Mad★Bull 34

Name: Mad★Bull 34
Genre: Action
Released: 1990-12-21T00:00:00+00:00
Rating: 6.35

Mad Bull 34

マッド★ブル34

6.35(5,231)

Rank#8550

#6240

OVA4 ep.Finished Airing47 min per ep

Daizaburo Edi-Ban, a Japanese-American, joins New York City's toughest precinct, the 34th. On his first day he is partnered up with John Estes, called Sleepy by his friends and Mad Bull by his enemies, a cop who stops crime with his own violent brand of justice. Mad Bull makes no qualms about executing common thieves with shotgun blasts if they even pose a minor threat to him or anyone around them. Mad Bull also often steals from prostitutes and does incredible amounts of property damage while fighting crime. Mad Bull's unpoliceman-like behavior often puts him in hot water with his partner Daizaburo and the 34th precinct. However, despite how reckless or illegal these acts are, a good cause is always revealed (For example, Sleepy uses the money he steals from the prostitutes to fund a venereal disease clinic and a home for battered and raped women). Perrine Valley, a police lieutenant, joins Daizaburo and Sleepy later on to help them tackle more difficult cases involving the mafia and drug-running. Mad Bull 34 is inspired by the high-action buddy cop films of the '70s and '80s. (Source: Thevinnymac)

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Reviews(18)

animegorey

January 16, 2009

Recommended

I was so happy I was able to find this on dvd ( if you can't, let me know and I'll help). This is funny, with good action and interesting stories. Each episode is about 45 minutes. Violence is great and explicit. Profanity flies like there's no tomorrow and it fits this anime. Animation is typical of early 90's. Some nudity that also has it's explicit moments. Pretty good cop anime that is not afraid to be over the top wether it's violence or comedy. Very enjoyable and rewatchability is high. If you like cyberpunk, I would recommend you check this out. I don't thinkI would classify it as cyberpunk, but it has it's moments.

literaturenerd

December 26, 2022

I knew I had to review at least one anime over the holiday season. Maybe I could review Tokyo Godfathers, the best Christmas movie ever made? Nah. Maybe I could review Akiba Maid War…but it’s just so hard to talk about that show without spoiling the fun. So, I decided to do something completely different and just re-review my favorite “So bad it’s awesome” anime of all time. I wrote a quick, shitty review back in 2014 or 2015 but I did NOT do this series justice. Now it’s time that I fully commit to spreading the gospel of the Mad Bull! It's difficult to talkabout Mad Bull without first bringing up the man responsible for it. That man being the legendary Kazuo Koike whom we lost back in 2019. Koike is best known for Lone Wolf and Cub, which is considered one of the most influential works of early seinen. Koike alongside Go Nagai are really credited with giving manga some balls and showing publishers that it doesn’t just have to be for kids. There’s a big market for adults as well. Lone Wolf and Cub is SOO well respected that it’s one of the sacred manga that’s considered acceptable to talk about on literature forums like /lit/ and you won’t be made fun of. That’s why it’s one of the 10 manga that MAL elitists will actually fucking read alongside Berserk, Punpun, Monster, Phoenix, and of course JoJo part 12: Balls of Steel. So why am I about to review one of the most laughably bad anime of all time? How did Koike go from an industry legend to a man whose latter works are a risible embarrassment? The rise and fall of Kazuo Koike almost eerily parallel that of American comic artist Frank Miller. He’s this guy who just shows up out of nowhere and absolutely kicked down the door with tits and gore and rampant misogyny and everyone was like “Holy shit! I thought comics were for little kids! This guy is actually making them enjoyable for men. That’s fucking bad ass! Much like Mr. Miller, Koike could actually be a pretty good writer when we wanted to be. However, both men let their fame go to their heads until their works morphed from cutting edge to a grotesque parody of itself. Koike went Lady Snowblood and Lone Wolf in the 1970s to writing Mad Bull, Wounded Man and Crying Freeman all in a row during the 1980s. Interestingly, the work that bridged his good work and his awful work was a manga that he worked on for 3 years alongside Go Nagai. While Koike’s latter works are indeed awful, they’re also undeniably entertaining. Mad Bull especially, which has been described as an escaped mental patient’s attempt at writing a buddy cop film. The other hero behind today’s anime is Satoshi Dezaki. He is the elder brother of Osamu, one of the greatest and most innovative directors in the history of anime. While his brother reinvented the anime industry, Satoshi founded a studio called Magic Bus and mostly directed utter schlock. They must have had some awkward family get togethers. However, Satoshi wasn’t without his triumphs. Sure, people like to laugh at Magic Bus for making stuff like Cipher and Wounded Man, but they also helped animate a little OVA series called Legend of the Galactic Heroes when most other studios weren’t interested. In 1990, the stars aligned, and Dezaki directed today’s MASTERPIECE of an anime. While the Mad Bull manga is entertaining, the anime is an entirely different level of awesome. The manga knew it was a joke. It’s supposed to be stupid. However, the anime often forgets this and plays the most ludicrous situations entirely straight. Half the time, the anime seems to think it’s a hard-hitting drama and brutal criticism of America in the vein of Chinatown. This blissful lack of self-awareness is really what helps cement the anime as an all-time masterpiece of schlock entertainment. Described by the official Anime Encyclopedia as an “odious, infantile, and puerile piece of shit”, Mad Bull 34 is the story of a 9-foot-tall police officer who cleans up the mean streets of 1980s New York City alongside his strait-laced partner, Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban. This name btw would make you think that his legal name is Daizaburo but he’s always called by his nickname Eddie. He’s never once called Eddie in either the show or the manga. Not once…ever. Officer John “Sleepy” Estes is a loose cannon cop who takes every opportunity he can to kill criminals and get them off the street. In his defense, he never kills anyone in the anime who was unarmed. However, he’s not the best cop when he brings in only one criminal for questioning in 4 episodes and kills about 87. It’s also probably a bad look in 2022 to have your anime start with a white police officer shooting a black guy’s head clean off within the opening 15 seconds. Don’t worry, Officer Sleepy also kills a bare minimum of 15 white people per episode. There is no discrimination or pattern whatsoever in his mass slaughter of New York’s criminal population. Officer Sleepy is also the biggest pimp in New York, but the anime presents this as a good thing since he uses the girls’ money to treat STDs, drug addiction and other medical expenses, so he spends their money more responsibly than they do and takes care of them. This anime has issues as you may have guessed. Each episode is a different adventure featuring an incredibly over the top villain including a cyborg mob-boss and female athlete who stole an alien super suit from the mafia and became The Predator. Daizaburo contributes to the show mostly by getting the living shit kicked out of him and needing to be rescued. A female cop Perine is introduced into the show although her contribution is much the same as every other blonde woman in this show. I’ll just let you guess what that is. There are only 4 episodes, but they are all completely insane and utterly hilarious. Mad Bull is the perfect show to watch with friends because no matter how many times I see it, I’m still finding new errors and goofs! You’ll notice the first time you watch it that every single English word in the anime is misspelled. Even Sleepy’s name tag when you first meet him is “Suleepy”. The episode title should read “Good-bye Sleepy” but instead reads “Good by Sleepy” as if he’s selling a perfume. Then you’ll notice the scaling. Officer Sleepy goes from 6 feet to 12 feet tall and everything in between. Often within the same scene. Scaling errors in this show are so bad that it often feels less like an error that was made due to crunch time and more like they actually didn’t know how to scale. They missed that day of art school. It’s common practice to not draw every character in every frame of animation during a group shot. After all, the human eye can’t pick up if a character is missing from a single frame and the animation moves at 60 FPS. Mad Bull leaves characters out of enough frames that they’ll often just blink in and out of existence. At first you think you’re just seeing things. There’s no way that just happened. However, it just keeps happening. In one scene, Sleepy shoots a goon wearing a hockey mask at point blank and the shotgun blast explodes his skull while leaving the mask completely undamaged. The anime even shows you this from a side view for some reason, so it looks like the blast of pellets just phase through the mask and liquify the head on the other side. There are just SOO many errors and things that go wrong in this anime it’s magical. You’ll never catch all the things wrong with Mad Bull. Its Cinema Sins score would be near infinite. The soundtrack of Mad Bull features officially licensed music from the legendary James Brown, whom I am 100% positive just signed off on it without ever seeing the show. The other wonderful thing about the audio is the English dub. You can still laugh at Mad Bull in Japanese, but the dub is the way to get the true Mad Bull experience. The dub was written in England by Manga UK and designed to have the saltiest script possible to punch up the rating and sell this as a very mature anime. This anime has easily some of my favorite quips and insults in the medium. “The man is so low he could parachute out of a snake’s asshole!” Although I will warn younger viewers that there are quite a few homophobic slurs in this dub. So don’t be surprised when that keeps happening. The entire dub is English actors trying New York accents with various degrees of success. Perine’s actress just flat gives up after one episode and reverts to an RP English accent. Everything about this dub is just spectacular. It is the whipped cream on the sundae. Sadly, I can’t bring myself to rate this higher than a 5, but I’m still DEFINITELY recommending that you check it out. I think the English dubbed episodes are still free on Youtube. If not, they can still be found across the internet. The series is also available on DVD through Discotek, although the Discotek DVD for the North American region is now out of print and sells for over 120$ due to the series’ relentless parade of police brutality. I’m pretty sure Discotek would be happy if every copy of this DVD with their name on it was destroyed. Needless to say, it is never going to be re-released. If you need some laughs and holiday joy this season, I can’t recommend Mad Bull highly enough.

unimportantuser

April 13, 2020

Not Recommended

Mad Bull 34 is one of my favorite bad OVAs. It's stupid as hell, a very inaccurate representation of what New York is like, it's CRAZY, over the top, makes one go WTF, but about all else, it is NOT boring. I'll attempt to explain why Mad Bull is a work of bad art. Oh & btw, there will be massive spoilers in this review. Read at you own risk Story: The "plot" of Mad Bull basically consists of Sleepy & Daizaburo going around New York "upholding the law". There really isn't an overarching plot to Mad Bull, rather it's an episodic 4 episode OVA. But honestlythat was for the best, as the episodic format helps lead into the crazy shenanigans that ensue throughout Mad Bull 34. Episode 1 is the set-up episode, it gives us some establishing shots of New York, introduces us to Daizaburo Dipshit, nicknamed "Eddie" (except they never call him that). The next shot that actually matters showcases a girl tied-up & about to get drugged & raped. Suddenly Sleepy nicknamed “Mad Bull” (except they rarely call him that) bursts into the room, & in an encouraging display of Police Brutality, blows the perpetrators heads off (in a way that doesn’t happen in real life might I add). Several bouts of introductions & exposition later we come to the supermarket scene. Robbers (wearing Jason masks & Rollerskates) come out of a supermarket after robbing it. The police cruiser then glides onto the scene & Sleepy, in yet another encouraging display of Police Brutality goes in & blows one of the robber’s head off. With Daizaburo Dipshit giving the appropriate reaction of “He’s blown his head off”. Also on the scene, was an innocent bystander, a woman no-less, a woman who pissed her pants because of course she would. Sleepy then tells Daizaburo “She’ll thaw out if you stick ya finger up her ass” & being the dipshit that he is, Daizaburo proceeds to do so, & gets chewed out by the woman for it. We then cut to a scene of Daizaburo & Sleepy sitting in the police cruiser. Sleepy eyes a prostitute & after Daizaburo says he’s not interested, Sleepy says, & I quote “Huh, you don’t mean your a faggot?” Yes, that is an actual quote. After this, we then cut to a scene of Sleepy trying to get Daizaburo some pussy because he’s such a “good friend”. He gathers a punch of prostitutes in one room & goes “Well girls, I was hoping you could give this one for free, as this man is a 100% certified virgin, & is in desperate need of some pussy”. A series of still images later, Daizaburo says he has a fiance to get out of getting some pussy. He then tells Sleepy that he knows that he meant well & was only trying to do a good thing for him (which isn’t how that works irl btw). That’s all in just the first 10 minutes and 21 seconds of episode 1? Does this sound like the kind of fun, trashy, unintentional comedy you might enjoy? If it does, I can only tell you that you’re in for one wild ride of crazy shenanigans, appaling racism & sexism, hilarious inaccuracies to not only New York but life in general. Mad Bull 34 has it all. Characters: The characters in Mad Bull are some of the most unlikable yet likable characters at the same time. Sleepy is fucking INSANE. He does whatever he wants, no matter how wrong or inaccurate it is to how a police force would actually operate in real life. But that doesn’t even matter, because to quote sleepy “In the 34th precinct I’m the law. AND NO SCUMBAG IS GONNA GET AWAY WITH SHIT WHILE I’M ALIVE”. Sleepy also is just swimming in plot armor throughout the entire anime. So much shit happens that should get him killed. In the first episode, the tires of his police cruiser are doused in oil making the car slip & slide, then fucking flipping over and crashing into a wall, an event that nobody would survive, but Sleepy walks it off like a fucking champ, basically unscratched that’s how much plot armor he’s doused in. Sleepy also has creative “strategies” (for lack of a better term) such as crotch grenades. These just add to how awesome Sleepy is. “Daisaboro Eddie Bannnnn” is our next character we have to discuss. Daisaboro first starts out as a relatively normal being who just wants to be a cop. But he has the fortunate team up of Sleepy as his partner. Daisaboro starts off as very critical of Sleepy’s actions. But once Sleepy tries to get him some pussy from some hookers & Daisaboro chews him out, he then proceeds to become friends with Sleepy at basically the drop of a hat with no character development whatsoever. After the fact he basically becomes Sleepy’s partner in law enforcement. Daisaboro is also swimming in just as much plot armor as Sleepy is, though I’d argue not as much since Daisaboro doesn’t get in as many situations where he should get killed as Sleepy does. The rest of the cast of Mad Bull is pretty flavorless, vanilla, stock, generic, and uninspired. All of the villains in this show are evil for evil's sake with absolutely no motivations behind what they do or why they do it. But to make up for this the villains allow for just as many ridiculous, stupid, over-the-top, and bat-shit insane shenanigans to play out. So, even though they’re lackadaisical, they at least stay in line with the unintentional comedy of this series Art & Sound” The art in Mad Bull is pretty bad & an all around low effort. Character designs for the male characters are usually pretty basic and/or muscular (copying most Shounen manga from the time). The women have more effort put into their character designs than the men do, but because of the really bad art, the effort put into them is automatically fucked over since you can’t even begin to appreciate them. Animation is also pretty lazy. Even in the action sequences there’s barely any animation to go around, they’ll usually just cut to still frames of drawings gliding across the screen. The voice acting is the best bad voice acting I’ve ever heard. I watched this in the English Dub (which is the only way you should watch this btw) and the voice actors were British. But they try really hard to hide the accents in their voices so that they can imitate what they think Americans sound like (spoilers, this is also an inaccurate representation of New York). But the actors at least sound like they’re having fun with their roles, maybe a bit too much fun. But this at least beats the voice acting of something like Girls & Panzer in Japanese, Sword For Truth’s English dub, and Conception’s voice acting in general. So a little fun goes a long way. Overall: Mad Bull 34 is bad. But it’s a fun kind of bad. Mad Bull 34 manages to keep me entertained throughout it’s bat-shit insanity, plot armor ridden main characters, lacking animation, bad art, surprisingly kick ass OST, and many other things. Mad Bull 34 is my favorite piece of garbage that I can enjoy watching without having to torture somebody in the process (though torturing my friends with this certainly helps. My final score for Mad Bull is gonna be a 4/10. But don’t let that rating deter you, this anime is absolutely worth watching because this truly is a once in a lifetime experience

lawlmartz

November 27, 2015

Mixed Feelings

Time to dust off the VCR and take a trip back to 1990, 'cause today I'm talking about that glorious ultraviolent cheese called Mad Bull 34! Break out the Nike Cortez, Power Shoulders, and the grunge flannel- frost your tips, mute Will Smith and eject your Lion King VHS... we've got some 90s to cover. For the uninitiated: Mad Bull 34 was made by a company called Magic Bus... who've done *checks* literally nothing else of note. They even made some hentai once, it looks like. Amazingly, this studio has been around since the early 80s, and somehow has generated enough revenue off their titlesto continue to exist in 2015. In 1996, Manga Entertainment took it upon themselves to make a gag dub for this ridiculously ultraviolent and unapologetically profane show- and created perhaps the ultimate cult classic, because the finished product is absolutely hilarious for more reasons than I can count. One of these reasons is insane, over the top violence. Another one is crazy dubs. Artwork and Animation: 2 Mad Bull is old, hand drawn, and absolute garbage. The majority of it is on par with Violence Jack level badness, but occasionally it looks decent. The first two episodes looked okay, but the quality descended for the second half. If you like action lines, blood fountains, and super gore, Mad Bull will scratch your itch for the sick. In multiple standoffs with even minor criminals, Sleepy will just straight up murder them. Shotgun to the head, decapitations, held out onto an oncoming train, you name it, Mad Bull's got it. If I were rating it for blood, gore, and violence, this would be a straight 10/10. Sound and Voice Acting: 9 If I were grating cheese, this would be Kraft- the cheesiest. If I'm grading their performances, oh my buddha, this takes the cake. While Daizaburo's got one of the New Yoik-iest fake New Yoik accents I've ever heard, the rest of the cast is so varied, I have no clue what they wanted to be. Perrine flip flops between a generic English accent and Chicago, and the episodic cast's voices are so freakin' awful that I could have rounded up some drunk hicks and gotten better performances out of them than this. Manga Entertainment probably went around the office after they got this license and asked who wanted to be in it. (they're also based in Chicago, which would explain the Chicago sounding accents... hmmm) But- this is the charm of Mad Bull. It's not meant to be taken seriously. This is high action cheese at its absolute best. Story and Characters: 4, 7 Mad Bull pulls from a lot of pop culture for its stories. It straight up rips off the movie "The French Connection" in episode 2, titled "The Manhattan Connection". It also borrows the Predator monster for episode 4. Generally speaking, the four stories go like this: Sleepy and Daizaburo go on patrol for Sleepy to bang some prostitutes, pay off an informant, or just generally cause mayhem- then they happen upon a crime in progress that leads to the discovery of a larger ring of criminal activity. Storywise, it's very functional- because it just plays off the Buddy Cop movies of the 80s tropes: one character that's a completely lawless ruffian and somehow manages to be a cop (Sleepy), and the stick-up-his-ass, by the book stiff (Daizaburo). In typical cop show fashion, Sleepy is the kind of cop that always gets the job done, no matter what. This includes murdering every criminal in his path, and using his superhuman strength and penchant for violence to cause a lot of cost for the state of New York. His straight man Daizaburo is the guy that plays everything by the rules, and is stunned alongside the audience at the antics his partner pulls. And he pulls crotch grenades, as well. You've gotta see some of this to believe it. WTF factor: 9.5/10 Enjoyment and Overall: 9, 6 I can't exactly rate Mad Bull a 9/10 just because it's a lot of fun to watch... except that I can. It's funny as heck, and really over the top with the violence in creative and disgusting ways, and the fact that it has this incredibly bad, but cheesetastic dub really puts the icing on top. If you're a fan of so bad it's good or cult classics, this one has its picture right next to those terms in the dictionary. You can't go wrong with a bit of the old ultraviolence, and Mad Bull delivers. As always, come rage at me. Or leave nice comments, I don't care- feedback's appreciated.

Mad★Bull 34

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