The anime film's premise involves an advanced robot police squad trying to recover a hijacked prototype tank.

The film is an early anime presentation for a slightly older audience, at a time when there wasn't much competition and before the clichés were established for this genre of action.

Set at the start of the 21st century, its main character is Ken, a motorcycle-mounted highway patrolman in what is presumably the American Southwest, who is called to join the police force in Centinel City (the name comes from centennial, not sentinel), where he is only expected to last six months.

Eleanor's, Scanny, is red and has a female figure, but whose face is composed entirely of blinking LEDs, and which has two cables streaming from the neck, and which plug into computer sockets.

The hijackers, who appear inside the tank after getting away from a recently committed bank robbery, were hired by a shadowy group backed by a foreign nation seeking an edge in their military.

The tank carries six ATGM launchers, three to each side of the turret, and a laser-based machine-gun-esque installment, in addition to its rifled main gun.

Eleanor then enters to study the tank, and it starts up on its own, having been programmed by the hijackers to head for a pier and drive off its end so as to rendezvous with an enemy submarine.

Work began on developing the idea into a TV series as a co-production between Artmic (then Wiz Corporation) and Studio Nue.

Working as part of the animation staff is Shoji Kawamori who is now famous for his mecha designs particularly on the seminal Super Dimension Fortress Macross.

Undeterred by Technopolice's failure Toshimichi Suzuki returned to his original idea, some years later reworking it as the OAV series Bubblegum Crisis, which fared slightly better but in the end suffered a similar fate.

In 1983 Technopolice 21C was dubbed by those ubiquitous Hong Kong kung fu voice actors (see also Battle For Moon Station Dallos, Locke the Superpower, Leda: The fantastic Adventure of Yohko and Macross: Do you remember love?).

The company responsible for the commissioning this new English track is unknown, they also made a few changes to the movie, moving the title card to the very start and pausing the individual shots of the opening credits to remove the Japanese text without shortening the running time or messing with the music.

The American market would not get to see Blader (now known as just Blade) in action until 1987 when Techno Police found its way to the shelves thanks to Celebrity's Just For Kids label (Battle for Earth Station S/1, Revenge of the Ninja Warrior), and later from Best Film and Video.