The year is 2032 and the place is Mega-Tokyo. It is a city sharply divided between the haves and the have-nots, a broken city on the rise, a city on the verge of a revolution, a city of humans ... and Boomers.
The creation of Genom Corporation; the Boomers are a new race of artificial cyberdroids created to serve humanity as a slave race of servants and laborers. But with every new technology; there are growing pains, flaws that their newest creations have yet to be discovered ... or mistakes that are simply too costly for the mega-corp to bother fixing, and resentment from the displaced and disenfranchised from the Boomers. Mega-Tokyo is a city on the verge of imploding ... like a bubble ready to burst.
The corrupt Genom Corporation turns a blind eye to the excesses and the beleaguered AD Police lack the technology, the funding, the manpower, and most importantly the political will to stop Boomer-related crimes and rampages from out-of-control Boomers. But not everyone lacks the means and methods. Mega-Tokyo's only hope may lie in a mysterious group of high-tech vigilante and mercenaries known as the Knight Sabers with super powerful armored hardsuits on a modern-day crusade to bring justice to their broken city.
This is their story ...
Bubblegum Crisis was a Japanese produced direct-to-video sci-fi cyberpunk action/thriller anime mini-series with Yoshiko Sakakibara, Kinuko Omori, Michie Tomizawa, and Akiko Hiramatsu contributing as the primary voice actors. Considered an OVA (Original Video Animation) series, the Bubblegum Crisis was heavily inspired by the 1982 American sci-fi film, Blade Runner. There were plans for an extended series with 13 separate animation videos however legal issues arose between Artmix and Youmex who jointly held ownership to the series which caused it to be prematurely discontinued with only eight episodes produced.
Despite its truncated storyline, the series became a cult classic to the point where it was one of the first anime series exported to North America unedited and subtitled in the early 1990s. It's popularity is credited as helping inspire the rise of popularizing the medium into the 21st Century. It successfully pioneered a franchise and spawned a sequel series, the Bubblegum Crash as well as several related spin-off series and a reboot series, Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040.