A.D. Police

Title:A.D. Police
A.D. Police Files
Overall:Watch
Keywords: , , , , , ,
Notables: FURUKAWA Toshio
R1 License - AnimEigo
SHINOHARA Emi
SUZUKI Toshimichi
WAKAMOTO Norio

Relentless technological development has resulted in the creation of Boomers, artificially intelligent androids with the potential to free mankind from physical labor. But anything that can be used can also be misused...

File 1: AD Police rookie Leon McNichol and his partner Geena discover that someone has been illegally reactivating defective Boomers which had been scrapped. One of these Boomers has a vivid memory locked in her mind--the image of the man who destroyed her. It is the image of Leon McNichol...

File 2: Detective Ailis Kara doggedly investigates a string of vicious murders of prostitutes. Along the way, Ailis meets a female executive who has had herself artificially augmented to get ahead in business. Is there a connection between the newly available implants and the murders? At what point does one stop being human and become a machine?

File 3: After being critically wounded battling a runaway Boomer, AD Police officer Billy Fanworth undergoes an experimental cyberoperation, and is reborn as an invincible Cyborg Cop. But Billy, who can only confirm his humanity by biting his tongue, soon finds out that invincibility isn't all it's cracked up to be.

[3 OAV episodes]


[edit] The ↗Bubblegum franchise:

Original story: Same setting (prequel):
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Watch 7 7 7 8 5 5 Ggultra2764 [series:698#1552]
Yeah, not much to write about here. AD Police mostly explores a few episodic cases with the AD Police force, that are tasked with handling renegade boomers within the world of Bubblegum Crisis. The individual stories are okay, as each explores a different member of the group involved in a boomer-related case affecting them in some way. But due to the episodic nature of the OVAs, it makes connecting with the characters here rather difficult and this series doesn't really add in much new for the BGC franchise. The franchise's catchy soundtrack is still here. But beyond that, this may only be worth checking out if you're a diehard Bubblegum Crisis fan.

Last updated Saturday, April 18 2020. Created Saturday, April 18 2020.
Watch 7 6 7 5 5 6 AstroNerdBoy [series:698#436]

Not much to write home about here, but certainly it does the original Bubblegum Crisis better than A.D. Police did for Bubblegum Crisis 2040. For starters, this actually does play as a prequel to Bubblegum Crisis as Leon is shown as a rookie AD Police officer. While he is only a supporting character in episodes 2 and 3, he's still there.

The individual stories are OK with Boomer related crimes involved. The first two are more so than the third, which could easily be another take on the movie Robocop. It didn't get very deep in its look at a human mind being encased in a cyborg body as former human cop (Billy) is now a cyborg one. The female scientist who created the metalic body decided that to improve Billy's performance in combat, he needs to be stimulated, and so has sex with this metal, non-human-looking cyborg. Boy was that freaky, more so in that Billy has no feeling save for his tongue which is one of the few pieces left from his original human body. Just wrong and weird.

Bottom line: Not horribly bad, but not much here either. Fans of the original Bubblegum Crisis will appreciate the title more I suspect.

Last updated Wednesday, February 09 2005. Created Tuesday, February 08 2005.

Watch Stretch [series:698#628]
This series consists of three episodes, or "Files", which open with the words "Another Story of Bubble Gum Crisis". Actually, this is a prequel to BGC, dealing with the adventures of the AD Police before the Knight Sabers appeared. Within the first few minutes of file 1, "The Phantom Woman", several things became obvious: that this show was going to be quite bloody, and that it was going to be far more of a "cyberpunk" series than BGC ever was. That was apparent just from the opening music, which had a strong, exciting beat to it, (a charachteristic which the music of BGC tended to lose as that series progressed), and also from the overall look and feel of this series. After watching the initial episode, I was left with the feeling that AD Police Files was sexy, gory, almost perverted--and lots of fun. At one point I found myself exclaiming "God, this is *weird*!"--and grinning. I was a fan of Leon from BGC, and so was happy to get ahold of some more of his exploits (though it turns out that he doesn't play nearly as large a part in the second and third episodes as he did in this first one). Leon is just a rookie in this series, and an interesting new charachter is Geena, his tough, experienced female partner. To be honest, if I hadn't read the summary of this episode from the box beforehand, I'm not sure I would have figured out why a particular Boomer had a grudge against Leon. The episode was over before I expected--the box gave it's length as 40 minutes, but it turned out that something like a third of that time was composed of the credits and three music videos. These were songs--not particularly memorable ones, I thought--and film clips from BGC. All three files turned out to have the length of the usual half-hour episode once it's been purged of commercials. There just didn't seem to be enough time to make good use of the intriguing premise behind each remaining episode. File 2, "The Ripper", went by so quickly that the mystery didn't have time to be particularly complex--the guilty party gave most of it away in a "since-I'm-about-to-kill-you-I-can-tell-you-everything" speech. I was sure that when the apparent murderer had been caught there would be some sort of twist and the story would continue, but no, it wasn't so. File 3, "The Man Who Bites His Tongue", went largely the same way--an interesting premise, but no time to seriously exploit it. Perhaps one reason why file 1 is my favorite is because it didn't try to cram complex philosophical questions into a mere 25 minutes. Files 2 and 3 should have been attempted as full-fledged movies, if at all.

My favorite line: "Boomers with sex functions can be sold for many times more than those without, you know"

Last updated Sunday, February 03 2008. Created Friday, November 21 2003.

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