Timelessness is overrated. Every creation comes from an era of media culture and even the most timeless productions cant help but reflect contemporary trends and zeitgeist. Bubblegum Crisis is the opposite of timeless. Its creators voracious creatures of popular media culture slathered a goopy concoction of everything that was hip at the time onto each animation cel. The series has no original bone in its body. Everything is a reference. It has nothing to say other than This is the definition of cool. As a result it is one of the purest anime time capsules you can watch. BGC takes place in a truetogenre Megatokyo a turbulent eastmeetswest cyberpunkian metropolis in which shadowy megacorps pull the strings. Murderous Replicants and Terminators prowl the neonlit streets kept in check only by a supersentai bishoujo team and their transforming mechamotorbikes and acrobatic power armorhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetalHeroSeries. Lasers and explosions dance across kaleidoscopic chrome to fullvocal 80s hard rock. Its adolescent hyperkitsch fit for an otaku. What it lacks in taste it makes up in designwork. The joy of watching BGC today is its nowretrofuture world of chunky appliancelike computers physical media handheld gadgetry toylike vehicles colorful fashions and range of scifiappropriate architectural interiordesign styles from modern to postmodern and hightech. When it comes to late80s tech design it oozes. As the creative personalities driving the series grow ambitious it becomes more apparent when one is watching a Masami bari episode e.g. 6 with his obsessively detailed mecha animation or a Satoshi Urushihara episode 7 with his crisply rendered bishoujo. By the end it takes another hard turn and resembles Kenichi Sonodas Gunsmith Cats. Such hobbylike swings in style are a reminder that passionate people made the series they clearly loved the stuff. The OVAs storytelling noticeably improves with each installment. In its finale 8 which devotes ample time to the rhythms and anxieties of the bishoujohero lifestyle its previously underdeveloped protagonists begin to take on a new dimension. Its unfortunate that it ends on that high note. Bubblegum Crash is a poor followup. Bubblegum Crisis exists in a continuum of genre anime with Akira and Mamoru Oshiis Ghost in the Shell serving as its high points. But where those distilled a handful of genre concepts into profound works of pop entertainment BGC is the raw unrefined sludge of late80s otaku culture. And sometimes an otaku wants it raw.