User:Katie5000/Crackaider

Crackaider is an anime written by the late, great Shotaro Ishinomori about drug-dealing robots. It is rumored that he was addicted to drugs at the time of its writing, and that the manga was part of a hidden agenda to introduce kids to them.

Synopsis

The show starts off with a certain Dr. Komyoji blowing his lab to smithereens while attempting to engineer a new type of meth. The explosion gets the attention of his daughter Mitsuko, who's busy freebasing in the living room of their mansion when this happens. She manages to make it down to the remains of the lab to discover that her father was also working on making the ultimate drug dealer to sell this stuff: a superhuman, bulletproof robot with extra speed and strength for outrunning the cops or rival drug lords. Unfortunately for Doctor K, his experimenting attracted the attention of one of these rival drug lords--a man known on the streets as "Professor Gill", head of the drug cartel known as DARK (Drugs are All Right for Kids). He proceeds to hold Doctor K prisoner and gets him to recreate his robotic drug dealer for him, so that he can use that copy to mass-produce an army of these things and keep kids hooked on crack.

Meanwhile, Doctor K's daughter is getting to know his original drug-dealing robot, who goes by the name Jiro. He has a serious case of amnesia and nothing Mitsuko can say or do can get anything much out of him. Just then, Jiro detects a DARK robot in the woods and jumps out the living room window to go after it. Annoyed, Mitsuko starts freebasing again but is soon chased out of her house by an evil robot hiding in the closet. She runs into Jiro, who has the robotic equivalent of a bad trip thanks to a special ultrasonic frequency that Gill discovered knocks out rival druglords' robotic runners. Freaked out, Jiro runs off to the city, where he spends the next two or three episodes getting to know potential clientele (and fighting off the urge to kill them when he hears ultrasonic sounds). Mitsuko eventually tracks him down with the help of a crooked detective and his whorish assistant, since she is so strung out.

It is about this time that Jiro meets Saburo, the rival robotic drug-runner that Doctor K had been working on in captivity. The two of them fight a whole lot, and Mitsuko takes up popping pills to deal with it. Eventually, Jiro is damaged in all the fighting, and Mitsuko has to repair him since none of the other cast members knows anything about robotics. She manages that, then ends up attempting to have sex with him because she's high and forgets that he isn't human. At any rate, Jiro leaves to go find Saburo and take him out, and comes across the entrance to the DARK base. Saburo goes on a trip of his own and ends up letting Jiro, Mitsuko, and the others into the base. Jiro confronts Gill, kills him, saves Doctor K, and blows up the base. He then promptly disappears. Mitsuko has no idea he's gone, since she got high and passed out in the middle of all the fighting. Somehow, she and the rest of the cast decide that Jiro will eventually be back.

OVA's

There were four OVA episodes that were unceremoniously tacked onto the end of the initial series when it was shown in the U.S. Instead of resolving questions raised in the last series, they pretty much just revolved around robot fighting and lacked a lot of the depth (and characters) of the original set of episodes. For some reason, Jiro had to fight off a lot of robotic sea creatures that included stingrays, jellyfish, and other things with tentacles. He also met a couple of female robots, who were probably from DARK's prostitution division. Anyway, one of them was stuck with the none-too-pleasant task of taking care of the kid that Professor Gill managed to sire out of wedlock, when the woman he was with was too drunk to notice who she was making love to. Jiro runs around with them for a while and discovers that Professor Gill's brain was somehow transferred into a robot body--not only that, but he is also using his vast drug fortune to develop a massive giant robot that will destroy entire cities and take over the world (I guess peddling drugs isn't good enough). Naturally he decides to try and stop it, and eventually does while saving Gill's kid in the process. So basically, the entire OVA cast dies except for like, them.

Characters

Jiro - Doc Komyoji's drug-running robot. The show revolves around him trying to make some kind of sense of this, while he looks for the Doctor along with Mitsuko.
Mitsuko - Doctor K's perpetually strung-out daughter. She discovers Jiro in the wreckage of her father's drug lab. Later on in the series, she decides he is kind of hot.
Doc Komyoji - drug dealer and experimenter, he decided to create the ultimate drug-runner after having one of his human runners get completely gunned down.
Professor Gill - lord of the massive drug cartel DARK and Doc Komyoji's rival. Wants to capitalize on the robotic drug-runner idea and to that end kidnaps Doctor K instead of just killing him.
Saburo - the drug-running robot that Doctor K makes for Prof. Gill while in captivity. Wants to destroy Jiro, since Jiro is his rival.
Hanpei Hattori - the crooked detective that Mitsuko employs to help her find Jiro, since she's too damn wasted to do it on her own. Knows he should probably turn her over to the cops, but doesn't because he knows she has money and he wants it.
Etsuko - Hattori's whorish assistant. Earns money on the side by selling herself; gets information from perps by sleeping with them. Thinks her boss is incompetent, which he probably is.