Vickeblanka -- Buntline Special

Buntline Special
(Wikipedia)

We're a few weeks into the anime season for Fall 2018 but I got to see some of the new entries yesterday. I had been expecting a more introspective lineup but there were quite a few zany ones in there, including this one whose ending theme I will be writing about tonight.

I never caught "Tiger & Bunny" in its entirety although I remember catching several minutes of one episode on Tokyo MX in my final year in Japan, and the biggest thing that caught my attention was seeing the decals of real corporations pasted on the main characters' uniforms.

Well, the same folks and company behind "Tiger & Bunny" have come up with another intriguing justice-based show called "DOUBLE DECKER! Doug & Kirill"（ダグ&キリル）. Half-sardonically, I had first assumed that the anime was about London-based trolley buses which metamorphose into heroic mecha named Doug and Kirill. Instead, there is indeed a Doug and Kirill but they are actually an initially mismatched duo of special cops on a very colourful team. I saw the first three episodes last night and "DOUBLE DECKER!" seems to be filled with shoutouts across the pop culture geek spectrum. There were tributes to cop shows such as "Hawaii Five-0", "Abunai Deka"（あぶない刑事）and "Taiyo ni Hoero!"（太陽にほえろ！）, and some hints of "X-Men", "Men In Black" and perhaps even "Strikeforce: Morituri". Heck, Episode 1 threw in a "Terminator" reference.

Plus, you got mysterious Doug looking like a young Bruce Greenwood ("Star Trek", "I, Robot", "Thirteen Days") and usually creamy-voiced seiyuu Saori Hayami（早見沙織）playing an extremely tough and sweary Seven-0 team member. My attention has been caught.

Another catchy thing? That ending theme by singer-songwriter Vickeblanka（ビッケブランカ）, "Buntline Special" which comes across as hard as a bullet from the actual gun that it's named after. Let's take that song onto an Anthem raid. It's the one theme song from yesterday's batch of anime that launched as an automatic earworm. So far, it's just been the ending credits that I could find, but I'm hopeful that a full version will hit YouTube pretty soon.

Vickeblanka, who hails from Aichi Prefecture, was born Junya Yamaike（山池純矢）and touts his influences being Elton John, Billy Joel and Michael Jackson. He released a couple of indie albums in 2014 and 2015 along with a downloadable single before making his major studio debut release in 2017, "Fearless" and two singles this year.