Insert joke about “blog updates” here.

I watched the first couple of episodes of old OAV series Mad Bull 34 earlier in the week. I don’t really have much to say about it’s actual content right now – it’s pretty much the kind of thing that I suspect most of the people who actually read his blog would hate anyway, being the incredibly violent and misogynistic adventures of the straight-laced, American-born Japanese cop Daizaburo “Eddie” Ban and his man-mountain pimp of a partner John “Sleepy” Estes (the man so imposing he has two nick-names, the other being the titular “Mad Bull”). I find pretty much everything about it to be pretty damn hilarious, but it’s not exactly high-brow or socially enlightened viewing material.

Of all the random things to jump out at me as being interesting in the show, though, the scene in above screenshot amused me. It’s a scene where Daizaburo is waiting in the car whilst, unbeknownst to him, Sleepy is collecting money from (and doing other things with) the prostitutes under his protection (when I said he was a pimp, I meant it in the literal sense). What I find kind of curious is the debris littering the car – fairly genuine looking Coke, Pepsi and 7-Up cans, and even a McDonalds cup!

This isn’t to say that we never see actual products in anime these days – obviously, there’s a bunch of shows which had Pizza Hut logo’s thrown all over the place (albeit only in Japan for the Sunrise productions), but those were specific cases of paid product sponsorship. In this case, it’s pretty obvious just by the fact that there’s Coke and Pepsi in the same shot that it was just something the animation staff threw in to give the proper setting flavour.

These days, I’d have to imagine that most studios are a bit more up on, or at least vaguely aware, of potential copyright issues when using iconography related to genuine brands in their productions without permission. It’s why you get seeming odd cases like OreImo, where all the characters use computers which look infinitely close to Sony Vaio’s, but sport subtle logo variations, despite the fact that the show is distributed by a Sony-affiliated label.

Or, perhaps even more hilariously, there’s the iM@S anime where they don’t even use the proper Aniplex logo despite them being the distributor! The Namco logo there isn’t right either, but, hey, at least it says Namco…

The other bizarre thing about Mad Bull that was kind of hilariously interesting was this caption in the ending credits…

You’ve really got to wonder about what kind of level of consultancy went on for them to warrant a Special Thanks in an OAV series in which the streets of New York are kept safe by a Cop-come-Pimp who shoots first and asks questions never, usually because the shooting tends to result in the liquification of the targets head…