Mad★Bull 34 (Mad Bull 34)

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Alternative Titles

Japanese: マッド★ブル34

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Information

Type: OVA

Episodes: 4

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Dec 21, 1990 to Aug 21, 1992

Producers: Pony Canyon

Licensors: Discotek Media, Manga Entertainment

Studios: Magic Bus

Source: Manga

Genre: Action

Themes: Detective, Gore

Duration: 47 min. per ep.

Rating: R+ - Mild Nudity

Statistics

Score: 6.34¹ (scored by 4,538 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #7954²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #5895

Members: 12,124

Favorites: 69

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Synopsis

Daizaburo Edi-Ban, a Japanese-American, joins New York City's toughest precinct, the 34th. On his first day he is partnered up with John Estes, called Sleepy by his friends and Mad Bull by his enemies, a cop who stops crime with his own violent brand of justice. Mad Bull makes no qualms about executing common thieves with shotgun blasts if they even pose a minor threat to him or anyone around them. Mad Bull also often steals from prostitutes and does incredible amounts of property damage while fighting crime. Mad Bull's unpoliceman-like behavior often puts him in hot water with his partner Daizaburo and the 34th precinct. However, despite how reckless or illegal these acts are, a good cause is always revealed (For example, Sleepy uses the money he steals from the prostitutes to fund a venereal disease clinic and a home for battered and raped women). Perrine Valley, a police lieutenant, joins Daizaburo and Sleepy later on to help them tackle more difficult cases involving the mafia and drug-running.

Mad Bull 34 is inspired by the high-action buddy cop films of the '70s and '80s.

(Source: Thevinnymac)

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Background

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Mad★Bull 34

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Estes, John

Main

Ootsuka, Akio
Japanese

Edi-Ban, Daizaburo

Main

Matsumoto, Yasunori
Japanese

Black Tattoo

Supporting

Aomori, Shin
Japanese

Nichol the Electrician

Supporting

Senda, Mitsuo
Japanese

Valley, Perine

Supporting

Takashima, Gara
Japanese

Murphy, Cindy

Supporting

Katsuki, Masako
Japanese

Yue, Yin

Supporting

Watanabe, Kumiko
Japanese

Ying, Li

Supporting

Arakawa, Minako
Japanese

Ling, Ai

Supporting

Watanabe, Misa
Japanese

Hua, Cui

Supporting

Amano, Yuri
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Dezaki, Tetsu

Director

Ueda, Yoshihiro

Episode Director

Wolskel, John

Script

Koike, Kazuo

Original Creator

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Opening Theme

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Ending Theme

	1: "Time to Get Busy" by James Brown (eps 1)
	2: "We Can Make It" by Maizurah (eps 2)
	3: "Living in the City" by Maizurah (eps 3)
	4: "Believe in Love Again" by Maizurah (eps 4)

Reviews

Dec 26, 2022

literaturenerd

Recommended

Funny

I knew I had to review at least one anime over the holiday season. Maybe I could review Tokyo Godfathers, the best Christmas movie ever made? Nah. Maybe I could review Akiba Maid War…but it’s just so hard to talk about that show without spoiling the fun. So, I decided to do something completely different and just re-review my favorite “So bad it’s awesome” anime of all time. I wrote a quick, shitty review back in 2014 or 2015 but I did NOT do this series justice. Now it’s time that I fully commit to spreading the gospel of the Mad Bull!

It's difficult to talk ... about Mad Bull without first bringing up the man responsible for it. That man being the legendary Kazuo Koike whom we lost back in 2019. Koike is best known for Lone Wolf and Cub, which is considered one of the most influential works of early seinen. Koike alongside Go Nagai are really credited with giving manga some balls and showing publishers that it doesn’t just have to be for kids. There’s a big market for adults as well. Lone Wolf and Cub is SOO well respected that it’s one of the sacred manga that’s considered acceptable to talk about on literature forums like /lit/ and you won’t be made fun of. That’s why it’s one of the 10 manga that MAL elitists will actually fucking read alongside Berserk, Punpun, Monster, Phoenix, and of course JoJo part 12: Balls of Steel. So why am I about to review one of the most laughably bad anime of all time? How did Koike go from an industry legend to a man whose latter works are a risible embarrassment? The rise and fall of Kazuo Koike almost eerily parallel that of American comic artist Frank Miller. He’s this guy who just shows up out of nowhere and absolutely kicked down the door with tits and gore and rampant misogyny and everyone was like “Holy shit! I thought comics were for little kids! This guy is actually making them enjoyable for men. That’s fucking bad ass! Much like Mr. Miller, Koike could actually be a pretty good writer when we wanted to be. However, both men let their fame go to their heads until their works morphed from cutting edge to a grotesque parody of itself. Koike went Lady Snowblood and Lone Wolf in the 1970s to writing Mad Bull, Wounded Man and Crying Freeman all in a row during the 1980s. Interestingly, the work that bridged his good work and his awful work was a manga that he worked on for 3 years alongside Go Nagai. While Koike’s latter works are indeed awful, they’re also undeniably entertaining. Mad Bull especially, which has been described as an escaped mental patient’s attempt at writing a buddy cop film.

The other hero behind today’s anime is Satoshi Dezaki. He is the elder brother of Osamu, one of the greatest and most innovative directors in the history of anime. While his brother reinvented the anime industry, Satoshi founded a studio called Magic Bus and mostly directed utter schlock. They must have had some awkward family get togethers. However, Satoshi wasn’t without his triumphs. Sure, people like to laugh at Magic Bus for making stuff like Cipher and Wounded Man, but they also helped animate a little OVA series called Legend of the Galactic Heroes when most other studios weren’t interested. In 1990, the stars aligned, and Dezaki directed today’s MASTERPIECE of an anime. While the Mad Bull manga is entertaining, the anime is an entirely different level of awesome. The manga knew it was a joke. It’s supposed to be stupid. However, the anime often forgets this and plays the most ludicrous situations entirely straight. Half the time, the anime seems to think it’s a hard-hitting drama and brutal criticism of America in the vein of Chinatown. This blissful lack of self-awareness is really what helps cement the anime as an all-time masterpiece of schlock entertainment.

Described by the official Anime Encyclopedia as an “odious, infantile, and puerile piece of shit”, Mad Bull 34 is the story of a 9-foot-tall police officer who cleans up the mean streets of 1980s New York City alongside his strait-laced partner, Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban. This name btw would make you think that his legal name is Daizaburo but he’s always called by his nickname Eddie. He’s never once called Eddie in either the show or the manga. Not once…ever. Officer John “Sleepy” Estes is a loose cannon cop who takes every opportunity he can to kill criminals and get them off the street. In his defense, he never kills anyone in the anime who was unarmed. However, he’s not the best cop when he brings in only one criminal for questioning in 4 episodes and kills about 87. It’s also probably a bad look in 2022 to have your anime start with a white police officer shooting a black guy’s head clean off within the opening 15 seconds. Don’t worry, Officer Sleepy also kills a bare minimum of 15 white people per episode. There is no discrimination or pattern whatsoever in his mass slaughter of New York’s criminal population. Officer Sleepy is also the biggest pimp in New York, but the anime presents this as a good thing since he uses the girls’ money to treat STDs, drug addiction and other medical expenses, so he spends their money more responsibly than they do and takes care of them. This anime has issues as you may have guessed. Each episode is a different adventure featuring an incredibly over the top villain including a cyborg mob-boss and female athlete who stole an alien super suit from the mafia and became The Predator. Daizaburo contributes to the show mostly by getting the living shit kicked out of him and needing to be rescued. A female cop Perine is introduced into the show although her contribution is much the same as every other blonde woman in this show. I’ll just let you guess what that is. There are only 4 episodes, but they are all completely insane and utterly hilarious.

Mad Bull is the perfect show to watch with friends because no matter how many times I see it, I’m still finding new errors and goofs! You’ll notice the first time you watch it that every single English word in the anime is misspelled. Even Sleepy’s name tag when you first meet him is “Suleepy”. The episode title should read “Good-bye Sleepy” but instead reads “Good by Sleepy” as if he’s selling a perfume. Then you’ll notice the scaling. Officer Sleepy goes from 6 feet to 12 feet tall and everything in between. Often within the same scene. Scaling errors in this show are so bad that it often feels less like an error that was made due to crunch time and more like they actually didn’t know how to scale. They missed that day of art school. It’s common practice to not draw every character in every frame of animation during a group shot. After all, the human eye can’t pick up if a character is missing from a single frame and the animation moves at 60 FPS. Mad Bull leaves characters out of enough frames that they’ll often just blink in and out of existence. At first you think you’re just seeing things. There’s no way that just happened. However, it just keeps happening. In one scene, Sleepy shoots a goon wearing a hockey mask at point blank and the shotgun blast explodes his skull while leaving the mask completely undamaged. The anime even shows you this from a side view for some reason, so it looks like the blast of pellets just phase through the mask and liquify the head on the other side. There are just SOO many errors and things that go wrong in this anime it’s magical. You’ll never catch all the things wrong with Mad Bull. Its Cinema Sins score would be near infinite.

The soundtrack of Mad Bull features officially licensed music from the legendary James Brown, whom I am 100% positive just signed off on it without ever seeing the show. The other wonderful thing about the audio is the English dub. You can still laugh at Mad Bull in Japanese, but the dub is the way to get the true Mad Bull experience. The dub was written in England by Manga UK and designed to have the saltiest script possible to punch up the rating and sell this as a very mature anime. This anime has easily some of my favorite quips and insults in the medium. “The man is so low he could parachute out of a snake’s asshole!” Although I will warn younger viewers that there are quite a few homophobic slurs in this dub. So don’t be surprised when that keeps happening. The entire dub is English actors trying New York accents with various degrees of success. Perine’s actress just flat gives up after one episode and reverts to an RP English accent. Everything about this dub is just spectacular. It is the whipped cream on the sundae.

Sadly, I can’t bring myself to rate this higher than a 5, but I’m still DEFINITELY recommending that you check it out. I think the English dubbed episodes are still free on Youtube. If not, they can still be found across the internet. The series is also available on DVD through Discotek, although the Discotek DVD for the North American region is now out of print and sells for over 120$ due to the series’ relentless parade of police brutality. I’m pretty sure Discotek would be happy if every copy of this DVD with their name on it was destroyed. Needless to say, it is never going to be re-released. If you need some laughs and holiday joy this season, I can’t recommend Mad Bull highly enough.

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Aug 16, 2017

HarryRambod22

Mixed Feelings

In a world where filth such as Umaru Chan and Eromanga Sensei Exist and are allowed to be shown on tv. It's important that we take a look back on a forgotten anime classic from way back in the day. Of course I'm talking about the classic Mad Bull 34. The main character for this show is of course John "Sleepy" Estevez. He is a true man who teaches you how to enforce the law and how to protect it. Hence Sleepy is the law of the city.

Sleepy’s partner is an immigrant named Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban who is clearly an allegory for the regressive ... left we find in today’s society. For example Mad Bull kills two robbers in the name of justice by blowing them apart with his shotgun for stealing from a convenience store. While Eddie says things like “you can’t just kill criminals like that” and “this is murder.” Sleepy knows that violence and mass destruction is the way to go to stop crime (fight fire with fire). In the beginning Eddie criticizes Sleepy’s methods but then begins to realize police like sleepy are the only reason justice is being served in the city. Sleepy also does heroic acts such as sleeping with prostitutes, robbing them, and putting the money he took from them back into charities and putting it to use in the socio economic system. He does this because prostitution is illegal and cannot be taxed by the government so instead of arresting those heathen hookers, sleepy steals their money, and puts it back into the economy. When I witness such scenes I cry red, white, and blue. Eddie develops though into a true American officer throughout the series and it’s much better for him in the end.

Now the art and sound for this show is complete crap to be honest. The art is very cheap and old looking; they were clearly on a very low budget when making this thing and the music well not much can be said about it. They don’t really use any form of music except the closing credits which utilizes James Brown.

The characters are the best thing about this show. Sleepy is the complete opposite of Eddie Ban but they make a great cop buddy duo. Other great characters include Perrine, the chief, and the slutty news reporter Jackie. Perrine is a great example of a strong woman throughout the series. She knows how to fight, she shows appropriate emotion when dealing with crime, and she takes wild risks (such as staging a pretend marriage for Daizaburo to save his life) even when she was being raped by thugs throughout the series she caused them bodily harm and fought them back. The police chief is possibly the ugliest animated human I’ve ever seen lol. His face literally looks like an asshole turned inside out. Anyway other great characters include Enrico who is a Mafioso presumably murdered by Perrine who barely survived and became a cyborg gangster. Yes, you heard a cyborg gangster. Cindy the main antagonist in the last episode is another great character as she is the only villain with a background story behind her. It is revealed that her brother worked for the 34th precinct before he died and she wants vengeance on them because they wronged her brother Kevin. What fascinates me is that her brother actually used money he got from Mafioso’s to fund her Olympic training in college for track. Also she is one of the earliest examples of a dark skinned woman portrayed as attractive in an Anime medium, and yea she’s really hot with a great figure. I’ll just leave it at that.

One thing I did get out of this show even with the bad art and laughable story was entertainment. Sure the story was directionless and not well formed but it’s the episodic nature and the bat shit insanity that makes it entertaining. It’s like a crack addict view about American police officers. It’s not in any way realistic in the slightest. One of my favorite scenes in the entire anime was when sleepy was found to have grenades glued on his pubic hairs and he yanks the grenades with his pubic hair out painfully at the top of a tower to blast criminals into pieces. It makes no sense but where else would I see such lunacy. That is what makes it entertaining. Another thing before I cap off this review is this show is much better experienced dub than sub. The dub is so bad that it’s good with those ridiculous “New Yawk” accents and laughable one liners that the sub cannot evoke the atmosphere for this kind of show properly. Examples of such great lines include “We’re gonna fuck the ass off ya,” “you’re gonna have a sore pussy,” “listen you sad shit fuck,” and my personal favorite “all his friends would know his dad was so low he would parachute out of a snake’s asshole.” While this anime was incredibly stupid and over the top, you’ll definitely laugh when you watch this.

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Jun 30, 2023

Bensonas

Not Recommended

I'll be honest there isn't much positive I can say about this show. Considering I've seen this appearing in a number of 'top X animes' lists my expectations definitely weren't met.

Animation wise is OK. For the time however, it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect a little more. It's all quite basic. It's not horrible, it's just ok. There is quite a lot of gore here and though I'm not opposed to gore, I feel what's presented in here is a little unnecessary. Some people may think that gore can never be unnecessary, but those people are massive fans of Hostel, and that film is ...

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Poll: Mad Bull 34 Episode 1 Discussion jonnjonzz - Sep 18, 2011	12 replies	by Shimyia »» Apr 26, 2023 2:00 PM
Poll: Mad Bull 34 Episode 4 Discussion jonnjonzz - Sep 18, 2011	17 replies	by JoexySun »» Feb 18, 2023 11:25 AM
Poll: Mad Bull 34 Episode 3 Discussion jonnjonzz - Sep 18, 2011	12 replies	by JoexySun »» Feb 18, 2023 11:17 AM
Poll: Mad Bull 34 Episode 2 Discussion jonnjonzz - Sep 18, 2011	15 replies	by JoexySun »» Feb 18, 2023 11:10 AM
DO YOU GUYS REALLY NEED WATCH THIS SHOW... 😂😂😂 92rael_ - Apr 12, 2022	2 replies	by iamKetranLang »» May 12, 2022 1:14 AM

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Mad★Bull 34

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Estes, John

Edi-Ban, Daizaburo

Black Tattoo

Nichol the Electrician

Valley, Perine

Murphy, Cindy

Yue, Yin

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Mad★Bull 34

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Synopsis

Background

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