Sometime back rewatching the Bubblegum Crisis OVAs, I looked up who the character/mechanical designers were (something I'd surprisingly only recently started doing with anime), and learned that Bubblegum Crisis was initially conceived as an update of this 1982 film. A joint production of Toho, Artmic, and Studio Nue, Techno Police 21C is a bit of an early '80s curiosity. Supposedly it was an attempt at producing more adult oriented animation, it's kind of cheaply made, and despite the apparent deaths that occur, it still feels like a goofy children's cartoon. Which is made much worse by the English dub. Taking place in a super futuristiccity called Centinel City in the year 2001 (or at least that's what the English title card tells us), Techno Police 21C is about a "special vehicles squad", which is in fact just a team of three people, who each direct a man sized robot called a "technoid" to aid them in ending the crime wave that has plagued the city. While miracles of science, the technoids seem to only be programmed to smash things, but luckily they have the ability to learn and thus the Techno Police have to teach them how to socialize and become better cops.

Techno Police 21C (I suspect "21C" comes from the fact it takes place in the 21st century), is rather silly on it's own, but holy crap does the English dub ramp up the silliness. Dubbed in Hong Kong, the anime sounds like many a kung fu flick from that era, which is funny at first, but that passes pretty quick and makes watching a chore. Not to mention the dialogue being totally ridiculous, making something that was supposed to be geared towards adults feel like a joke. The mechanical designs are kinda cool in an early '80s sort of way though, but this is definitely not a hidden gem. While pretty awful, it's not entirely useless by virtue of it serving as the inspiration for what would become the significantly better Bubblegum Crisis years later.