Streaming Titles – Anime World Order Podcast

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As the Fall 2025 anime season approaches, we talk about our favorites of Summer 2025 before Gerald reviews Bubblegum Crash!, the 3-part sequel to Bubblegum Crisis which we reviewed roughly 17 years ago.

Introduction (0:00 – 50:50)
We start off by reading an email from a listener who watched Aim for the Top! Gunbuster for the first time as a result of our review from…wait, two years ago?! Incidentally, Discotek’s license for Gunbuster is about to expire, so buy the Blu-Ray now while it’s still available if you haven’t already done so. We mull over the possiblity of setting up some ranked choice polling for listeners to weigh in with their seasonal Top 3, revisiting past titles from the earliest days of the podcast, doing separate YouTube-friendly edits of the reviews, and getting some new merchandise made. The latter is derailed by the same thing that’s derailing more or less every pop culture hobby pursuit in the United States: the elimination of the de minimis exception.

With the Fall 2025 anime season upon us, we’ll be doing a trailer watch-along on 09/27/2025 at 3:00 PM on our Discord. There’s no way to record these to VOD for later viewing, so join us if you can. Hopefully, we didn’t screw up our server boosts and the Discord Stage still has enough slots for everyone. Hopefully also there’s no outlandishness with Discord’s servers the way there was during Otakon. Due to our con reports for Otakon, AFO, and such we never did get to weigh in on the Summer 2025 anime season, so we do so here. Marvel at how few of the most popular titles of the season we saw any of at all! We’ll be sure to add them to the backlog…

Review: Bubblegum Crash! (50:50 – 2:03:06)
After some required convincing of Daryl and Clarissa, Gerald reviews Bubblegum Crash!, which has never exactly held the most sterling of reputations among anime fans. Considering the last time we talked about anything related to Bubblegum Crisis was 15 years ago when we reviewed the AD Police Files OAV, it seems the time was right especially when one considers AnimEigo’s recent release of the series on Blu-Ray. If you order directly from the MediaOCD store, they throw in a slipcover! Remember: only deranged lunatics throw away the slipcover when they buy something on home video!

The opening to Bubblegum Crash! is the closest it gets to feeling like Bubblegum Crisis.

For the record, this upgrade to Nene’s hardsuit precedes Tekkaman Blade

It made sense in the AD Police Files prequel, but Boomers looking like obvious robots is weird here. Look, we get that you made this after doing AD Police Files but still

In the grim darkness of the cyberpunk future, copaganda reigns unchecked. Imagine if the real world were like–oh wait

The Turbografx 16 game has an English language patch. But how crazy would it be for such heavily funded and militarized police forces to do nothing in the face of danger–oh wait

As was the style at the time, all of the English readouts consist of random oddities.

Sylia Stingray doesn’t have much to do in Crash!, but at least she still looks good doing it

In 2025, it’s quite likely that more ladies are into Priss than gentlemen

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0In this episode, by popular request Daryl reviews the 1998 sci-fi Western Outlaw Star, which we all remember so little about it’s almost like we’re seeing it for the first time. The original Toonami Generation is now middle-aged, after all.

Introduction (0:00 – 1:03.22)
Anime Boston is just two weeks away; we’d better start working on all those panels we’re doing, huh? For now, it’s another new anime season, and another batch of titles to check out. We talk about what we’re watching, since there’s a fair bit of good stuff airing right now. But also, Gerald saw a movie that displeased him mightily. We spend about 45 minutes discussing this.

But then we also talk about the incredibly short print runs of both manga and anime these days, which means we have no choice but to bring up the fact that the recent policy decisions being undertaken by the government are now having tangible effects on our existences of watching cartoons, playing videogames, and going to fan conventions. This is less than 15 minutes worth of discussion, but we know this is all anyone will pretend we talked about. So look: we’d love to stick to just talking about anime and avoid politics anything, but politics thinks otherwise. If want to argue about this, we will just delete/hide your comments without responding or showing them to anyone.

Rough news all around, and while it’s affecting merchandise right now (model kits, toys, apparel), printed materials are supposed to be exempt from all this tariff junk as are goods from Canada and Mexico that are compliant with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). That should theoretically include most authored anime Blu-Rays and UHDs…except since we recorded this they’re talking about levying tariffs on foreign-produced media. Can that actually happen? Realistically not, but we’ve been saying that about a lot of things lately that are happening in the dumbest possible way. As The Comics Journal succinctly put it, “they might fuck us up at any moment.”

This is a unique time in history, and not in a good way.

Never in our lives have we been unable to preorder otaku goods because of who’s running the government. These are not things that can (or should) ever be shifted to domestic production.

There was no plan of action or implementation period because nobody making these decisions thought them through first.

One day, someone is going to pretend all of this was no big deal and that it was all blown out of proportion. So we’ll take the screenshots now, because who knows if there’ll even still be an Internet Archive of web snapshots in the future.

Review: Outlaw Star (1:03:22 – 2:29:08)
Daryl reviews a series that has been highly requested over the years, presumably because Outlaw Star aired during what people now nostalgically refer to as the “golden age” of Toonami/Adult Swim: that time during their early inceptions where they were first showing anime nationwide, effectively creating a brand new wave of anime fandom that spanned wider than fansubs or retail store rentals/releases had ever done before. Outlaw Star’s hybrid of Eastern mysticism with science fiction and the tropes of the American Western made it reasonably accessible to audiences who did not have prior knowledge of Japan, but the fact that it aired concurrently with two other space Westerns, one of which was Cowboy Bebop (the TV series of which wasn’t technically made by Bones like we said on account of the studio not existing until a few months after Cowboy Bebop TV was made, such that Bebop TV is also by Sunrise albeit by a different team, but the founders of Bones were the same people who made Bebop), means it is forever destined to be thought of as lesser by comparison even 27 years later. Nevertheless, we’ll try to evaluate it separately from that, seeing as how it’s been 27 years and all.