The Devil May Cry series is one of the last emissaries of a specific brand of coolness that remains firmly time-locked to the early 2000s. There’s no nuance to Dante; he’s just a towering pile of everything that ruled between 2001 and 2008. Self-awareness and ironic detachment miss this franchise like a poorly timed stinger. There hasn’t been a mainline entry in the series in half a decade, but the upcoming Netflix anime seems prepped to keep the spirit alive. Its commitment to that fun-loving spirit shines through in the show’s choices of Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” and Papa Roach’s “Last Resort” in its opening theme and promos.
Adi Shankar lives and dies by that same unironic sense of coolness. He’s a remarkable rock star producer who seems to kick in the door of every video game company to demand the reins of all his favorite stuff. He has, though far from singlehandedly, cemented prestige animated series as the ideal medium for video game adaptations. Shankar’s Castlevania set the tone, but Devil May Cry presents a far more fascinating test of his format.
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Both Devil May Cry Trailers Picked Excellent Songs
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Creator |
Adi Shankar |
|---|---|
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Starring |
Johnny Yong Bosch, Scout Taylor-Compton, Hoon Lee, Chris Coppola, Kevin Conroy, Robbie Daymond, and Tony Todd |
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Production Company |
Studio Mir |
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Release Date |
April 3, 2025 |
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Streaming On |
Netflix |
The Devil May Cry franchise has a ton of memorable music. Each of the mainline games sports iconic, powerful, and consistently viral theme songs. From the first game’s “Lock & Load” to DMC 4‘s “Shall Never Surrender,” there’s no shortage of excellent tracks to choose from. The Netflix anime is mostly based off of Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening, meaning they could have slapped “Devils Never Cry” on the opening credits and basked in the endless applause. The most recent console game, Devil May Cry V, pushed the main themes for its four main characters into the upper echelon of video game music. Netflix opted for absolutely none of those songs for its DMC anime’s marketing campaign. Instead, they dropped an opening credit sequence backed by Limp Bizkit’s seminal 2000 nu-metal track “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)”. As if that weren’t enough, the first full trailer included Papa Roach’s iconic debut single, “Last Resort.” Those songs have a lot in common, but their most important shared element is their singular temporality.
Devil May Cry Represents A Bygone Era
There’s nothing to suggest that the kind of unironic cool antics of the Devil May Cry franchise are absent from the modern era. One need only look to the prevalence of anime series that portray impossibly powerful characters using comically dire scenarios to demonstrate their carefree superiority over their opposition. The main difference between the glut of anime that focus on characters as powerful as Dante and the adventures of the devil hunter himself is that the former are almost always satirical in nature. Dante is many things, but he isn’t ironic. He doesn’t play guitar solos, stop for dance numbers, drop goofy one-liners, or surf his enemies into submission as a snarky takedown of someone else. He does those things because they’re cool, he’s cool, and he wants to do cool things. It’s that blessed simplicity that provides freedom from glib detachment or ironic bathos. Dante emerged into pop culture decades before people frequently made a meme out of “You know what? Hell yeah!” but that statement is genuinely all one needs to understand the character. He’s the kind of guy who would unironically celebrate Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach, leading their songs to appear prominently in his second anime series.
The DMC Anime Understands the Assignment
The other big connection between Papa Roach’s classic self-harm anthem and DMC is the world of anime music videos, or AMVs. The early 2000s were absolutely lousy with comically edgy edits of anime scenes set to the dulcet tones of Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, and their peers. To the fanbase, those AMVs feel as integral to the 2000s anime scene as any individual show. People who were somewhere between 12 and 17 when DMC 3 dropped would be ecstatic to see an official anime adaptation using similar music and editing to create their official marketing. The incredible truth of the AMV is that they never truly went away. They live on in the endless supply of TikTok edits of everything from Demon Slayer to the Super Smash Bros. roster. Those edits mostly eschew the rock elements of previous song choices, favoring more modern rap with far less depression, but the spirit is still very much alive. Appealing to the AMV crowd brings in the old fanbase and the new audience. It’s the perfect companion to a DMC adaptation that knows its audience.
It’s still funny to hear “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” and “Last Resort” in modern ads with the Netflix logo attached. Devil May Cry has the power to launch songs that used to blast out of original iPods back into prominence. More importantly, those songs’ unironic appeal to early-2000s cool speaks to the perfect encapsulation of the spirit of DMC. Netflix’s Devil May Cry seems poised to bring Smokin’ Sick Style to the small screen for the first time in far too long.
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