‘Bubblegum Crash’ Smashes Into Your Home Collection In Early 2025
by Anton Kromoff
Welcome to the table,
When I was a kid, I tried my best to grab as many TTRPG books as I could that would not instantly trigger the adults in my life. These things would upset them because it was “corrupting the youth,” or “a tool of the devil,” or some kind of insidious plot by some secret cabal to “sew chaos in the hearts and minds of the nation.”
As you can imagine, it always felt like wandering across a spider’s web trying my very best to not pluck a string that would spell certain doom. One book that got a lot of snarky comments and side eyes was the Bubblegum Crisis TTRPG. I had not seen any of Bubblegum Crisis at the point I acquired the game book, but the world of Hardsuites and pop icons in a neo-Tokyo setting was very cool and instantly gave me Blade Runner meets Phantom 2040*.
I would pore over this book using only the big light from the bar pouring through my bedroom window in the middle of the night. So many cool things are in this book; stats on mec-suites, cyber-punk style weapons, and lots of rad art of characters and vehicles all based around this anime I had never seen. It was a weird way to enter the fandom of these “hi-tech heroes,” but I never seem to do things the easy way.
I tell you all of that to tell you I am pretty stoked that AnimEigo is set to deliver the sequel to Bubblegum Crisis with the upcoming Blu-ray of Bubblegum Crash, slated for January 21, 2025. The original came out all the way back in 1991 when I was in my single digits still. Crash is a follow-up of the Bubblegum Crisis series that dropped in 1987 and this new Blu-ray will have all 3 episodes – Illegal Army, Geo Climbers, and Melt Down. It features a full restoration of Episode 2 (Geo-Climbers), along with new HD upscales of Episodes 1 and 3 and comes packaged with a newly designed slipcover exclusively available for purchase from the MediaOCD website at this link.
If you are a fan of classic anime, mec-suites, or finally want to see stuff your parents would not let you watch, you should keep an eye out for this ultra-rad upcoming set.
Until next time, I designed so many of these Hardsuites in my spiral notebooks. I have an entire notebook where I converted them to D&D rules so I could add them to the lunchtime games, this had a huge impact on me as a kid so it is really cool to see the fandom still out there kicking.
*Phantom 2040 – My introduction to cyberpunk was clunky and bits and pieces came in over the years without me really understanding what the genre was. I knew enough to know that “dark future” was a thing but I did not really fully understand it until I saw Phantom 2040. That cartoon really painted this brilliant picture for me of a dystopian high-tech world and became a springboard that I could leap from to start exploring other media and literature to learn more about the genera. The video game for Phantom 2040 was also fantastic even if I could never beat it.
