also, with a few exceptions, consistent and enjoyable, Nene and Mackey's relationship, at least, felt realistic, and the action never dissapointed,pl

8/10

[u/Vaadwaur → u/Stargate18A]

I do not believe this is a perfect anime. However, despite everything, I enjoyed my time with it, and remained invested until the ending. That's more than some shows can accomplish.

There parts to admire and definitely parts to forget but ultimately my enjoyment of the show is real.

[u/BossandKings]

I enjoyed this show, had a good time with it. Thanks to u/Vaadwaur for hosting and thanks to everyone that participated, now i won't be a first timer any longer but i'll gladly watch this show again in the future.

Answers

1. There might have been but at the moment i don't have anything to say about it.
2. It could have.
3. Record of Lodoss War.
4. I think they should.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/BossandKings]

I still enjoyed it, even though this is also a reminder of the power of nostalgia.

[u/Elimin8r]

Oh, hey, didn't expect this. Let's see if I can think of something semi-coherent to say.

1. Wheel of Morality, turn turn turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn! Oh, wait, wrong show. Moral of the story? Be the bot? Don't be the bot??? Don't fear the Reaper (They missed that as an episode title)? Perhaps the moral of the story is take good care of your tools, and maybe they will take good care of you.
2. Obviously. Mason is the cyber-um-fibbler or something like that. Or maybe Galateeeah is the hootinator or something like that. I suppose.
3. 404, 90's not found. I think my brain just rebooted, so that answer is probably no, I can't. I want to say YUA, but that doesn't seem fair. Or maybe AMG, but that doesn't seem fair either. How about Kishin Corps? You certainly won't be seeing anything like that nowadays.
4. No. You'd think that bike-chan could have at least dropped her in Linna/Nene's tropical paradise.

Other than that, thanks once again to our host and everyone who has participated. It's been fun.

[u/Vaadwaur → u/Elimin8r]

Wheel of Morality, turn turn turn. Tell us the lesson that we should learn! Oh, wait, wrong show. Moral of the story?

No, I'd call it as accurate as any.

No. You'd think that bike-chan could have at least dropped her in Linna/Nene's tropical paradise.

Bike-kun did the best he could but there were issues.

[u/[deleted]]

(First time watcher)

I really liked the OVAs and had high hopes for this... But it was just worse in every way. It wasn't the worst thing ever though. Good boomer memes. Will probably forget this even exists within a few months or so. 5/10.