The mystery of Parasite Dolls

I’ve been working on a special project recently that reminded me of something very interesting that I had forgotten all about…

This is a subject that I’ve wanted to talk about ever since I was running a little site called “The Bubblegum Crisis Center” back in the early 2000s. The mystery involves the last spin-off of Bubblegum Crisis to be released called Parasite Dolls.

It all starts with the existence of an image I saw back in 2001, when I was looking around the Internet, trying to learn as much as I could about an anime I had started watching on TV called Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040.

This particular image depicted a number of characters from, what was described as, “a new BGC series” by the title of “Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040” coming out in 1998. While I found this fan site in 2001, it was very old, and indeed, this image was also very old, dating all the way back to the mid-1990s.

However, the problem with this image is that it did not depict the characters from Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 at all. In fact, the characters that appear in the image weren’t from any of the Bubblegum Crisis series released so far.

It wasn’t until 2003 that we finally learned about the characters shown in that image with the announcement of a new anime series called Parasite Dolls. Funnily enough, now that I look at the original image I found back in 2001, the characters do appear slightly different from how they appear in the anime itself.

So what was the deal? Why did it take us over five years to learn where those characters actually came from?

Let’s take a look back at 1998, the year Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 started airing on Japanese TV. It started on the 8th of October and ended on the 31st of March, 1999. A month later, a second Bubblegum Crisis series called “AD Police” started on the 7th of April and finished on the 30th of June, 1999.

These two anime series were created by AIC (Anime International Company) after they managed to acquire the rights to create their own anime based on the original Bubblegum Crisis OVA series released from 1987 to 1991.

There is a lot of promotional material for both Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 and AD Police TV, all the way from 1997 to the spark of its international popularity in the early 2000s with the English dub releases of both anime by ADV Films. However, there was not a single mention of Parasite Dolls throughout this entire time period aside from that single image that popped up in the dark recesses of the early Internet.

My hunch is that it was all down to AIC simply running out of money. The evidence I have for this is the faltering animation quality of Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, and how the animation quality of AD Police TV was extremely… basic in comparison to its companion anime.

From what I can tell about the situation, all the money AIC had went into the production of Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 and whatever was left over was sucked up by AD Police TV. Parasite Dolls definitely did exist back then, however, with the lukewarm reception of Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 and the AD Police TV series falling flat on its face, AIC must have abandoned the project after only making the first two episodes of Parasite Dolls.

How do I know they made the first two episodes back in 1998/1999? Simple, just watch Parasite Dolls and it becomes very obvious. It’s a 3 part OVA series where each episode runs for around 30 minutes each. When you watch the first two episodes, the animation style resembles what you would find from an anime production made back in 1998/1999.

However, when you hit the third part, things change… drastically. The animation style changes, featuring dynamic lighting and some 3D effects that are not present in the first two parts. It’s very clear that this third episode was created years after the first two, especially when you consider the writer of the first two episodes (and of BGC2040) Chiaki J. Konaka seemed to share writing credit with a new writer by the name of Kazuto Nakazawa in the third episode.

In addition, I found that a number of production companies seemed to have worked on the third episode that didn’t have anything to do with the first two episodes. Everything about the series tells you that these episodes were made apart from each other.

The second episode was made within a year of the first and the third episode was made around five years after the second. Why am I so confident about that time frame? Because the episodes themselves tell you this upfront. The second episode is set a year after the first while the events of the third episode take place five years after the second episode.

I’m also pretty sure that Parasite Dolls was meant to be a much longer series than it became. The reason I say this is because the events of the third episode kill off almost all the main and support cast and ends abruptly despite how the first two episodes tried to take its time to flesh out the characters.

In any case, what may have prompted AIC to take Parasite Dolls out of cold storage and finish it off was the resurgence in popularity the series developed when it was released by ADV Films outside of Japan. Indeed, after Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 became popular, ADV Films picked up and dubbed AD Police TV and were in talks with AIC to create a sequel to Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, funded by ADV Films itself.

Who knows what the true plans for Parasite Dolls would have been if the two other Bubblegum Crisis series made in 1998/1999 were successful… but we’ll never know.

Nowadays, Bubblegum Crisis has fallen back into obscurity and I doubt it will ever get its time in the spotlight again. There’s not much room for cyberpunk style anime these days, not unless it has a truckload of “moe” piled on top of it.

Anyway, that’s it from me… I just wanted to talk about that little mystery I found many years ago… back to that special project I mentioned at the start of this article.