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Ah, Garcian…how long has it been? Entirely too long; we missed about two months of podcasting! Much has happened (as our new poll implies) but fear not, for WE are still alive…long enough to record ONE review anyway! Gerald’s reviewing the old 1990 OAV series AD Police Files. If you haven’t already done so, we recommend listening to our podcast on Bubblegum Crisis before this one, since AD Police Files is a prequel to that.
AnimEigo still carries this on DVD, or you can buy it through RightStuf. If you like the anime, the manga is of comparable quality. Amazon still has a few copies via third party.
Is that a Killer 7 reference I see? I think that’s win right there my good sir.
Why is this the most disgusting episode of AWO? You guys have talked about Kazuo Koike manga, Legend of the Overfiend and mentioned several Moe’ series in passing. For whatever reason the blatant misogyny combined with masochism makes my stomach churn and to think someone of my generation isn’t completely desensitized by sex and violence. It’s just your description of the AD Police OVA makes it sound absolutely vile, but if I watched it without listening to this podcast I would not take any special notice of this title (maybe). Despite my short rant I would still want a copy to watch out of sheer curiosity.
I need to see AD Police Files now. Sounds crazy, just the way I love my 80’s-early 90’s OVAs.
Apparently whenever Gerald starts to like something, he starts to get worried.
That’s a frightening scenario, man.
I haven’t listened to the podcast yet but I’ll chime in on some random thoughts. [In the future, please don’t do this. –Daryl] Though AD Police was nowhere near as good as Bubblegum Crisis, further stories in that universe are always welcome. I haven’t watched it since the early-mid 90s, but the things i remember most is the kick ass music and the weird creepy ambiance this show had. I’d say AD Police dealt with some interesting themes regarding the human/machine dynamic and did it in a entertaining way. Or i could just be remember it all wrong.
There was another series called Parasite Dolls I believe that also takes place in the BGC[2040 –Daryl] universe. I’ve been meaning to watch it for almost 10 years now. From the lack of talk/buzz about it, I’m assuming it wasn’t very good.
Did I miss something about this being the most disgusting episode? I have seen AD Police and everything that Gerald did say are the parts that I remember about the OAV. I don’t watch hentai but from what I have heard and read about in reviews of Legend of the Overfiend and Kite this (AD Police) is nothing that extreme; just a hard R rating if it was released as a movie here in the US.
I have seen Parasite Dolls and I thought that it was just there for its shock value instead of its story so I would recommend people to not watch it. The only thing that I can say is that it was made at a time with the transition of traditional cell animation and the computer coloring and it looks like it is traditional cell animation. From what I remember (it has been of six years) the animation is good but nothing special.
In my opinion AD Police is less shocking than Wicked City because it does not go into all the details with its brutalities. This is a good review on getting the basic feel of the series that Gerald gave us so if anyone is interested on it then go buy it while it is so cheap.
As someone who has similar tastes to you Gerald, I had to weep at your attack on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. I have all six seasons and an autographed picture of Kevin Sorbo on my wall.
I own the aforementioned AD Police Manga, which I find to be a great companion piece to the OVA. Tony Takezaki is certainly a great artist, and was apparently discovered via his Bubblegum Crisis doujinshi.
Violence, Masochism and Misogyny aside, Compared to Genocyber, AD Police is a well-natured little romp.
Dane, I really like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, in fact, it’s one of the last shows I watched religiously in syndication, (Xena might have been the last since I don’t even remember what sort of stuff was actually syndicated after that) but the point still stands that the show went on way too long.
Heh, I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Gerald!
I also agree. Season 6 seemed rather non-eventful, especially compared to the previous season. It was certainly time for the show to wrap up. I was actually unable to see season 6 until it’s release on DVD due to the fact that season 6 was never broadcast in Australia (or Hong Kong!).
After hearing this review I am not sure if I should watch AD Police. I watched the original Bubblegum Crisis only recently (last year I think) and liked it, but I am not sure if I belong to the “liked BC because of the girls in power suits” crowd or not, so not sure if I’d like stories in the same setting without the Knight Sabers.
Also, you last episode was so long ago that I already started to worry that maybe you’d abandoned podcasting:P
I think Tony Takezaki’s output these days is primarily manga. He did an all-color ero comic called Space Pinchy (pub. by Dark Horse) and occasionally does parody strips in Gundam Ace. He can do an amazingly dead-on imitation of Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, so he apes that style for his Gundam comics. If you didn’t know they were two different people you’d swear it was Yas drawing somewhat looser for comedy purposes.
Never watched ADP, so that’s all I got.
Takezaki has also recently done a good parody of Evangelion in a looser version of Yoshiyuki Sadamoto’s style (being looser means, oddly enough, that it ends up looking more like ’90s Sadamoto) so he definitely has a knack for doing impressions.
Gerald, if I had known you were going to cover A.D. Police next, I would have brought my copy of the A.D. Police 25:00 manga. It’s definitely a different set of stories from the A.D. Police manga Viz published. Do you have 25:00?
It was great being able to hang out with you all at AWA–thank you all for coming to my party, too!
Hey Carl, I actually thought we mentioned it in one of the last episodes that we’d do an episode on AD Police. Either way, I’d have loved to see AD Police 25:00 and see how different it is from the regular AD Police manga, which I also haven’t seen.
Most surprising of all is that Tony Takezaki is still working and doing things. I need to see some of his new artwork and see how it’s changed since he was already pretty good from what I saw then.
And of course, when I said “if I had known,” I meant to say, “if I had been paying closer attention.” ^_^
As you may know, Takezaki is from Osaka and was a contributor to some of Sonoda’s ’80s doujinshi; it’s my understanding that Sonoda brought him into the AD Police gig.
AD Police 25:00 was running in Comic Noizy magazine at least as early as the December 1988 issue; it’s my impression it began sometime in 1988 (the tankobon itself was later collected in 1990 by the Model Graphix label). This was just before Sonoda himself started doing the Riding Bean comic (the one that’s at the end of Vol. 4 of the Dark Horse omnibus) in Comic Noizy, so they ran more or less at the same time.
AD Police 25:00 contains versions of the stories “The Man Who Bites His Tongue” (it was the first chapter of the manga) and “The Phantom Woman” (which Takezaki called instead “Meatsauce Ecstasy”), and its 1988 date, one-and-a-half or possibly as much as two years before the OAV’s release, suggests of course that Takezaki was involved in the AD Police project from an early stage (I believe the anime credits him for “character conceptual design”).
25:00 is interesting in several other ways; it’s also an early example of a bilingual Japanese tankobon; almost all the word balloons and captions contain both the original dialogue and an English translation. About half the stories are serious and the other half farcical; three of them involve the Knight Sabers. Takezaki was parodying art styles back then as well: in 25:00 he does Yasuo Otsuka, American superhero comics, and Seizou Watase (one of the few manga-ka who works regularly in color and who specializes in stories about bars; he designed the ending credits for “Bobby’s In Deep”).
Son of a bitch…
[I won’t make you say it again. You’re a CLEANER. –Daryl]
I have to chime in here and say I don’t think A.D. Police Files is misogynistic. It would be misogynistic if it implied that all the terrible shit that happens to certain female characters in the show is somehow a good thing, which it does not. Quite the opposite, in fact. The Ripper in particular portrays one female character as particularly tragic, the subject of pathos, not scorn.
Whenever I hear somebody alleging that a non-Frank Miller work is misogynist, I often make the argument that the work is misanthropic (i.e. Ernest Hemingway novels, Watchmen etc.). Is this the case with A.D. Police Files? [I’m fairly certain that I vocalized this stance in the podcast, as it’s my take on it. –Daryl] It seems like everybody is equally despicable. I’ve never seen it but I need to.
P.S. Gooberzilla, I’m a big fan of your work.
P.P.S. AWO Crew, I don’t think you mentioned this in the review, but how does the art style compare to the original BGC? You mentioned that it was “very realistic” but you never compared it to the original.
I see your point Paul, but I think while the “acts” are definitely seen as wrong, and that it doesn’t get terribly graphic with the violence against women, I think attitude of it is definitely one of distrusting women, being suspicious of what they’re thinking, how they’re acting, and such things that women are especially unstable around their periods/menstrual cycles, etc…
I think there’s an aspect of AD Police that gets overlooked, the Japanese attitude towards bodily integrity.
It seems there’s an ingrained dislike, even disgust over losing body parts or invasive medical acts, to the point…well, look at all the famous anime and manga people who have died over otherwise curable illnesses because a simple biopsy wasn’t done. I’m not sure but I think it’s a Shinto thing.
(which, yes, means that on one level Black Jack is a horror comic).
Consider the different takes on the Bionic Man concept:
America: “OH God I’ve lost my arm and legs! Wait, you want to give me mechanical replacements? Ok, yeah, let’s go”
Japan: “Oh God I’ve lost my legs and arm and you’ve given me machine replacements? KILL ME for I am become a monster! A devil! I don’t want to live!”
If you look at the stories in AD Police with that thinking, they take on a whole other aspect. And I think the “she died a woman” line now makes more sense. [Yes, in context the line actually makes narrative sense, THANKS FOR SAPPING ALL JOY FROM THIS WORLD ONCE AGAIN –Daryl]
Or so it seems to me.
Steve,
Here’s another point for consideration:
The paradoxical nature of the fact that what most Otaku will spend on masturbatory items such as the “Plasma Sperm”, Huggable Pillows and school-girl sex-mannequins (perhaps the precursor to sex boomers?) would be enough to buy REAL human sex a dozen times over.
You don’t understand the otaku heart, sir. That which you speak of is no paradox.
You can only purchase real human “sex.” You cannot purchase real human “love.” You CAN however purchase doll/puppet/2D love everlasting, or more accurately a chemically-similar but not quite identical substitute. If you think of love as heroin, this commercialized vector of it is the Methadone Of Eros.
Or, as it’s known on the streets of the ghetto, “moe.”
Unless I skipped something what do you guys think of the 13 episode A.D. Police Files that was released by ADV a long while back?
I thought the show was only good because of its opening song and for that reason it was worth three dollars (this show shouldn’t be available for more than three dollars, ANYWHERE!). Characters are cookie cutter and reminded me of City Hunter knockoff kind of people. [You must have skipped something, as we briefly stated our thoughts on that TV series as being pretty much exactly what you just said, right down to the “just listen to the song, don’t watch the show” bit. –Daryl]
(Self-censoring to avoid stupid spam filter) [Hmm, that shouldn’t be necessary. I’M UNCENSORING THIS –Daryl]
There’s only a passing reference to it in your podcast, but I’m not convinced that the main characters in Bubblegum Crisis #5-6 are sex androids. (Which is not to say that there are no sex androids in the series.) I am in the middle of watching Galaxy Railways and they refer to the main female android as a “sexaroid” and it clearly doesn’t mean “android made for sex,” to the extent that I wonder if the connotations of “sexaroid” in Japanese are just not what English speakers might expect.
“I think The Ripper might be like, the ultimate Japan cartoon… Like, if you were to think the term, not even Japanese animation, but like “Japtoon”, I think The Ripper embodies all that that word implies.”
So this would be Colony Drop’s
favouritefavorite, then? [Actually, yes. That was indeed the point. Also, I’ve declared this post UNAMERICAN and have taken suitable countermeasures. — Daryl]In other, less mocking thoughts, I remember being surprised that something like AD Police Files would be so much different in tone than Bubblegum Crisis or Bubblegum Crash, when I read of it in Helen McCarthy’s Anime Movie Guide.
I mean, on the one side you’ve got candy neon mecha action with four beautiful women flying around in powered
armourarmor, destroying monstrous robots… And on the other hand, it’s dark, depressing stories about the price of cybernetics and the blurring of the line between man and machine. It’s a striking difference.Another great episode. AD Police was great for its time. I haven’t seen it in years so I’m not sure how it holds up now. Keep em comin.
I went back and listened to #26 mainly the review of MD Geist …. hahaha I almost ran my car off the road due to laughing so hard. Thanks Daryl!
In an even more unrelated topic.
Have you watched High School of the Dead yet? What did you think? Too much fan service?
Also … I’ve looked around for a fansubbed Great Mazinger and could only find a few epsodes. Does anyonbe know if this series was completed by any fansub group and if so can you point me in the direction of where it would be located. Thanks!
MOAAAR THOUGHT BIRRRRD!
It wasn’t that hard to Google it. Great Mazinger is being done by msubs. http://msubsreleases.wordpress.com/ . Although I don’t know how well seeded the torrents are. They are up to episode 21.