Bubblegum Crisis/Trivia

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Hey, It's That Voice! / Retroactive Recognition:
  • Names to Know in Anime: Kenichi Sonoda did the character and hardsuit designs for the original series. Hiroki Hayashi directed the fourth OVA episode before going on to Tenchi Muyo!. Masami Ohbari (Gravion, the Fatal Fury anime) directed the episodes "Moonlight Rambler" and "Red Eyes," and Satoshi Urushihara supervised and was "guest character designer" for the episode "Double Vision." See also the Hey, It's That Voice! entry.
  • Screwed By Internal Politics: After the eighth OVA episode, various disputes caused the two major studios involved with BGC, Artmic and Youmex, to split, causing the immediate cancellation of any other original-run OVAs. Who is to "blame" is debatable, but the split is what led to the franchise going Off the Rails and led to relative disasters like Crash!
  • Shout-Out: To Streets of Fire, Blade Runner, Top Gun, Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons, Marvel Comics, and others.
    • The Boomers' metallic skulls with glowing red eyes are reminiscent of The Terminator‍'‍s endoskeleton.
    • The weapons the AD Police carry are clearly the pulse rifles from Aliens. The way Sylvie kills the last Doberman with Weaponized Exhaust is also a reference to the first Alien movie.
    • The mere existence of Priss (and her backing band, the Replicants) needs to be mentioned here. Especially since she first appears to us as a wild-haired blonde. (The joke is that it's a wig, of course.) Leon is also named after one of the replicants from Blade Runner.
      • AD Police headquarters looks exactly like the police headquarters in Blade Runner as well
    • The bands, Priss and the Replicants and Vision and the Revengers, are shout-outs to Streets of Fire‍'‍s Ellen Aim and the Attackers.
      • The female head of Genom security is named Madigan, a possible Shout-Out to actress Amy Madigan who had a supporting role in Streets of Fire.
    • BGC features a red-haired Romanova. A certain hardsuit-wearing hero features a red-haired Romanova as a secondary character. Hilariously, though, the two could not be more dissimilar otherwise (Nene is a Playful Hacker who isn't that great at the physical violence while Black Widow is, well, a bigger Action Girl than Priss).
    • A neon sign in the background of the first episode reads "MZ 23". Megazone 23 was AIC's previous project before starting BGC.
    • The AD Police's Roadblock "truck" in Revenge Road is named Lulu Belle. That's Bogart's tank in Sahara.
    • When Sylia meets her informant Fargo in a Ferris Wheel car, she asks him if this makes him feel like Harry Lime.
  • What Could Have Been: Kinuko Oomori, the original voice for Priss in the OAVs, was originally contracted for the first six episodes, and her character was going to be killed off at the end of episode 6, but due to popular demand, Priss was kept alive at the last minute.
    • Vision's song, "Say Yes", played at the beginning of episode 7, alludes to Priss's supposed death.
      • According to some accounts, the problem wasn't that Oomori was contracted for only 6 episodes, but instead that her recording label was pitching a fit that she was singing in the OAVs in violation of what may have been an exclusivity clause in her contract (Kinuko Oomori isn't an actress, per se, instead she's a singer who's remembered for her one big role in an anime franchise, in much the same fashion as Mari Iijima) and demanded Oomori leave the series. According to this account Priss indeed was to be killed off in Episode 6, but a last-minute compromise between the label and Youmex/Artmic spared her, and Oomori was allowed to finish up the balance of planned episodes on the condition that she perform no more solo songs.
  • The Wiki Rule: The Bubblegum Crisis Wiki.