Box Turtle Arts Journal

Warning: Some Vulgarity

What do you get when you mix the suicide squad with cyberpunk? You get a gunslinger, a techno-wizard strongman, and an androgynous twink. You may know Cyber City Oedo 808 from the clip of the guy saying “you wouldn’t recognize a goddamn vampire if it jumped up and bit you on the end of your fucking dick” (and now that I’ve used swearing in a quote I’ve got free reign to swear as much as I want from here-on out) but I think I need to stress that that is from the real officially licensed dub. 

This classic work of Japanimation arrived in this world in the bright young year of 1990 and blew the socks off of everyone who watched it, or maybe it didn’t but it sure did for me. Beautiful cell animation, and guess what? This was an Original Video Animation (OVA) so it had a budget. This three-episode OVA is about three mega-criminals with many life sentences racked up who take a deal to wear bomb collars and solve crimes. Each crime they solve reduces their sentences a bit. The real trick is that the police chief controls their bomb collars from his lighter, and at the start of each assignment activates a timer; if the assigned crime isn’t resolved by the end of the allotted time, boom, it’s not just a device to prevent them from going rogue. 

Each part of the OVA is centered on a different one of the characters with the other two playing supporting roles, and though there isn’t much overarching continuity between them if any they all help explore the black-and-neon world. First is Sengoku who is our classic street-runner gun-slinger roughian with a heart of copper who has to try and rescue people trapped in a giant sky-scraper called the “space-scraper” as the computer systems are driven haywire by a ghost in the machine. Second is Goggles, or “Gogul” as it should not be written, named such because he wears hacker mono-goggles, a mountain of muscle who also serves as the team’s technology expert as the three investigate a series of strange murders leading the police into conflict with the military as they test out a new secret weapon. Third is Benten, the androgynous guy with a flair for the dramatic and the romantic and they fight vampires. It works, because it’s Benten’s episode it leans much more into gothic/romantic vibes which turns out fits very well into the gritty cyberpunk city. 

The episodes all paint the city as a seedy, dangerous, extravagant, and beautiful city, each doing so in similar but different ways as they rotate their focus and while I am sure these episodes could fit in any order the prescribed one is the best, going from a simple case with something more buried beneath to a more complicated one where legality can only be determined by whichever side comes out on top to the most esoteric of the three which still manages to balance out its comparative weirdness by being a relatively more straightforward plot, and all working well within the classic theme of cyberpunk: using technology to breach the limits of human capabilities and life and all the unethical things that come with it.

Aside from all that, the OVA is just stunning. Kinda schlocky at times but in a cool 80s-90s way, violence, action, explosions, fun characters, interesting villains, and it never delves too deep into schlocky-ness to become overly-campy, dull or gratuitous. Cyber City Oedo 808 is an interesting and engaging watch that I thoroughly recommend. Plus its name is just fun to say.