A dark spin-off from Toshimichi Suzuki's BUBBLEGUM CRISIS, AD Police concentrates on the AD (vanced) antirobot crime division of Mega Tokyo's police force. Leon McNicol, a minor character in the original series, is partnered here with butch lady-cop Gena in several investigations that play with ideas of humanity in a high-tech society. The "voomer" robots here are all female in the man's world of the ADP, where only women who are prepared to become one with machines stand a chance in it. Whereas this device was used in Bubblegum Crisis as an excuse for girls with impressive high-tech kits, here it is far more misogynistic, as femininity is gradually eroded by bionics and prosthetics, takin g characters' humanity with it. A businesswoman, for example, is only successful in the boardroom after she has a hysterectomy, but the trauma turns her into a serial killer. There are shades of Blade Runner in the sex-android stalker that locks onto the man who injured her, and there are also blatant steals from Robocop in the final chapter, wherein one of Gena's ex-boyfriends receives so much augmentation that his tongue is the only part of his original body that remains.
Canceled after just three of the planned five episodes, the franchise was not revived until 1999, in the wake of the Bubblegum Crisis 2040 remake, as a 1 2-part TV Tokyo series directed by Hidehito Ueda. The new AD Police was a far shallower affair, ditching many of the old characters in favor of a buddy movie cliche between rapid-response robot-crime cop Takeru Sasaki and his new partner, Hans Krier. Clearly made with half an eye on the overseas market (all the other leads have foreign names like Paul Sanders, Liam Fletcher, and Nancy Wilson ) , the melting-pot remake is something of a disappointment.
The franchise was briefly resurrected in Parasite Dolls (2003) , a three-part video series directed by Kazuto Nakazawa, focusing on a clandestine branch of the AD Police, called, somewhat unimaginatively, Branch. The story focuses on Buzz, an officer like writer Chiaki Konaka's earlier Ross Sylibus in ARMITAGE III, who is transferred to an unattractive new posting and forced to cooperate with a detested robot partner. Parasite Dolls also exists in a movie length edit, which is the version most commonly found outside Japan.
