Bubblegum Crash

Not as good as the original series (and the animation is a step down), but it's still pretty entertaining. I particularly liked the second episode with an advanced Boomer that has a human-level A.I. The big plus this has over the original is I think the characteristics of the four main girls are far more defined; they all have more well-rounded personalities. I also can't figure out why most sources claim the series was cut short due to legal issues, as the 3rd episode felt like a pretty satisfying conclusion to me. Sure, the series is way more lighthearted than the original, but I honestly ... can't see why any fans with an open mind couldn't find some enjoyment in this.

I’m actually glad that most reviews of Crash! are generally more positive than I thought they would be - I’ve seen this iteration of the franchise shit on so many dang times, even by Kenichi Sonoda himself, and it baffles me that this show has a lower rating overall than 2040. 2040 is terrible! Sure, Crash ain’t perfect, but I will say this much: In spite of having many of the strengths of its prequel series Crisis cut away from it - like any sort of lasting canon around character development, high-quality art, consistently good 80’s music, Priss’s VA, etc etc etc. - Crash! does ... its damnedest to play to the strengths of Crisis rather than the weaknesses, and for the most part it succeeds, even managing to pile up some stuff that I wish the original series had managed to play around with.

A bit of context before I get going, though: Bubblegum Crisis was made by 3 companies in a joint venture, but Crash was the result of all those companies parting ways and one of them (ARTMIC) trying to continue the series without key elements and the long-term timetable the series usually had. They put 3 episodes out in six months before one of the other companies (Youmex) sued them into bankruptcy, etc. So that’s why, amidst all the copyright issues, GENOM isn’t mentioned, Priss’s VA is different (but not necessarily worse if you ask me!) and only the vaguest sense of continuity carries over, because they couldn’t explicitly reference episodes whose rights they didn’t technically own. Regardless:

Story: Story has never been the franchise’s strongest suit, in no small part because of the seat-of-pants production methods even the original series went through, with directors changing almost every episode towards the end of the original OVA’s run. And that’s fine, actually. Like most superhero stories, BGC is at its best when it lets its characters play to their archetype and run around and kick ass and blow stuff up in a generally cohesive narrative background. And for the most part Crash! achieves this. The four Sabers are still largely themselves. Sylia may be a little softer in her methods, Priss may be more generically grumpy (she apparently hates Boomers now for some vague reason despite having gotten pretty close to banging one), but now Nene - yes, Nene, the cute hacker one - is the moral glue who keeps the team together in the first episode, which is refreshing! It takes the best parts of her character from Scoop Chase and builds on that moral pride she has as an ADP desk jockey, the kind of pride Priss and Linna just don’t have. (Oh, and Linna gets a bit more development of her money-crazed character. She’s one-note, yes, but it’s a good kind of one note. Like I said, playing to archetypes). The whole first episode is cliche, but in a good way, in that it’s the Sabers getting back together to kick some powersuited merc’s to the curb with minimal bitchiness from the involved parties. It’s not hitting the emotional highs of the back half of the original series, but it’s getting there.
The second episode plays to a strength of Crash! that Crisis actually doesn’t have. Namely, it focuses intensely on Boomers. Boomers were always just kind of there in Crisis, the issues around killer robots and the like coming in and out of focus based on what the director that time around wanted to focus on. Here, though, they’re everywhere, an integral part of life not just as Terminators which pop out of their skin, but as civilian labor. GENOM’s absence notwithstanding, this makes sense, provides a grounding, however weak, to the world that wasn’t really there in Crisis. Episode 2 focuses on a cute little super-intelligent Boomer who as far as continuity goes makes no sense - weren’t Boomers already pretty much Turing-Test-passable? - but the action scenes that he as a MacGuffin cause, with Priss and him running around Megatokyo’s underground trying to dodge a gang of Boomer terrorists and getting into various exotic firefights, are worth the goofiness. Hell, if you take it alone, I’d argue episode two is the best of the bunch.
Episode three, on the other hand, tries desperately to a) be all hardsuit-action, all the time, b) tie up the loose story threads previous episodes of both Crisis and Crash! were generally content to leave hanging, and c) bring back Largo for the second fucking time. It’s a mess on most levels - the action scenes aren’t exciting, the plot outline is barely coherent, Sylia almost gets turned into Instrumentality by Largo, it all kind of feels like the ending of 2040 and not in a good way. The less said about Melt Down the better.

Art: Crash’s art isn’t as good as Crisis’s art. Not even close, on several levels. Megatokyo feels more utopian-futuristic and less gritty and grimy the way the initial parts of Crisis did, though admittedly the city did seem to slip towards that more optimistic aesthetic over time; color is darker and less vivid; the whole art style feels barebones, lacking the detail of an OVA put together with more time and money. Some say the mecha designs, having been done by a toy designer instead of Sonoda and company, are lacking, but I actually like the new Hardsuits and the Knight Wing, and to a lesser degree the new Boomers (especially Largo’s final-boss forms). Admittedly, the action scenes in which they are involved are significantly less kinetic, more the usual low-budget firing-all-weapons-at-enemy-while-they-dodge-in-another-shot kinda stuff, but even then getting the Sabers hardware that can actually wreck their foes pretty hard - even for dear, sweet, precious Nene - is a good trend, one that 2040 completely ignores to its detriment. I personally like Geo Climbers’ running firefights between Priss and various breeds of terrorist Boomer, but your mileage may vary there. You won’t get anything as cool as Priss vs. the crab-mech from episode seven, but I think you’ll be surprised.

Sound: Sound effects are still generally okay, but the magic of 80’s music has been swapped out for a generally more early-90’s sort of synthesizer-jazz mixed with overwrought dramatic pieces that try to emulate Danny Elfman’s soundtrack for the Burton Batman movies. The few vocal songs that Ryoko Tachikawa, and eventually the other Sabers, aren’t bad, though, they’re just not really well-integrated into the episode openings as they were in Crisis. More’s the pity, too. Musical openings were always one of the series strengths if you ask me.

Overall: I guess the most I can say about Crash is that it isn’t as bad as everyone thinks it is. Even with less budget and less bottled-lightning magic available to ARTMIC under a time crunch, Crash still manages to hit the highs of what is good about Crisis: Cute girls in power armor whooping Boomer ass in high-octane fight scenes mixed with sci-fi slice-of-life. And really, what more could you ask for in a series, even one marred by episodes as nonsensical as the third one? Well, if you like 2040, you might say ‘deep analysis of the relationship between man and machine’.
And you would be wrong. So. Fucking. Wrong.

Bubblegum Crash is a fairly decent companion piece to its prequel that - despite being episodic - still manages to continue the plot established in the previous series and does wrap up the narrative. Frankly speaking though, the story throughout most of the series is rather lackluster and forgettable when the focus is placed on the B plots of each episode.

With everything else in regards to the visuals, soundtrack, and characters, it's all good to even great in some instances - especially for fans of the original. All the old cast is back and their interactions are always amusing. The aesthetic has a very retro ... 80s vibe and it's paired together with a nice pop/rock ost to fit the mood.

This OVA has some great moments in it, but it's sometimes a slog to get to them and that's ultimately what keeps holding Bubblegum Crash from being something that I'd wholly recommend without first giving warning.