Watching Tank Police in a post-2016 World

 

That's right, horrified at the way things are going I've embraced a period of escapism and watched a horrifying speculative future 2010s where the police have the firepower of militaries, the world is heavily polluted, the politicians only care about re-election and corporations believe employment contracts give them the right to control their employees own bodies. In hindsight, that wasn't the best plan I've authored.

It's the holiday period, and I've caught several winter bugs over the past two months. So in addition to having time off, an erratic sleep pattern and semiregular periods of imposed isolation has led to quite a bit more time on my hands than I had planned for. And I filled part of the hiatus catching up on a backlog of films and television. I finally scratched a few things off my list, including It's a Wonderful Life, and also today's topic for discussion Dominion Tank Police, and its sequel (kinda) New Dominion Tank Police. The Tank Police OVAs have been on my list for some time, why the long wait? Well, a combination of them being in limited availability in my markets and a reputation for not being great pieces of entertainment. What fanbase they do have is largely thanks to being early action Sci-Fi anime that were licensed internationally, and being based on Manga by Shirow Masmune, the creator of Ghost in the Shell didn't hurt either. They also benefited by the existence of Anna and Uni Puma who are androids, sisters and Cat girls. 

Apart from that, both shows have their issues, the first series from the late 1980s is quite cheap, the animation can be choppy and reuse of assets is obvious, the dubbing itself is also a bit spotty, some of the voice acting feels weak, and the dialogue sounds weird. It also struggles with tone, it's a rather cynical take on cyber punk futures and cop dramas with very crude humour and extremely hard to like protagonists. Only to drop most of the jokes and refocus attention on a comedic fool villain (Buaku) and his tragic past at the end. Oh, and it ends on a cliffhanger that is not followed up on in New Tank Police.

New Tank Police on paper has a lot more going for it. Released in the mid 90s, it looks more professionally made, the characters have more detail, the animation is smoother, and I didn't notice much reusing and recycling of previous footage. The dialogue sounds a lot more like things people would actually say, and the cast who are the same voice actors who worked on Tank Police either gained more experience and confidence in the years between releases, or they received a lot more support direction wise. And the action set pieces have more going on too, most of the action in the first series were basic chases with some gag stunts thrown in. In New Tank Police, there are clever escalations and use of vertical space. 

And yet, and yet, I found myself having stronger feelings for the choppier and cheaper series. Which is a little odd since that show's four episode run goes from stealing jars of piss and anti-tank mines that are dick jokes - yes I am serious- to a sad look at the life of a hairy android crook for hire whose stealing a piece of fine art and risking his life, not for the massive pay-off, but because he was the subject of that painting, and it depicts his early life in a lab where he was physically and mentally tortured since creation by uncaring scientists who used him as raw material for experiments. So, as far as he (Buaku) is concerned it's his by right, oh, and it also contains hidden data that can prove the existence of that experiment and the existence of his fellow lab mates who did not survive and escape the lab. It's extremely sad, and it makes it perfectly crystal clear just how crooked, horrible and miserable this world is. 

New Tank Police, well Lenoa Ozaki the female cop on the top image and the protagonist of the franchise has to investigate the murder of an old friend on the motorcycle police, and there's some corporate scheming going on with cyborg henchmen. It's perfectly fine sci-fi with a cynical edge where the protagonists are cops. It's perfectly fine, didn't get very engaged with it, wasn't put off by it. I did find it slightly amusing to learn that New Tank Police took place in 2016, well, I found it funny at first, now I'm a little sad.

Speaking of sad, I was surprised to see how different the Cat Women were to what I had been primed to expect from the marketing. The Puma sisters were the breakout characters of this franchise, most marketing material I've found about these two series heavily pushes them, sometimes to the exclusion of tanks and police. I suspect quite a few people who watched these two miniseries were quite disappointed. Yes the Puma sisters appear frequently, yes they wear costumes that are usually revealing, and they do a striptease. Just the one though, and it's depicted as very goofy if many cutaways to reaction shots of SWAT police behaving like the Wolf from those Tex Avery cartoons. 

No, they don't wear anything like that in the show. And not to get into a slap fight with TV Guide, but the word sometimes is doing the heavy lifting in that quote.

 

There are raunchy anime OVAs, but the Tank Police ones are not in that number. The sister's main contributions were comedy and then some tear-jerking because as androids they are treated very poorly by society. They're in Buaku's gang because that's the only prospect of regular money that they can get that isn't stripping. And in New Tank Police where Buaku is completely absent, they sleep in an underground car park and have nothing going for them except more crime. Even when they move over into sort of doing the right thing territory, they get hassled and harassed by the Tank Police anyway.

Having watched both, I now understand why it's largely been relegated as an artefact of the 90s-early 2000s. Though watching in 2023 I think it may have aged pretty well. It's a cynical franchise where the label hero doesn't fit anyone comfortably, and the protagonists would be denounced and avoided if they were real people, but here the violence and cruelty is softened with crude humour and a strong distrust of everyone and everything. Like how the Home Alone movies use slapstick sensibilities and heart string tugging to take the sting out of scenes of Kevin McCallister throwing bricks at Daniel Stern's head. 

Grenade torture, Dominion Tank Police's first running joke

Despite this, unfortunately, the march of time has shown that its depictions of cops as a bunch of self obsessed jerks and violent thugs barely qualifies as satire. The first four minutes of the first episode of Tank Police is a back and forth shouting match between two characters, the mayor and the Chief of Police, the Mayor is furious that the Tank Police are causing so much damage to the city while the Chief couldn't care less about that and is demanding even more dangerous and powerful weapons. Since the 1980s, police forces across the world have been showered with military grade weapon systems, including armoured vehicles, so Main Battle Tanks aren't so farfetched. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/05/why-are-some-us-police-forces-equipped-like-military-units

How about the attitude? Well, the Tank Police are depicted as selfish arseholes who only bother to fight crime because they view the activities of criminals as a direct challenge to them personally. In the first Tank Police episode, the captain of the force is lecturing Lenoa and another rookie on how the most important thing is to preserve their Tanks. There's a violent incident every 36 seconds on average in that city, and if they were too active in responding, they'd soon be worn down. He even overrules the rookies who which to answer a call for back up from the SWAT police, since he views his fellow police officers with contempt. He only bothers to try and stop Buaku's gang when they rear end his Tank and thus insult him personally.

Lenoa is no better, unlike the Captain she doesn't subscribe to How to Kill magazine, but once her Tank gets scratched in yet another grenade "Interrogation" scene which she set up she tries to gun down an unarmed prisoner who is suspended from a game show spin wheel. She sort of sees Buaku as a person by the end of Tank Police thanks to how that plot line goes, but she's more than willing to kill and torture anyone who runs afoul of her. Many cop centred media products deal with abuse of power and usually covers for it with some appeal to pragmatism or threatening potential outcome, if the detective doesn't murder the child murderer the bill of rights and lawyers will set them free, or there's a ticking time bomb and people's lives are at stake so they had to beat the suspect until they can't walk any more, or show that the bad things made the police feel bad about doing them.

Tank Police throws all of that out of the window. The criminals who get the grenade treatment are bad people who admit to horrible actions, but it's crystal clear that the "interrogations" were excuses for the Tank Police to torture people for fun. One of them confesses to multiple murders, which they didn't ask him about because they didn't know anything about them. When they deploy they frequently level the City, they in fact do much more damage to than the criminals do, and they are fully aware of this and do not care about it. They don't even like supporting fellow police officers, Lenoa's dramatic climax is using her damaged Tank to shut a civilian jet out of the air, killing everyone on board. The passengers are shady corporate criminals, but she's avenging a friend and has no real interest in whatever their scheme was. Make the Tank Police into a rival gang with better connections to international arms markets and nothing much changes in how they operate. You could even keep the paperwork jokes and change them to being compensation payments that are deducted from their protection racket income. Which is functionally what taxes to pay for the police are.

So, surely this level of callous self interest must be a product of cynical imagination, right? Well, in the United States of America the doctrine of Qualified Immunity protects police officers in what are blatent examples of brutality. 

To push Brooks to step out of her car, one of the officers pulled out a Taser and asked her if she knew what it was. She didn’t, but told the officer she was seven months pregnant. The officers chatted in front of her, casually discussing which part of her body they would tase: “Well, don’t do it in her stomach,” one of them said, “do it in her thigh.” The officers twisted Brooks’s arm behind her back and tased her three separate times—first on her thigh, then in the arm, and then in the neck—before dragging her into the street, laying her face down, and cuffing her.Brooks sued the officers to hold them accountable for their conduct. Six federal judges agreed that the officers’ use of severe force absent any threat to their safety violated the U.S. Constitution. But those same judges dismissed her case, relying on a legal doctrine called “qualified immunity.” Qualified Immunity Explained

 And said actions of brutality are not uncommon. Furthermore, funding these police forces is draining multiple city budgets.

https://www.statista.com/chart/10593/how-much-do-us-cities-spend-on-policing/

And as for giving a damn about other people, well they haven't done that for a long time if they ever did. Currently as I'm writing this in the United Kingdom every month there's another reveleation that police forces especially the Metropolitan have been harbouring and covering for murderers and rapists within there ranks. And Uvalde Texas showed the world that over 400 police officers from multiple forces including special tactical response units with military grade equipment will just stay in cover listening to gunfire and calls for help from schoolchildren for over an hour before deciding they had enough strength assembled to intervene. The shooter entered the school at 11:30 am and wasn't confronted and eliminated untill 12:50. At the start of the attack there were 19 officers inside the school building the majority of the back up stayed outside for the duration.

Practically the only thing that still science fiction about the Tank Police franchise is that we don't have fully sapient Cat Women gynoids and anti-tank mines that humoursly flip the tank over like a Chef's spatula only more phallic. We're stuck with weird walking dog leg robots and anti-tank mines that explode and maim or kill everyone in the vicinity. Once again reality has ruined a joke.