Daizoburo EdiBan Is a young Americanborn Japanese man descended from immigrants and raised to uphold a strict sense of morality. He joins the New York city police force precinct 34 intending nothing less than to enforce the law punish evil fight crime and defend the innocent. His idealistic nature is stressed to the breaking point when he finds out that his partner whether he likes it or not is a veteran cop named Johnny Estes who carries two nicknames Sleepy probably for his chill and laid back nature when hes off the clock and Mad Bull for his violent uncontrollable nature that he slips into whenever he slips on the badge. A long time loose cannon who would rather spend his time making the rounds with every prostitute in the tricounty area than patrol his assigned area and to whom questioning live suspects just feels like a waste of time and energy it doesnt take very long for Officer Estes to show his impressionable rookie partner what the inside of a rapists brain looks like. But as the two cops become closer Or as Daizoburo slowly slips into the trappings of Stockholm Syndrome which seems equally plausible He begins to see the good nature of his giant burly buddy as well as the method behind his bullheaded madness. Unfortunately his trouble doesnt end there as Mad Bulls Shoot first and ask questions to the splattered skulls later tactics have earned him more than a few enemies throughout his storied career and hes always willing to make a few more With this giant oversexed trigger happy senior officer by his side Daizoburo will have to deal with rapists gangsters drug dealers witness protection and a serialkiller who wont stop targeting cops all while struggling to defend his ideals the general population and his precious virginity from the very person he was expecting to help him do so. Welcome to the concrete jungle my friends because weve got fun and games so strap on your grenade jock strap and take a bite out of the big apple. Hey did you know there used to be a production company called Magic Bus? If so then that makes one of us Seriously though talk about obscure. If this thing isnt owned and operated by Miss Frizzle Im not sure what reality is anymore. Anyway obscure is definitely the right word for this company who appeared in the mid eighties and put out most of their work in the nineties including nine straight years of Legend of the Galactic Heroes. They seemingly went quiet in 2006 having produced only two shows between then and now. Mad Bull 34 was an OVA series that they released over the course of two years. It was released in the early nineties so Well you can probably guess from there what kind of animation youre in for. The visual quality of this series is so low budget that even though its extremely dated I highly doubt it was even considered acceptable for its time. It does kind of work in its advantage as the low quality does sort of add to the overall tone making it feel more like a bootleg video of a grindhouse movie and yeah that is a pretty good fit. Even considering this however its still a really ugly looking show which is especially hard to ignore in the first episode where it looks like the producers havent even begun to figure out how to use budget cuts to hide their weaknesses. They get better at it in the third and fourth episodes or in other words the second half but the result they achieve isnt really as effective as they were hoping because while it doesnt look cheap or badly animated in those episodes it does look very obviously like budget cuts are being used and that is an improvement but not a huge one. No matter what episode youre watching however the budget was clearly reserved for action as the best looking moments in the series are the gunfights the gruesome dismemberments and exploding heads and the admittedly fun car chases. Thats not to say any of it looks good per se as its best moments look mediocre at most but the rest of the onscreen material And I do mean the rest of it Suffers to help the action to even look THAT good. The artwork is very roughly drawn much like the backgrounds although they did accurately capture the shitty and decrepit feeling of most areas in New York city. Character designs despite falling to the same issue are inspired and distinctive as long were referring to the main hero characters. The villains are much more generic and samey as most of them could be described as stock thugs with a few rare musclebound black guys and sexy femme fatales to break up the monotony. A lot of the women who appear throughout the series most of whom are either prostitutes victims or both are just big boobed long haired blonde chicks with very little variation in their appearances. The heroes who are among the very few featured people are kind of unforgettable even the one who looks just like all the other blondes. One of the tricks they use to make Mad Bull and Daizoburo memorable was through their drastically different heights with the title character towering over all he meets and the actual main character an obvious audience cypher and the moral center of the group is quite possibly the shortest man in Manhattan. Oh and theres also a villain who wears a costume that looks like a cross between Green Goblin and a Xenomorph. With only four 45 minute episodes under its belt there really shouldnt be a lot of music but each episode has at least ten different tracks in it. The music was seemingly entirely produced by one man English rock guitarist David Ross Skinner and while it does carry an authentic New York City cop drama feel to it the homogeny does show as theres actually very little variety to the music. Thats not to say any of it sounds bad as a lot of it is actually pretty cool sounding but theres only so much you can get out of a soundtrack thats comprised mostly of slow tunes for moments and high tension tunes for the action. Most of the ending themes were contributed by a Korean band called Maizurah who can sing in what sounds like pretty impeccable English but perhaps more surprising is the fact that the ending theme of the very first episode is a song from the Godfather of soul himself James Brown. Yeah Im making that sound more impressive than it is because James Brown is all around amazing and yet they still managed to find one of his lesser songs. I seriously think Time to Get Busy is the result of Brown completely forgetting the lyrics and just not giving a fuck. The english dub on the other hand is pretty awesome. I know thats weird to say about a dub from the nineties especially for the dub of a low budget OVA because these things normally sound like the worst things ever but the actors in this title just have so much fun with what theyre given. This is especially true of Allan Wenger a man with so many voice credits to his name since 1978 that its a crime wikipedia doesnt have a page on him. His dubbing resume extends to animation from a laundry list of countries with relatively few coming from Japan. In any case he plays the title character as dumb cocky and bullheaded but at the same time with enough laid back presence and good humor to make him feel more like a lovable doofus than a psychopath with a badge. Alan Merriott has a much more pronounced anime history and as Ediban he skews a lot younger than his costar and he does so with a much deeper accent which easily sells the idea that hes just transferred into this precinct from another county. Of course both actors do have perfect accents and pitches for their characters. Speaking of perfect accents the prime female character Perrine Valley Well she certainly has an accent. Her stint in anime voice acting appears to be a hiccup in her primary career as a British TV actress including appearances in a 2007 Doctor Who spinoff. This is probably the reason shes the only British character in the entire series a fact thats never explained or referenced in the dialogue. She barely has a presence reads off her lines as stiff and blandly as possible and is completely overshadowed by the female characters who are introduced in the following two episodes. Unfortunately the dub gets a little muddled from here partially due to the many names on it that only appear in this specific series Which is normally a sign that fake names are being used And while several black thugs in the series are credited under the name Wesley Powell I think I can distinctly hear Beau Billingslea in their performances. I could be wrong but Beau is awesome and if these stock thugs were being played by an actual black man Unlike the animes only black female character I could see him wanting to keep his name off of it. This show can get pretty racist after all. In the time that Ive been writing for this blog if Ive ever said anything negative about an anime you like and you disagree with me I respect your opinion and would love to hear what you love about it that I dont. Granted when a series offends me in some special way I may argue with you but I will at least acknowledge that you have a point that needs making. What I cant respect is when people defend an awful series by saying in so many colorful ways that its immune to criticism. They dont claim that any of my points are wrong just that theyre moot A series can be terrible and get away with it because it was never trying to be good or it was aiming to please an audience that Im apparently not part of. Ive seen this argument used in defense of titles like Gantz Kiss X Sis Stella Womens Academy and an untold number of old shockfilled OVA series when really the only form of media I can justifiably see that defense applying to is actual porn. With any other form of media theres no reason why you shouldnt go in with standards and expectations and youre not nitpicky for having them. For example a lot of people love yaoi anime because they want to see two hot guys bang nevermind the fact that the situations are often highly rapey and the characters are infantilized. People like yuri anime because they want to see two hot girls getting it on nevermind the fact that neither of them feel like real people in even the shallowest of contexts. People love romance stories even when theyre sexist and abusive as all hell with special nods to Twilight Fifty Shades of Grey and Say I Love You. Yeah I said it. I wont say theres anything wrong with indulging in your guilty pleasures because the thrill you get out of it is worth all the questionable crap you have to ignore but to defend it as a profound piece of literature or awesome despite its flaws when youre just ignoring the things you dont like is insane. Yeah I love caviar but if you spread it on a piece of your dogs dried up shit Im not going to stuff that shit into mouth for some caviar Im going to say No thank you Id like the next batch to be on a cracker please. On that note do I have a low opinion of Mad Bull 34 because of its excessive violence sex and misogynistic attitude towards women? No because I actually have a rather high tolerance for these things. I enjoy Elfen Lied and Sword Art Online after all despite what the mediocre scores I gave them may suggest. The reason Mad Bull 34 fails to impress me is entirely due to its writing and if youre scoffing at me for not taking its ridiculous and tongue in cheek nature into account guess what I did. There is no form of literature or entertainment save for literal porn that isnt subject to the quality of its writing and yes that includes exploitation media. Thats not to say theres such a thing as objective quality or that all forms of media should be united under one unifying standard but if I have an opinion on something Im going to express it in depth and in detail with no regard for what the piece was trying to do or who it was trying to entertain. Except with Mad Bull 34 I dont really NEED much in the way of detail and Im going to prove it by going episode by episode. The first episode so gracefully titled Hit and Rape is the story of how Ediban met and formed a bond with Sleepy Joe Estes and out of the entire series this one probably contains the most violence and sex. I dont mind that so much What I do mind is that the whole episode plays like a glowing selfindulgent selfinsert fanfic written by someone who wishes they could be a giant musclebound stud. He gets flaws in later episodes but Sleepy Joe is SUCH a MarySue here. Hes the pinnacle of justice everybody loves him and the people who dont are either the villains hes inconveniencing or people who just dont understand him. He gets to have a ton of anonymous sex with hookers for free but none of them mind because hes a totally nice person whos paying to have their STDs and rape trauma treated even though he demonstrates early on that his form of breaking woman out of shock is to penetrate them anally. He murders criminals for bullshit reasons following convoluted logic that the rest of the world just blindly accepts because he is Joe and he can do no wrong even based on a guess so farfetched that Sherlock Holmes would pump the breaks before acting on it. The second episode tries to be better as it introduces a strong female character Of course by this shows standards strong means not a prostitute and like most female characters shes pretty much just there to get in trouble get assaulted and show the audience her tits. I honestly dont remember much about this episode unless I really think about it I recall the villain being more obvious than Doctor Evil Sleepy being able to survive half a dozen bullets to the ass as well as a point blank grenade explosion to the face and to be fair one of the most epic moments in anime history Sleepy Joe pulls off his pants to reveal that hes tied a few dozen grenades to his pubes which his partner starts to pluck and throw at a bunch of 1930s cartoon mobsters. Honestly that moment is probably why people remember this series at all They sure as hell dont come back to see Daizoburo miraculously rise from his death bed all of his teeth suddenly intact after a phony marriage ceremony helps him recover from what should have been a fatal beating. I dont want to give away too much of the last two episodes for spoiler reasons and the like so Im just going to lump them together here. The third episode involves a plot between a politician and a reporter thats so confusing its honestly hard to keep up with and our heroes get tied up in a witness protection story where everybody keeps making decisions that are stupid and contrived beyond belief the backstory to the situation were dropped into is told to us and never shown and apparently a politician can buy his way out of being positively identified by ten murderscene rape kits and with that much power a lone reporter shooting her mouth off somehow poses a threat? And then you have the final episode which started out really good with a villain from Sleepys past come back to haunt him killing more male police officers than the Russian chick from KickAss 2 and it seems like the series will go out on a great note before a sudden reveal halfway through turns it into the most bafflingly awful love story since Elfen Lied. It does say something about your ability to write villains when the first one that has a remotely understandable motive gets treated like a fucking saint. If any of this interests you which I can understand then youre in luck After twenty years of obscurity it was rescued and released stateside on DVD in 2012 by Diskotek Media whove been doing a lot of that lately. You can find it at a pretty decent price too. Unfortunately the original manga which I can only imagine is superior due to that usually being the case is not available nor is its sequel Mad Bull 2000. I hope by this point Ive proven to you that my problems with this title go far deeper than its socalled shocking content. Your sensibilities may differ but for me offensiveness is a matter of context and not content and no matter how bloody oversexed or misogynistic the material got I just couldnt muster up enough interest or investment in the story or characters to GET offended. It was so stupid and badly written that even when graphic rape was occurring on screen I didnt feel sorry for the victims I didnt feel angry at the villains I didnt feel disgusted by the tastes of the writer I was just bored staring blankly at the screen and waiting for any Any of its ridiculous shit to be as entertainingly bad as the crotch grenades were. And speaking of entertainingly bad thats exactly what this series is You invite some friends over you get drunk enough to think your reflection is picking a fight with you and you laugh your asses off at how desperate this series is to try and make you remember it. Its not anywhere near one of the worst anime Ive ever seen but Id never recommend it to someone on the assumption that theyll genuinely soberly enjoy it. I give Mad Bull 34 a 3/10.