AKA: アドバンスドポリス (Advanced Police), AD Police: To Protect and To Serve

Genre: Sci-fi bishi-police action drama

Length: Television series, 12 episodes, 23 minutes each

Distributor: Currently licensed by Nozomi/Right Stuf International, available streaming on Retrocrush.

Content Rating: 12+ (violence, some language, mature themes)

Related Series: AD Police, Bubblegum Crash, Bubblegum Crisis, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040

Also Recommended: Armitage III: Polymatrix, Bubblegum Crisis 2040, Ghost in the Shell, Patlabor: the Movie

Notes: Credit given to "Laws of Anime" Ver. 6.0 (Ryan Shellito and Darrin Bright) at http://www.bright.net/~nyla/animelaw.html for the quote.

Rating:

AD Police TV

Synopsis

Something strange is happening in Genom City, and it's up to the high-tech crime specialists of the AD Police to get to the bottom of the mystery. The traditional police squad-room drama popularized by television's NYPD Blue and Hill Street Blues is given a futuristic anime overhaul in AD Police. In a five-hour story arc, we are introduced to Genom City's elite squad of specialists and watch as they encounter tragedy after tragedy in their quest to solve a mystery which threatens to destroy the infrastructure of a once-powerful city under reconstruction following a massive natural disaster.

Review

Laws of Anime:
#16 - Law of Inverse Accuracy:
The accuracy of a "Good Guy" when operating any form of firearm increases as the difficulty of the shot increases. The accuracy of the "Bad Guys" when operating firearms decreases when the difficulty of the shot decreases. (Also known as the Storm Trooper Effect) Example: A "Good Guy" in a drunken stupor being held upside down from a moving vehicle will always hit, and several battalions of "Bad Guys" firing on a "Good Guy" standing alone in the middle of an open field will always miss.

Now take the aforementioned example literally and tell me why this shouldn't be in a cop drama. You have five seconds.

Okay, pencils down please. Hand your answers to the front slowly, that way all implanted bombs will go off before they reach me.

The answer to that question, and basically my problem with this whole series? When a creator is attempting to pull an anime NYPD Blue, they simply can not expect me to believe that the two perfect, sexy cops can take down 20+ raging military-grade Boomers with nothing other than pistols. (Hello! What about armor? Who would want tin cans that can't protect themselves from even small-arms fire?). Talk about your "specialist policemen." If this title had decided to go totally one way or the other, either fantastical with drama, or just complete "average-policeman rising to the situation" cop drama (like the reverse cover leads us to believe) it may have been passable, but the creators decided to try to do both, and accomplished neither.

It also doesn't help that the two main leads come off flatter than the proverbial pancake. It almost seems as if they really aren't characters at all, but mechanical constructs of past characters. Heck, even calling them "stereotypes" would probably be stretching it. Everything about the heros seems blatantly contrived: a Japanese "punk" specialist paired with a foreign (in this case German) pretty boy? You know, that partnership doesn't sound too bad, until you realize that they are going to go through and milk it for all it's worth without even trying to add anything even slightly original or even interesting, all to leave me with a very "meh" reaction to what should have been a really dynamic partnership (if it were done right).

And don't even get me started on the artwork. For those of us who remember the fully-detailed exquisiteness of the Bubblegum Crisis: Tokyo 2040 Voomers, there should be a moment of silence, as this series contains none that even resemble those voomers. The voomers in this series, one in particular that I'm thinking of, could pass for a blurry action shot of a vacuum cleaner with eight hoses waving around, sound and all, not to mention the various appropriate "suckage" puns that could be applied there. The only aspects that look like they had a larger animation budget than South Park are when the two main characters are doing "cool things (TM)" and some scenes near the end, where everything seems to inexplicably get better animated.

Out of all of this title's attributes, however, the plot was the lone above-average point in a vast sea of putrid-smelling dung, as it starts out pretty weak for the first six episodes in order to introduce the flat characters, but then, like the animation, gets markedly better by the end. When the story is told by such irritatingly shallow characters and presented in such an unattractive package, however, the unanimous response of my test audience of myself and three other people was the same, "who cares?" Even the VHS release of this series could be indicated as enough evidence of these shortcomings, after all, ADV actually stopped releasing it after only the second tape, waiting more than a year to release the "To Protect and To Serve" set on DVD!

I hope they bought this license for cheap though and got their money's worth, because I sure didn't when I bought the DVD set.

Crap, but digestible (if you really want to). Add a star if you REALLY like angsty sexy boys. — Isaac Cynova

Recommended Audience: Early teens and up, as there is some language, and more mature themes, such as the difference between humans and robots.