The following essay was initially planned to be included on the SRS release of The Whale God, but did not wind up on the final release. As such, author Henning Strauss has given Maser Patrol permission to reproduce it here.
Preface:
In Japan’s rich mythology, there is also a story of a ghost whale. The bake kujira-named legend can be found in prefectures like in Shimane. In this folklore, fish are going rare, because the ghost whale has appeared. In 1952, only seven years after the war, a man named Eiji Tsuburaya was trying to make Japan’s first giant monster (kaiju) movie. His first movie idea was that the legendary ghost whale should now rise again and attack Tokyo.
His idea was denied, but he tried and later this idea was also referenced in GODZILLA (1954), where Eiji Tsuburaya directed the special effects. The name “Godzilla” is a combination of the Japanese word for whale, “kujira” (or “kudzira” as they would render it in Roman letters at the time) with “gorilla”. Tsuburaya saw the 1933 KING KONG back in the day and wanted his own giant monster ever since. (if you want: fan, movie-maker, author and artist Jules Carozza created a visual what-if-scenario based on Tsuburaya’s first giant monster movie idea with the help of the A.I. software of Midjourney). In addition the 1933 KING KONG had seen a popular re-release in 1952, not only in Japan, but also in other countries. It may be of interest, that KING KONG was distributed by Daiei then.
Later, a man named Shigeru Mizuki should popularize the bake kujira in his GEGEGE NOKITARO manga series, which was also adapted into anime and live-action.
Preface 2:
In 1961, author Koichiro Uno published a novel named THE WHALE GOD. It became a hit among Japanese readers and just one year later, in 1962: the Japanese studio of Daiei (1942-1971; 1974-2002) released a movie-adaptation. The movie starred Shintaro Katsu, who would also begin his long career as the blind masseur, gambler and swordsman ZATOICHI based on the character and story by Kan Shimozawa in the same year.
The screenplay for this drama was created by writer and director Kaneto Shindo, probably most famous for his drama ONIBABA (1964). It is likely that Uno was aware of the bake kujira legend. It appears to me that 10 years after the initial idea for a first Japanese giant monster movie, Daiei intended to beat their competition of Toho. In adapting THE WHALE GOD, creating their own take of the legend in a movie. (Not to forget: Eiji Tsuburaya, composer Akira Ifukube and actor Takashi Shimura also worked for Daiei, along with their works at Toho!)
Another set of examples where the bake kujira is referenced are in P Productions’ SPECTREMAN (1971-1972) (Episodes 17+18), and the 25th and 29th Godzilla movie from Toho.
For GODZILLA in his 1954 debut, before he visually appeared the kaiju king is being referred to as a local deity, worshipped by the people of Odo Island. The King of the Monsters as a spiritual being again can be seen in GODZILLA, MOTHRA, KINGGHIDORAH – GIANT MONSTERS ALL-OUT ATTACK (2001) by director Shusuke Kaneko. Godzilla there is the vengeful embodiment of the dead from the Pacific War, who were forgotten. SHIN GODZILLA (2016) from Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi features the assumption that the giant creature before he makes landfall might be a whale. But since the word “shin” has the possible translation of the word “God”, the connection between language and beliefs can be found, too.
Back to THE WHALE GOD. The drama should see a manga adaptation of Takao Saito, who would later create Duke Togo, better known as GOLGO 13 – the world’s best and deadliest assassin.
Tokuzo Tanaka’s movie, also is sometimes called a Japanese MOBY DICK*. But how does MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE by Herman Melville fares in Japan? A few scenes indicate that John Huston’s MOBY DICK (1956) was probably a visual reference.
But how does Herman Melville’s most famous book work as a reference in Japanese popular culture? A country with its own identity and philosophies?
Preface 3:
MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE by Herman Melville is not only a book, it is a journey. A journey which has been read and adapted in a lot of artistic ways. Many people find it difficult or even impossible to understand, but no matter: MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE is influential. Much has been written and produced about it until this day; Melville’s immortal novel is a cultural backbone of the so-called western civilization.
Please note that this is not an exhaustive listing, it is only what I personally know or I am aware of. This tiny article is only meant to supplement the process of understanding how influential MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE is. I will avoid personal judgement.
The novel
The very first complete translation of MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE in Japan happened in 1941 by Tomoji Abe. It had no recognizable impact on the Japanese then. When the novel was republished in 1949, people there became more aware of it. The book is there titled HAKUGEI, which means WHITE WHALE. The book was next published in the 1950s by the following translators: Akira Tomita, Yutaka Miyanishi, and Nishijiro Tanaka.
Movie-releases and their influence
In 1956; the Huston directed MOBY DICK with a screenplay of his own with science-fiction-author Ray Bradbury was released into cinema. It was the third cinematic movie adaptation of MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE and the first, which is true to the text. This movie was released in Japan, too.
Inspired by this movie and it’s visuals, the magazine of Omoshiro Book (Funny Book) published an abridged retelling using art from Rockwell Kent of the 1930 Lakeside Press edition and even art by 19th century artist Thomas Beale, along with scenes drawn by Soji Yamakawa. A reprint happened in the magazine WILD. Soji Yamakawa is in Japan best known for the manga of KENYA BOY. KENYA BOY‘s depiction of the Tyrannosaurus rex would also contribute in creating the final design for Toho’s Godzilla by Akira Watanabe in 1954!
In 1969 artist Joya Kagemaru and writer Ikki Kajiwara (of ASHITA NO JOE and TIGER MASK fame) adapted MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE as a manga for young boys. (note that here Ishmael is a young boy!) where the visual influence is clearly seen from Huston’s movie.
In 1985, another adaptation, this time from artist Akira Hio (SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO), written by literary critic Hotsuki Ozaki, would do the same. There was also a manga by the same title in 1985 from Shiriagari Kotobuki, though the plot is original.
In the 2009 direct-to-video CGI-anime-series of MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM – MS IGLOO 2:GRAVITY BATTLEFRONT, episode 2: “King of the Land, Forward!” the character of Herman Yandell not only references Melville’s first name, but also the visual appearance of Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. “King of the Land, Forward!” uses an antagonistic White Ogre-named Zaku II mobile suit mech. The human ace pilot of the Zaku II is Elmer Snell. For MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM in particular, there is a paragraph below.
While the other movie adaptations would see a Japanese release, too – MOBY-DICK; OR:THE WHALE would find its own depictions and designs elsewhere.
Artists
When it comes to art for MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE, there are also several Japanese artists who drew their own take:
Go Nagai is a manga artist, once a student under Shotaro Ishinomori (KAMEN RIDER). His 1988 piece for a friend of his: MOBY DICK FOR PRESIDENT MATSUYAMA, is more like something from his own DEVILMAN manga than the source material: a white, giant sperm whale, with a naked barebreasted woman as a figure head, almost like a caricature of the Statue of Liberty. At the tail, there is a tiny man, probably a caricature of Ahab.
Like Ishinomori, Nagai is known for creating many influential titles and many iconic creations: MAZINGER Z or CUTIE HONEY to name two additional titles. It was Nagai’s MAZINGER Z from 1972 that created the mech (giant robot) boom. Nagai’s fame in the English-speaking world is quite limited, though.
In 1999 Tatsuya Morino made a picture for his book KAIBUTSU GENSO GASHU in a collection of famous horror icons.
A more traditional piece of art comes from Zakuro Aoyama, released in 2017.
The winner of the 2020 JIA Illustration Silver Award was THE DAY OF MOBY-DICK, created by artist Tsutomu Kitazawa. It was another completely free depiction: Giant sky dwelling whales, with a castle on their respective backs, a high fantasy setting.
The manga, anime, novel, and games connections and relations
Within the Japanese entertainment industry nothing can exist without the other. A true border, as it often happens in the western mind setting, does not exist there. MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE was also referenced in a few manga:
On one hand, you have short adaptations, like the one from Katsuhiro Otomo (best known for his manga and later anime of AKIRA) in his collection book named HÄNSEL UNDGRETEL (the title refers to the German fairytale by the Brothers Grimm), where a short sequence is drawn by Otomo.
In 1985 Akira Miyashita started his series SAKIGAKE!! OTOKOJUKU. Within the manga, you can spot a more freer adaptation. “Chapter 14: Ocean Island , Tour 2: Captain Ahab” + “Chapter 15: Secret Operation: Hunt Moby Dick” sees the respective adaptation. The manga is a parody of what “being a man” means. A mixing of swashbuckler English pirate aesthetic and Japanese style is clearly seen.
For the former, mixing romantic English pirate looks with whaling is also something you can discover in the west: see Mead Schaeffer’s art from 1922 as the most prominent example! Ahab in Miyashita’s work wears an eye patch and a hook, plus ultimately ends up like the biblical Jonas in the belly of the whale.
The probably first “free” interpretation Ahab in a manga was in FISHERMAN SANPEI by Takao Yaguchi from the mid-1970s. The determination of Ahab is demonstrated that he wears an eye patch and has a pirate-styled flag on his ship. The anime adaptation came later.
Yukinobu Hoshino, known for hard-science-fiction manga (see 2001 NIGHTS (1984-1986)), created an alternate end and sequel for MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE in 1996.
Yet another adaptation of the novel was from the MANGA DE DOKUHA series in 2009, from anonymous art collective Variety Circle. This one is actually available in English from One Peace Books, under their “Manga Classic Readers” imprint.
The so-far latest appearance as a manga is AHAB by Tatsuya Saruwatari from 2022-2023. This manga, even if primarily set in the 19th century, uses original elements, to tell the battle between Ahab and Moby Dick. Saruwatari (RIKI-OH) is also known for his extreme violent actions, which can be seen here, too.
For anime:
TRITON OF THE SEA is originally a manga by Osamu Tezuka (JUNGLE EMPEROR LEO; better known in the West under the title KIMBA, THE WHITE LION). One year after the manga concluded, in 1972 an anime adaptation directed by Yoshiyuki Tomino hit Japanese TV. There is also one episode, which references Melville’s book.
A few years later, Tomino would create the work that, he would be immortalized for: 1979’s MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM. MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM has its own, if more unconscious references to Melville’s book. The original TV-series, like MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE and STAR TREK was at first not being recognized as the landmark work it is. Also, the titular mech, the RX-78-2 Gundam is called White Devil by the antagonistic faction, the Principality of Zeon. Tomino once called the 1956 movie MOBY DICK one of his favorite movies, so, inspiration might be possible.
Another GUNDAM spin-off, but also set during the One Year War from the original TV series, is the already mentioned MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM – MS IGLOO 2: GRAVITYBATTLEFRONT. Please note that Tomino is there only credited as a creator, along with the group known as Hajime Yadate.
Short cameos can be seen in URUSEI YATSURA’s 1980s anime incarnation, episode 32 “Shock Library – Quiet Please!” and episode 90 “Lady Ryuunosuke”. It seems that for the depiction of Ahab in episode 90 by Ryuunosuke Fujinami’s father inspired Akira Miyashita for his in SAKIGAKE!! OTOKOJUKU. URUSEI YATSURA from Rumiko Takahashi is a romantic, fantasy, action, science fiction comedy series.
Another one can be spotted in THE BOY AND THE BEAST from 2015 by director Mamoru Hosoda. Here it is the book itself from the Kadokawa Library published in the same year.
Again a more free in the depiction of Moby Dick himself is the White Demon from the novel series of RE:ZERO by Tappei Nagatsuki, starting in 2014. It was adapted into an anime TV-series.
For games, the first one to reference is TOKYO AFTERSCHOOL SUMMONERS, where an anthropomorphic water-bull is named Ahab and wears even an artificial leg. The 2020 game of AGE OF ISHTARIA shows a girl, with a harpoon and a single kneesock (as a pegleg representation), also named Ahab. In Japanese popular subculture, making a girl of a original male or genderless character is just a kind of anthropomorphism distinction (MOE).
Since many manga (and light novels) are also adapted into an anime, BUNGO STRAYDOGS by Kafka Asagiri and Sango Harukawa is one example, where you can find not only Herman Melville, but also a Moby Dick, only not as a sperm whale, but more like a baleen and artificial. For artificial whales, see below!
The manga of YU-GI-OH ARC-V sees another tribute. The whale named White Aura is one of the Synchro Monsters in this series.
The use of names
The names of Moby Dick or Ahab or both can be met literally everywhere. See also the manga epic ONE PIECE by Eiichiro Oda, where the ships of pirate Edward Newgate, AKA Whitebeard, are named Moby Dick. During the events of the story, a man named Kozuki Oden wanted to join Whitebeard and his crew. To test his determination he was forced to hold a chain for 3 days. A chain attached to their ship. Oden succeeded. The 3 days might be reference to the Final Chase between Ahab and Moby Dick from the book.
In Hideaki Anno’s first own directed anime epic: AIM FOR THE TOP!! (GUNBUSTER) from 1988-1989, there are two booster rocket ships named after the White Whale!
Another set of Ahab and sky whales, can be found in the SOUL EATER manga by Atsushi Okubo. Since the sky mirrors the ocean, it is seems only that here Okubo and Kitazawa had at-least the same initial idea.
Within Sakyo Komatsu’s novel DAY OF RESURRECTION (1964) a minor character codenamed Ahab is present. The English translation of the book and the international title of the movie adaptation from 1980 by director Kinji Fukasaku are named VIRUS. But this isn’t Komatsu’s only reference. In his own essay “DEAR IVAN EFREMOV“, Japan’s most famous science fiction-author compares MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE as a contemporary monster of its time.
The series of MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: IRON-BLOODED ORPHANS (2015-2017) is set into an alternate universe. In this universe, Ahab particles and Ahab waves can create artificial gravity.
As readers of the novel know, Ahab has a family. Within RE-ZERO: FATE STRANGE FAKE, Ahab and later his son appear. The son is named Ishmael Ahab. Also in this title features a being, in shape of a giant white sperm-whale, supposedly female. It is more like a chapter, instead a full-blown adaptation.
Inspired works
I already mentioned artificial whales. The 1980 MU NO HAKUGEI (WHITE WHALE OFMU) (named MOBY DICK 5 in Italy) TV anime series established the trend of showing Moby Dick not as a sperm whale, as Melville created him. “Moby Dick” is also from time to time a general name for whales. However, here the White Whale is actually a giant spaceship.
Osamu Dezaki’s TV-anime-science-fiction-series HAKUGEI DENSETSU – LEGEND OFTHE MOBY DICK (1997-1999) is another one. Again this work is more free: you have an artificial space-ship shaped whale, but this time more sperm whale in appearance, and Ahab again with an eye patch and an artificial leg. The story is again it’s own, where only tiny bits of Melville’s book are used.
For 2021’s WHITE WHALE MOBY DICK, author Baku Yumemakura (ONMYOJI movie series) created a whole novel, where he mixed Melville’s allegoric epic with real people. The historic figure of John Manjiro is also integrated into this book. Yumemakura’s take sees it that Manjiro also survives the encounter with Moby Dick, like Ishmael.
Conclusion
As you have now read, MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE has, besides the connection with Godzilla, a place in Japan. It is obviously not the position that the book occupies in the west, especially in the United States, but it generates influence of its own, which not only contributes to Japanese subcultures, but also to the western ones.
Should you be aware of more connections, that I missed: please contact me! (via Facebook)
You can see G-Fan #123 for my comparison between Moby Dick and Godzilla, which became available again with the release of THE WHALE GOD by SRS Cinema. This G-Fan issue is reported OOP.
* Moby-Dick or Moby Dick? Is there is a difference? Yes, indeed. For those, who read the novel, you don’t need an explanation. For all others: MOBY-DICK; OR: THE WHALE is the full title of the book. The titular sperm whale is written without the hyphen within Melville’s text. As a compromise to refer to both, I wrote it in Latin and capital letters.
New panel recording up on YouTube, this one is from Anime NJ++ this year. This one covers the Sushi Typhoon imprint and some general history of Japanese splatter films, so it may be a bit edgier than our usual content.
In this episode, Kevin, Josh, and Lux sit down to discuss Netflix’s 2023 adaptation of Yu Yu Hakusho. As three relatively hardcore fans of the source material, we get into a fair amount of minutia comparing the new incarnation to different adaptations from years past, so it’d be good to have a passing familiarity with the property before listening… but hey, it’s a good idea to have a passing familiarity with Yu Yu Hakusho in general, so if you haven’t ever read the manga or watched the anime, now’s as good a time as ever to give it a shot (but don’t start with the Netflix series).
This went up on YouTube back in September, but somehow I missed linking it on the blog: a presentation Mike Dent and I did at G-Fest 2023, covering the history of late-night tokusatsu shows. Due to the plethora of content and the limitations of time, we only got up to 2007, so a part 2 will follow in some form eventually.
And actually, while we’re at it, here’s the Kaiju Transmissions panel from the same show:
There’s one more panel from G-Fest that still needs to be edited and added to YouTube, so keep an eye out.
Last weekend was Otakon, where I got to give a panel detailing the wild intersection of Japanese pop culture and Marvel comics. This one details Marvel books based on Japanese properties, manga’s influence on Marvel, and Marvel characters in Japanese titles, which was a lot to cram into an hour (let alone 45 minutes due to a schedule reading accident!)
This summer’s G-Fest panels were also recorded, so those are next on the agenda.
In this episode, Kevin is joined by Alex, Connor, and Jared as the gang look back on the decade since Ultraman Ginga debuted, recapping all of the mainline Ultraman shows and trying to decide exactly what “New Generation” means. This is perhaps not a great episode for novices, but experienced Ultra-fans who want to get our perspectives on everything going up through Ultraman Decker (which, we neglected to mention, could be a play on “deca” being Greek for “ten”), excluding Trigger, since we covered it last year.
Forgot to post this here earlier, but here’s a presentation for Kaiju Masterclass from earlier this month, giving an overview of Takashi Yamazaki’s entire filmography and speculating about what it might mean for his future Godzilla movie. After that, it turns into a miscellaneous Q&A on a variety of kaiju-related topics.
Holy cats, it’s Maser Patrol’s tenth anniversary! That’s right, the blog began on January 1st, 2013, the same day as the 50th anniversary of the Astro Boy anime. That show (and thus the entire TV anime format) is 60 today, so I guess that tracks.
To get it out of the way now, this post will purely be reflective, so no exciting announcement like there was with the 5th anniversary post when an intention to write Kaiju for Hipsters was declared. Another book is still something that could happen eventually, but right now things are purely ideational (at one point I had started working on gathering materials for a Japanese zombie movie guide, but I put that work on hold after discovering an individual more qualified than myself was already attempting the exact same project), and time’s been stretched thinner than it was back then.
Overall, it’s been a busy decade personally, as I completed grad school, changed jobs and moved multiple times, got married. However, this blog has been a great source of comfort, friendship, and thrills along the entire journey. It’s truly awesome and humbling to have been able to write so many posts, give so many panels, record so many podcasts, translate so many neglected stories, interview so many cool people. I’ve able to write a book, introduce film screenings, do liner notes for a major Blu-ray release; all far exceeding what I imagined at the outset. But what’s more personally rewarding is, forgive the cliché, the friends I made along the way.
The core of the blog comes out of both fandom and friendship; it was begun out of discussions among WashU’s anime club, and the same people who were part of it then are still part of my conversations every day (most notably Amanda, who in the ten years the blog has been around went from being a friend to being my wife, from a Japanese student to a professional translator interpreting for G-Fest and Kaiju Masterclass). Through the blog I’ve been introduced to countless others who have become close collaborators and comrades: Byrd and Matt at Kaiju Transmissions most obviously (I’ve been on that show more times than I can count at this point), but also Justin Mullis, Connor of Easter’s Kaiju Kompendium, the increasingly prolific John LeMay, Jared Faust at Xenofauna, Chris and Alex at Seismic Toys, Chris Marti of Cosmic Monster, John Bellotti at Robo7, Nick Driscoll at Toho Kingdom, Mike Dent at Vintage Henshin, Henning Strauß, Raf Enshohma, Jules Carrozza, Matt Burkett at Monstrosities, Chris and Jessica at Kaiju Kingdom, Avery Guerra, Kyle Yount at Kaijucast, Nick Poling at The Monster Report, and so many, many more… odds are if we’re Facebook friends, this blog had something to do with it, and it’s cool to know all of you.
It’s wild looking back on the circumstances of the blog’s creation, back in what kaiju fans call “the wilderness years”. In the very first post, I anticipated some titles that I had no way of anticipating would alter the landscape of the genre forever, including the then-upcoming anime adaptation of Attack on Titan (which arguably proved to be the breakout hit of the decade) and Pacific Rim, which, in addition to launching a powerhouse franchise on the strength of a single fantastic film, kind of ushered in a kaiju renaissance in Hollywood. Next came the MonsterVerse, which is remarkably still going strong, outlasting any prior American attempts at Godzilla by a wide margin. It also sparked a revival in Japan, so we have a concurrent Reiwa Godzilla series, typified by ambitious auteur screenwriters, to contrast the dumb blockbuster fun of the American features.
That rising tide has led to other franchises rising from their past dormancy as well, with new Gamera, Yokai Monsters (with Daimajin), heck, even a new Prince of Space and Voltes V! Chief among them, Ultraman is back in a bigger way than ever before, with a major international theatrical release, a popular anime series, and the New Generation of shows, also celebrating a decade, which is longer than even the successful 70s or 00s periods of the franchise managed. Better still, this is the decade when we saw Ultraman finally crack the US market, first with simulcasts on Crunchyroll, then on YouTube, and with the Chaiyo case resolved plus an aggressive commitment by the likes of Mill Creek, Marvel, and others, we’re enjoying the open floodgates of access to the world of M78.
Ultraman is the biggest success story, but tokusatsu in general is seeing levels of availability beyond our previous imagination. Super Sentai was once thought indelibly frozen due to the existence of Power Rangers, but now, even with a short Hasbro hiccup, we have everything from Fiveman to Dekaranger on DVD. We’re also seeing Kamen Rider getting releases, three shows on Blu-ray so far with another five on streaming, a far cry from the time when a V3 DVD from Hawaii was the only game in town. We’re even finally seeing Metal Heroes, thanks to Discotek, a company who’d previously sworn off live action titles due to low sales, creating an entire Toku Time imprint. There’s also Kraken Releasing, who did god’s work with making Garo available, and hopefully aren’t permanently down for the count.
Anime distribution has also wildly changed. When this blog started, Crunchyroll was a small independent outfit, but now they’ve fused with Funimation under Sony to become a kind of Disney for anime (though, Disney also now has a streaming service with its own anime). The streaming wars ramped up, with big corporate backing, and now anime conventions have a lot more glitzy polish of trade shows, though a few of the smaller outfits maintain the independent spirit that the likes of Crunchyroll and Section23 did in days past (I do miss the time when the power players could actually answer questions at their booths instead of just passing out promotional swag). We’re also seeing more theatrical releases than ever before, and they’re actually performing well at the box office. (Another title that I’d mentioned as upcoming in this blog’s first post, Dragon Ball: Battle of the Gods, might have been a catalyst for this trend.)
On the Japanese side, the landscape of major studios has completely shifted, with a new generation of brands like Mappa, Trigger, Orange, and Wit associated with marks of quality (plus Sola and Polygon on the opposite end of the spectrum). We’ve seen more titles produced per season than ever before, and a change in the format of adaptations; “forever” adaptations with tons of filler arcs gave way to seasonal shows that take breaks for a cour or two and come back the next year. Manga series are also getting shorter, as even paradigm-altering hits opt to wrap up their stories rather than continuing to milk their readership for as long as it can, which was the older model. Not to mention the rise and utter dominance of isekai programming nowadays…
Who knows what the next decade may bring? Perhaps we should have a podcast discussion to speculate more.
Looking forward, the blog has a few more neat things in the pipeline: articles, podcasts, convention presentations, and maybe another translation or two, but I’ll try not to give too much away for now, otherwise it’ll wind up like the half-year-delayed “Is there a figure of that” panel that I promise we still do plan to record and put up in the near future. In the meantime, the Facebook page is still the best place to look for up-to-date news posts and occasional other ephemera.
With that said, thanks for reading, whether you’ve been with Maser Patrol for most of this decade milestone or not. Looking forward to covering more in the decade to come, and to all a happy new year!
Have you ever wondered about how the Death Note anime started during the short four-month window between the two live-action movies? Or how Parasyte’s anime debuted the same month as its first live-action film, despite being two decades since the source manga had ended? Or how Erased’s anime, novel, and live-action film all hit during the same month that the original manga concluded?
This is because Japan, as a nation, are masters of what they call the “media mix”, a phrase that they were throwing around quite a lot well before “transmedia” became a hot buzzword in Hollywood. The notion is that you can capture an audience not entirely inclined towards your primary medium by drumming up interest in their medium of choice. In short, you can make something like an anime, drama miniseries, or video game essentially as a long advertisement for your blockbuster manga or movie property, or occasionally vice-versa.
While manga can be big business, it’s also comparably much cheaper to produce than a major motion picture, which is why in cases where the manga is not already the format of the source material, it might behoove a studio to cross-promote their upcoming film with a manga adaptation. It’s such a common occurrence that there’s even a special denomination for such novelizations: “comicalize” (コミカライズ), one of those quirky wasei-eigo terms that Japanese people often don’t realize isn’t actually used in English. There are copious examples of Japanese movies being given such treatment over the decades, sometimes from major artists in the industry. Here are some J-horror examples to keep with this month’s Halloween theme:
It’s not just domestic entertainment that gets this treatment, however; Japan also has a tradition of comicalizing Hollywood cinema. These adaptations are often viewed as disposable shorts, rarely if ever reprinted in their native country and almost never translated into English, which I think is quite a shame, especially for these titles that originate with English-language movies. So, for this Halloween, I think it might be worth diving into the strange, oft-forgotten second life some of these American movies had in the pages of Japanese manga anthologies. Due to the scarcity of some (most) of these titles, much of this will be cobbled together from various images others have posted on social media in the past, so apologies that image quality won’t be very consistent.
Kicking things off, 1973’s The Exorcist is obviously one of the most influential horror films of all time, inspiring countless imitators around the globe. In Japan, particularly, it hit at the right time to be a major catalyst in the country’s “occult boom”, when there was a huge interest in the paranormal; for example, it was off of The Exorcist’s success that the Japanese blockbuster The Prophecies of Nostradamus got greenlit, and it is also widely speculated to be the impetus for Daijiro Morohoshi’s classic Yokai Hunter manga. For such a momentous film, it’s appropriate to go to the best in the business to adapt it, and thus, the legendary Kazuo Umezz himself made an adaptation of The Exorcist for Shonen Magazine #23 in 1974. The end result is interesting and atypical for what you’d expect from a manga: it’s full color, composed of both Umezz’s hand-drawn art and promotional stills from the film overlayed; sort of half comic, half film comic. Additionally, several of the stills are black-and-white and have only been tinted to color, so it clashes with Umezz’s lush artwork. Why it would have been done this way is unclear, but it really hammers home the message that this is an upcoming live-action movie, lest the audience get confused and think of it as only a spooky manga story.
Umezz wasn’t the only titan of the horror manga field to tackle The Exorcist, however; in the August issue of monthly Shonen Champion, Shinichi Koga took a much more traditional black-and-white manga approach to adapting the story. Koga’s grotesquely contorted figures and moody crosshatched linework frankly give Umezz a run for his money, demonstrating an obvious influence on current-day horror comic wunderkind Junji Ito as well. It’s quite fitting that Koga did this one, as The Exorcist was an immense stimulus for his magnum opus Eko Eko Azarak, which he began serialization on the following year. It’s always fascinating to compare different artists taking on the exact same story, and while one could imagine a modern studio panicking over the prospect of exclusive contracts and market dilution, at the time it was not uncommon to see multiple anthologies adapt the same story in service of marketing a film to the widest possible audience, rather than viewing them as competition (e.g., Mitsuru Miura shonen adaptation of House vs Masako Watanabe’s shojo version, or how Masaru Irago and Mitsuru Hiruta were both putting out TV-accurate manga versions of Devilman while Go Nagai’s manga went off the rails).
Just two months after adapting The Exorcist, Koga was back in the pages of Champion, this time teaming with fellow horror artist Shinji Hama to do a 40-page adaptation of the US/UK coproduction The Legend of Hell House (five pages more than The Exorcist got!). Again, the style oozes atmosphere, a portent of the kind of imagery Koga would bring to Eko Eko Azarak shortly thereafter, though based on the credits it seems Koga drafted the layouts while Hama did more of the heavy lifting on the artwork itself.
If it seems an odd coincidence that both of those movies were adapted in the pages of monthly and BessatsuShonen Champion, it’s not just that the publisher had a proclivity for supernatural horror (at least not just that, since Eko Eko Azarak *did* begin running in Weekly Shonen Champion in 1975). Instead, they were all part of an ongoing series titled Gekiga Roadshow (“gekiga” being a more “mature” term than the light, juvenile “manga” rarely in use anymore (think “graphic novel” vs “comic”), while “roadshow” is a loan word referring to theatrical releases). The series began in 1971 with Daiji Kazumine’s adaptation of Godzilla vs. Hedorah and went for a whopping 54 monthly installments, tackling whatever the blockbuster du jour was, ranging from comedies to disaster pictures to martial arts flicks to westerns to thrillers, covering both domestic and foreign films. Naturally, this includes horror flicks, accounting for quite a number of the titles we’ll look at here.
The Exorcist and Legend of Hell House were both influences on 1976’s The Omen, so it’s fitting that that film also got an adaption, in Champion’s November 1976 issue, and although Eko Eko Azarak did have a chapter referencing the film, Koga was not involved. This time the artist was Setsuo Tanabe, a prolific comicalizer who took on a whopping eleven films for the Gekiga Roadshow, including Enter the Dragon and The Towering Inferno. The manga manages to preserve the film’s ominous (no pun intended) tone, with heavy use of black ink, gory death scenes, and a version of devil-child Damian who exudes pure malice. Plus, not a bad representation of Gregory Peck!
The Omen wasn’t the only “creepy kid” flick to arrive on Champion’s pages, but the other entries might surprise. The era had a miniature wave of such cinematic content (Rosemary’s Baby, Village of the Damned, To the Devil a Daughter), but surprisingly the independent Larry Cohen flick It’s Alive not only got a wide release in Japan, but also got adapted into a whopping 50-page manga adaptation by Yoshisato Takayama (AKA Yoshinori Takayama, who also adapted Prophecies of Nostradamus) in the November 1974 issue. While the adaptation itself appears to be (from available pages) a fairly faithful recreation of the contents of the film, it’s interesting that the preview image used to advertise the manga instead shows a relatively-normal smirking blonde child looming over stabbed bodies (as opposed to the deformed mutant baby who kills people bare-handed), which makes one wonder if the editorial department only had the title (Akuma no Akachan, “Devil’s Baby”) to work with at the time. The mutant baby does appear in the manga proper, but perhaps it could also be considered a spoiler to reveal before the climax.
(While on the “killer kids” topic, it’s also worth pointing out that June 1977’s issue of Champion had an adaptation of Who Can Kill a Child? by Gosaku Ota, one of Go Nagai’s acolytes. However, that movie is Spanish rather than American, so we won’t dwell on it here.)
I’ve spoken in the past about the Jurassic Park manga adaptation, but that’s not the only movie based on a Michael Crichton story about a theme park out of control to be comicalized. Westworld got the 41-page treatment in the January 1974 issue of Champion, and Mitsuru Hiruta did a fine job with a suitably creepy depiction of Yul Briner’s iconic killer robot cowboy proto-slasher. Combat between life and artificial life could be a halmark of Hiruta’s career, come to think of it, since he’d previously adapted Kikaider and Kikaider 01, and later the same year would give us the Gekiga Roadshow version of Godzilla vs Mechagodzilla.
Side note: Westworld also comes up in prologue to the story “Robot Land” from Astro Boy volume 4.
Not all horror has to be done with a straight face, however, as Kunio Nagatani, one of the pioneers of parody manga known for contributing to Fujio Fujiko titles like Osomatsu-kun, was tasked in the October 1975 issue of Champion with adapting Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Given that only a few pages have surfaced online in pretty miserable quality, plus translating comedy is a nightmare at the best of times, it’s a bit difficult to gauge, but it certainly seems that Nagatani is delivering his own spin, rather than trying to stick close to the original script; a wise decision in this adaptation.
(Gekiga Roadshow also later did Blazing Saddles, by the way, since Mel Brooks’ movies arrived in Japan out-of-order.)
Just in case I gave the misimpression earlier that The Exorcist was the biggest horror hit of the 1970s, we should clarify that there was another title that blew it (and everyone else) out of the water, in some cases literally. 1975’s Jaws changed the cinematic landscape and gave birth to the modern blockbuster, and as such has had quite an impact on Japanese cinema as well, inspiring both classics like Obayashi’s House and duds like Jaws in Japan. Naturally Champion was all over it, so the December 1975 issue featured a 50-page manga adaptation by Setsuo Tanabe, with adequate action and drama conveyed.
This is notably not the most famous manga adaptation of Jaws, however, since that was done by Herald Books, written by shojo mangaka Akira Ichijo and drawn by Sakuma Chu, clocking in at just over 100 pages. In addition to its status as a collectors’ item, this version has some nice color artwork and really ups the gekiga-factor by extending the skinny-dipping sequence at the start, even launching the woman out of the water so the reader can get a really good look at her breasts! Generally, this seems the favored manga incarnation by Jaws fans, with even more over-the-top stylization, though part of that popularity may be the difficulty in actually discovering the Tanabe version exists at all.
Of course, Jaws inspired a host of cinematic imitators, and many of those found their way onto the comics pages as well. Peter Benchley’s follow-up novel to Jaws, The Deep, was turned into a movie, and Gosaku Ota adapted it for the August 1977 issue of Champion. The month prior, future Ultraman comic artist Shinji Imura did an adaptation of Tentacles, and that wasn’t even his first Jaws-ploitation piece, since he’d also adapted The Legend of Dinosaurs and Monster Birds for the magazine that May. January 1978 saw Kyuuta Ishikawa (Gao, Monster Prince) adapt Orca for 40 pages.
And lest we forget, the 1976 King Kong was also made in direct response to the success of Jaws. Though Japan was one of the few nations to sit out of the rush to deliver their own cinematic take on the giant ape to capitalize (unlike Italy, South Korea, the UK, and Hong Kong), it did take on the Eighth Wonder himself in both the form of video games and manga. Naturally, there was an adaptation, going above and beyond by stretching across two issues of monthly Shonen Magazine (October and November), adapted by Kenji Tagami. Tagami’s style is overly “gekiga”, trying so hard to look realistic that Dwan’s pronounced nose, chin, and muscle tone look a bit too masculine to readers accustomed to modern manga aesthetics. Kong, on the other hand, kind of looks like a man whose nose has been cut off.
However, Daiji Kazumine, the prolific kaiju mangaka who’d already taken on Kong a decade prior, also had an adaptation, as a whopping 64-pager in the December 1976 issue #51 of TeleviLand. As is fitting with the more juvenile target audience of TeleviLand, Kazumine’s Kong is a lot more friendly and cartoonier, at times looking as afraid of Dwan as she is of him, and even gives her a bouquet of flowers as he’s dying! On the other hand, he takes out a jet fighter with his teeth, which is more like something from the poster than from the actual film.
While we’re at it, we can throw Giant Spider Invasion in with other 1970s “animal panic” movies. Setsuo Tanabe did a 40-page adaptation for the September 1976 issue of Champion. Since the actual film is pretty hokey, there’s a good chance kids who went to the cinema based on the manga were let down. I do like the was Tanabe draws the sheriff character, though.
The Gekiga Roadshow series ended in the late 1970s, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, though some have speculated that Japan reprinting American-made comic adaptations of titles like Star Wars and Alien didn’t help the matter (slapping “Leiji Matsumoto Presents” on the cover of Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson’s Alien wasn’t going to fool anyone, but they sure tried it!), effectively taking wind out from the brand’s sails by causing them to miss a few mega-blockbusters.
However, in a nation as comic-ravenous as Japan, it wasn’t long before other publication began to pick up the comicalizing slack, and as far as horror goes, the baton definitely passed not to another shonen anthology, but a shojo one: monthly Halloween. While mostly known in English-language circles as the anthology that gave us Junji Ito, Halloween was a lot more than that, basically kicking off a whole boom for female-targeted horror manga that continues to this day, although the mid-80s to mid-90s was truly the high point, with numerous anthologies like Horror House, Suspiria, Night Zone, Solitaire, Prom Night, Pandora, Mystery Bonita, and Horror M rising and falling in Halloween’s wake.
Both Ceiling Gallery and Zimmerit have great overviews on the magazine in general, so here we’ll just focus on the topic at hand: the magazine was also movie-crazy, with some issues featuring original photo shoots of iconic horror movie characters on the covers (at least, before the covers transitioned from photos to manga art towards the end of its run). Naturally, there were comicalizations of horror flicks within the anthology’s pages as well, both of Japanese titles (such as Sweet Home and Monster Heaven: Ghost Hero) and imports.
One thing that’s interesting is that three of the movies chosen to adapt are of the zombie genre; despite being the nation that reinvigorated worldwide interest in the creatures with Resident Evil in the late 90s, they were actually pretty slow to adopt the monsters. Japan didn’t get theatrical releases for a lot of the foundational zombie cinema (e.g., I Walk with a Zombie, Night of the Living Dead, Plan 9 from Outer Space), didn’t have a proper zombie feature of their own until Battle Girl in 1991 (little pieces like Youjo Melon and Legend of Stardust Brothers not withstanding). Their real breakout exposure with the genre was Romero’s 1978 classic Dawn of the Dead, which while a hit, was advertised with the zombies making the laughing noises of the mushroom people from Matango, since that was pretty much the closest frame of references audiences at the time had.
Over the next decade, though, an avalanche of foreign zombie flicks poured in, and Japanese audiences lapped them up. Now, having not actually gotten Night of the Living Dead, it makes sense that Return of the Living Dead would be retitled, in this case to Battalion (origin of the portmanteau “obattalion” for punky old ladies). Anyway, the movie got adapted in the March 1986 issue of Halloween, one of two movies that got the treatment that month (the other being Ai no Kagero). Artist Mari Eran lends the story a sketchy, cartoony style over the 50 pages, including some surprisingly faithful touches, such as the plot point about Night of the Living Dead in the backstory, and, most notably, Trash’s copious nudity, including more pubic hair than one would expect in a shojo manga. Trash actually bookends the entire work, as she’s the focus of the first panel, and the final is a cliffhanger from the scene where she’s revived as a zombie (which is also on the manga’s cover page). Perhaps due to this aspect, it’s actually quite easy to find this manga, in its entirety, uploaded to hentai sites.
Mockbuster-style exploitation is a big thing in Japanese movie marketing, but surprisingly, “…of the Dead” didn’t really take off as a title phrase there like it did in the States (at least, not until a certain Zack Snyder remake). As mentioned before, Night of the Living Dead didn’t get released there for a long time, Dawn of the Dead was released under the Italian title Zombie, Return of the Living Dead was Battalion, so when it came time to release Day of the Dead, the title took its format not from the Romero side, but from the Japanese title of Evil Dead. That movie was released in Japan as Shiryō no Harawata (“Ghost Guts”, ironically itself a play on the Japanese Angel Guts series), and its popularity inspired a wave of imitators, such as the Japanese Shiryō no Wana (Evil Dead Trap), but also a glut of western horror movies that copied the format by starting with “Shiryo no” for their Japanese titles: Silver Bullet, Deadly Blessing, The Boogeyman, Dementia 13, The Beyond, Brain Dead…the list goes on. So, Day of the Dead became Shiryō no Ejiki (“Ghost’s Victim”, or perhaps “Evil Dead Victim”).
Anyway, regardless of its title, Day of the Dead got an adaptation in the May 1986 issue of Halloween, courtesy of Yutaka Abe, one of Gosho Aoyama’s assistants on Detective Conan. The art in this version is great, and Abe takes some shojo-styled liberties here and there, such as having a somewhat touching scene between Bub and Sarah where you really ramp up the sympathy for the main zombie. The short actually did get reprinted as a bonus in the first volume of Triangle High School, so it’s a bit easier to come by than some of the ones that only printed in magazine format.
Abe followed this up with another “shiryo” comicalization, again unrelated to the prior: Shiryō no Shitatari (“Trickling of Ghosts”), AKA Zombio, or, as we call it stateside, ReAnimator. This was a particularly interesting read for me, since:
It’s on the long side at 70 pages (40 pages in Halloween’s March 1987 issue, 30 pages in April).
It’s somewhat easily available; it was retitled Deadly Night and reprinted in the second volume of Triangle High School.
I’m pretty familiar with different edits and the shooting script for the source movie.
Often, novelizations can be based on earlier versions of scripts that don’t make it into the theatrical version of a film, but this follows the theatrical version of the film quite closely, which makes sense for a completed foreign movie that’s being imported. I have to wonder if Abe had an early release of the film on video for reference, or if he just had the translated script for the subtitled edition (which wouldn’t have had elements from the shooting script that didn’t make the theatrical cut) and some promotional photos. It’s easy to postulate that the brevity of the cat sequence in this adaptation, or the lack of nudity in the finale, was due to pacing for page count or toning things down for a shojo audience, but I also have to wonder how much of that could simply be that the script didn’t stress those elements because they’re so visual. Barbara Crampton’s nudity did feature quite heavily on the movie’s Japanese poster, though, so even if Abe somehow delivered the manga without the movie in hand, it’d be difficult to miss. It raises a question about the production methods of all of these adaptations, frankly.
Likely to avoid confusion with the Obayashi movie of the same name, Steve Miner’s 1986 haunted house flick House was retitled in Japan to Goblin, though the katakana rendering is closer to “gabalin” (ガバリン), perhaps to evoke the word “javelin”? The film actually did get a sizable push in Japan, with the soundtrack, a novelization, and a puzzle game book unique to the country. Naturally, this also included a manga adaptation, though it’s been a bit buried to time; unlike the other titles in this article, I couldn’t find any images from it online and I only found out it existed by scrolling through tables of contents from Halloween back issues and noticing that July 1986 (which has a House cover) also has a manga for it.
I ordered a copy, and it turns out that author Rururu Araragi took a really interesting approach to the adaptation: while the movie plays out as a series of vignettes, the manga is actually a choose-your-own adventure format. For example, when there’s a knock at the door, you can turn to one page if it’s the protagonist Roger’s ex-wife, or a different page if it’s his sexy neighbor. All the main set pieces from the film are represented, but this interactive approach to the storytelling really accentuates the bewilderment that Roger would have when dealing with the haunting.
Speaking of movies getting their characters guest spots on the cover, Freddy Krueger shows up on the front of an issue from 1990, but the manga adaptation of A Nightmare on Elm Street was actually in the June 1986 issue. This one’s by So-ko Agi (an artist whose name primarily results in this title if you google her) and tells the complete story of the film in 47 pages. Key moments like the geyser of blood from the bed and the clawed hand in the bath are preserved, though the climax is a bit truncated as it’s more about Nancy praying Freddy away than dragging him into the real world. Freddy has pointed ears in several, but not all, panels here, and while such an inconsistency might be a flaw in other works, the phantasmagoric dream-logic makes such continuity less of an issue.
Speaking of supernatural slashers, Hellraiser also got an adaptation…basically. Printed in the debut issue of monthly Bears Club in March 1988, this is technically an adaptation of The Hellbound Heart, the third time Naruho Amino had adapted a Clive Barker story for manga after The Yattering and Jack and In the Hills, The Cities. However, Amino admits that translating the book to the visual medium of comics proved difficult, and thus referenced the movie version heavily; it’s all Barker’s vision either way.
The Terminator often gets forgotten as an 80s slasher, but his debut film really fits into that mold. Tomo’o Kimura (just prior to hitting big with Let’s Dachiko) did a short comic for the movie pamphlet, emulating American comics in both that it’s in full color (probably easy enough due to its brevity), and using English-language sounds effects. Predating the NOW Comics run by a few years, this manga is actually Terminator’s debut in comic format, a claim shared by a few other characters we’ve looked at today, such as Herbert West and Freddy Krueger, whose own American comics wouldn’t crop up until a few years after their respective manga incarnations.
Though only the first Terminator really counts as a horror flick before veering more heavily into action territory, it’s also worth noting that future Redline director Takeshi Koike drew the Terminator 2 T-800 in an illustration for Animage, while Terminator 3 got an entire volume-long manga adaptation by Ark Performance (Gamera: Hard Link).
While it’s not a movie, per se, I also think it’s worth mentioning that the 1983 TV miniseries V (which, incidentally, is not a particularly Google-friendly name) got a two-volume manga adaptation in 1989 by Go Nagai and Tatsuya Yasuda (drawing as Tatsuo Yasuda). This one was officially released in France and Italy, but alas, no English-language attempts yet. Reviews claim that the manga is nigh-incomprehensible if you haven’t already seen the show, but the imagery of the reptilian aliens in human disguise feels almost tailored-made to the manga format, coming across better than its live-action counterpart.
In recent years, comicalizations of western horror flicks haven’t proven quite as common as in the past, but every once in a while, there’s still an occurrence, usually from smaller studios rather than major blockbusters. One such example was even in the pages of monthly Shonen Champion, even: Kenji Hirasawa did an adaptation of the Daniel Craig/Naomi Watts thriller Dream House for the December 2012 issue. It’s a far cry from the days of Gekiga Roadshow, though, as Hirasawa’s style is quite cartoonish.
Suzuki-sensei’s Kenji Taketomi did an adaptation of Jerry Bruckheimer’s Deliver Us from Evil in 2015 to commemorate the home video release. It seems like a nice fit into the overall oeuvre of ESP media that Japan enjoys, if potentially a few decades late on the boom.
Most recently, Junji Ito did an adaptation of Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse that was available in film booklets (i.e., sold in theaters playing the movie), a nice synergy since both the mangaka and the movie skew thematically Lovecraftian. Given Ito’s incredible international popularity at the moment, it’s honestly kind of shocking that this one wasn’t brought back to the US in any official capacity. It’s drawn more realistically than Ito’s normal style, but really captures Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in stellar interpretation.
Aside from doing comic adaptations, sometimes mangaka also get hired to do posters for Japanese releases of Western movies, often with some tenuous connection (like Monkey Punch illustrating Jackie Chan posters because he was also nicknamed Monkey, or Masami Kurumada doing Clash of the Titans because Greek mythology), so there’s no surprise that horror artists wind up tackling horror films. A few examples:
Kazuo Umezz drew a poster for the Ghost House production The Possession, adding his trademark sound effect “gwashi” from Makoto-chan into the palm of the hand in the art
Nori Ochazuke (Fear Infection) did two posters for Annabelle
An unknown artist did a cover for An American Werewolf in London, really playing up the comedic appeal of the film, perhaps due to it being a John Landis project
Original Death Note artist Takeshi Obata did a poster for the Adam Wingard film adaptation
When the 2019 Hellboy was released, Dynamic productions created a crossover poster with Devilman. Original Hellboy creator Mike Mignola reciprocated by drawing a Hellboy/Devilman crossover of his own
While both films are European, it’s worth noting that Junji Ito did a poster for Inside and home video covers for both Demons movies
A common thread between all the manga discussed today is that none of them have been made available in English, so I’ll wrap this on a glimmer of hope with one that actually did get a US release via Tokyopop and is still easily available to buy and read. Actually, of all the titles, perhaps it’s the one most appropriate for Halloween…or maybe you’re better off saving it for Christmas instead. That’s right, The Nightmare Before Christmas was adapted by Jun Asuka at Kodansha, and she brings a suitably shojo touch to the entire affair, to the delight of goths everywhere. My main critique of Tokyopop’s release is the cover, which is quite monochromatic compared to the Japanese release, but it’s a price that must sometimes be paid. Whether you do pick up the book or not; hopefully you got something out of this article, and Happy Halloween!
Excellent places I cribbed from; scope them out for similar material:
One more G-Fest recording for this year! This panel had content from across Asia, but we only had time for the Japanese part at the show, so a bonus recording will come out in the near future to go over a few of the remaining slides that covered Korean and Chinese dinosaur flicks.
Another G-Fest panel is now up on YouTube, looking at various trailers for projects that either never saw the light of day, or wound up quite differently from their initially advertised incarnations. I wasn’t able to actually play any trailers during the panel, but links to lots of them are in the description.
Jessica Tseang was due to interview the great Godzilla and Ultraman franchise actress Tomoko Ai at G-Fest this year, but wasn’t able to attend the convention due to a sudden emergency. Since Amanda was already on interpreter duty, Kevin stepped in as Jessica’s replacement for the interview.
We talked about Ms Ai’s career on Ultraman Leo, her time at Toho with Terror of Mechagodzilla, as well as a stint at Toei including guesting on Goranger and (almost) leading in The Kagestar. It was a fantastic experience for us, and hopefully this recording is a good overview and is a suitable consolation for anyone who also wanted to go and couldn’t make it to the convention this year.
Special thanks to Chris Marti for help with editing this episode!
One of several live recordings from G-Fest XXVII, this episode was a panel in collaboration with Chris Eaton of the Kaiju Kingdom Podcast, looking into the overlap of the tokusatsu and professional wrestling industries in Japan. We go into shared tropes and shared talent, so it should be fun for wrestling fan and novice alike!
*mild spoilers if you haven’t watched trailers or seen the latest Bandai figures*
Shin Ultraman is, after the Rebuild of Evangelion and Shin Godzilla, the third entry in the Shin Japan Heroes franchise, but it’s also significant in that it’s the first made consciously with the “Shin” brand at the forefront. As such, it’s neat to look at how it codifies just what the “shin” prefix represents. There are surface-level aspects, such as Hideaki Anno’s dense, jargon-filled dialogue, rapid editing and Akio Jissoji-inspired unconventional camera angles, pop cultural Easter eggs for otaku in the audience, and a soundtrack comprised of vintage film scores and banging new pieces from Shiro Sagisu. All of that is part of the lens, but ultimately, what the brand seems to be about is revisiting classic franchises, rebooting them effectively from the ground up, and distilling what worked about their original incarnations with an infusion of modern realism.
This has led to a misunderstanding amongst the Godzilla fandom, who interpreted “Shin” to mean “horrific and creepy”, because the original 1954 Godzilla, a dour allegory for nuclear destruction, was horrific and creepy, but 1966’s Ultraman is a hopeful space-age fantasy. Don’t get me wrong; there’s a definite overlap between Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman, and not just in the literal crossover in the Godzilla Battle Line mobile game: the film starts with a Shin Godzilla sight gag, there’s some recycled military footage, and one actor even seeming to reprise a role. However, the newer film lacks the profound sense of political commentary and haunting artistic nuance, because, frankly, the original Ultraman TV series wasn’t the traumatic dirge that the original 1954 Godzilla is. The result is a movie that is arguably not as “good” from a substantive perspective, but is a lot more fun.
Certainly, a criticism that will (perhaps unfairly) be levied at Shin Ultraman is a lack of dramatic cohesion, as the antagonist shifts multiple times over the course of the movie, as though it’s several episodes of a TV series put together. This is where a comparison to Shin Evangelion seems apt, particularly the first entry, Evangelion 1.11. Unlike Shin Godzilla, both Shin Evangelion and Shin Ultraman are based on television shows, so you have multiple antagonists (“monsters of the week”) appear in succession throughout the picture, but the encounters are not truly self-contained; each “episode” shifts the character dynamics and provides a deeper look into some facet of the overall gestalt (which in Shin Ultraman’s case is humanity’s role in the universe). What’s more, another unifying factor between Shin Evangelion and Shin Ultraman is that both were conceived as multi-film franchises, with the original pitch including a Shin Ultraman sequel and a Shin Ultraseven. It’s not confirmed yet that these will ever manifest (or if they’ll suffer extreme delays like the Evangelion rebuilds did), but the success of Shin Ultraman and some cryptic comments from Tsuburaya about further blockbuster motion pictures do seem encouraging on that front.
For those whose primary complaint with Shin Godzilla was the statuesque nature of the title character, I do have good news: much like how the 1966 Ultraman was a peppy action-fest compared to the 1954 Godzilla, this movie is rich with fight scenes. Elements stick quite close to the original show, so Ultraman doesn’t suddenly have brand new abilities unseen in the first incarnation (aside from an enhanced sense of smell? Was that something he did before?), but each battle manages to feel fresh with different styles, including the iconic spacium beam, hand-to-hand melee, and impressive aerial battles that manage to reinvent the vibe of a flying fight: it doesn’t look like the stiff choreography of the original show, but also gives a completely different feel from the Ultraman flying scenes that Ichiro Itano put together in the 2000s as well. The locations for the action sequences also hit the classic staples: mountains, city, oil refinery, outer space, etc, preventing there from being a sense of repetition to the action.
Obviously, with all of these combat scenes, there’s no shortage of special effects to be had, and it seems that Shinji Higuchi is basically repeating what was done with Shin Godzilla: full CG for the monsters with occasional practical miniatures composited into the scenes. While Shin Godzilla was rushed because of the upcoming Legendary movie, the pandemic actually gave Shin Ultraman’s CG team more time to tinker, so there are no shots that look quite as shoddy as some of the Kamata sequences in the former film. However, the CG didn’t exactly blow anyone away with its realism, either; if you’re not happy with how things look in the trailer, you probably won’t be happy with the overall movie either. It’s worth noting that there are a ton of CG characters on display for a much longer amount of screen time, so I’m certainly willing to cut slack. Of special note is how they incorporated so much tokusatsu history into the SFX process, such bringing back Bin Furuya to do motion capture for Ultraman, having Anno do some mocap himself (a callback to his very early Ultraman student fanfilms), and even having Sadao Iizuka return to do hand animation for the spacium beam. That sort of attention to detail likely wouldn’t have been attempted by any other filmmakers in the industry.
Speaking of returning to roots, the designs for Ultraman and his enemies harkened back to a lot of their origins as well, and their execution universally impressed me. Ultraman himself is as close as we’ve ever gotten to Tohl Narita’s original design, and though he didn’t have a color timer, they incorporated color changes to the suit (a reference to the original grayish stage show appearance) to similar effect. I also dug that they give him a name other than “Ultraman”, Lipia, which was chosen by the filmmakers because they didn’t get any hits on Google when they searched for it, accentuating his alien-ness. Kaiju only appear in the early part of the film (Higuchi explained that the escalation of bringing aliens in doesn’t leave much space for random rampaging creatures, which I agree with), but I dug the Mahiro Maeda takes on Neronga and Gabora, especially with the in-universe explanation of their relation to Pagos. Zarab’s redesign is really interesting, making use of his invisibility for a Hollow Man kind of effect, as though his skin is only painted on; he even first appears in a coat and fedora like in many Invisible Man films. Zōffy (not Zoffy!) is a callback to his original design and even different spelling of his name as first appeared in a children’s magazine prior to his appearance in the show, but his role here is quite different in a way that could have some major ramifications for this version of the franchise. There’s also another kaiju that gives major vibes of Evangelion’s Arael, the God Warrior, or even Diriver from SSSS.Gridman with its redesign, suitable for a dramatic climax; I won’t spoil it, but you can figure it out.
Also there’s Mephilas. Everything with Mephilas in this movie is goddamn perfect; especially his penchant for quoting human aphorisms.
For those fixated on nationalistic subtext of Anno’s filmography, there will undoubtedly be something to latch onto here as well, such as the proclamation that kaiju only appear in Japan. However, while Higuchi began the show with an apology to the audience over the depiction of Americans in the movie, I honestly didn’t notice the subject coming up that much (e.g., the US are the ones who sell MOP2 missiles to the Japanese defense force), with no token gaijin characters like Patterson, Asuka, or Jung in the mix.
Speaking of the human cast, none of the SSSP as we formerly knew them are in this, which is an interesting choice for a reboot. In true Anno fashion, the new team seems to be a ragtag group of nerdy maladjusted weirdos (a realistic take for a thinktank of scientific consultants to military operations). Like with Hayata in the original Ultraman, we technically don’t get much of lead man Kaminaga (Takumi Saito, who was Captain Ikeda in Shin Godzilla) before he gets possessed by Ultraman, but he does a stellar (no pun intended) performance as an alien in a human’s body, giving me flashbacks to John Carpenter’s Starman. Masami Nagasawa (one of the Godzilla franchise’s Shobijin) plays Kaminaga’s partner Hiroko Asami, a tough special agent with some tsundere qualities, kind of like Natsuki in Anno’s version of Cutie Honey, also quite entertaining. Definitely pandering to the otaku demographic is Taki (Daiki Araoka, Gao God from Gaoranger), a nerdy physicist who had Thunderbirds, Star Trek, and Madoka Magica merchandise on his desk at work, but as a member of that demographic I found that charming; he also has a nice little storyline echoing the original’s about finding the balance between how much defense the Earth can do for itself versus what they need Ultraman for. Pop idol Akari Hayami rounds out the SSSP playing the surprisingly schlubby character of Yumi, a biologist who works hard and uh…doesn’t like bugs? She could have used a bit more character development. There’s also perhaps a bit more butt-slapping that one would expect in a professional workplace, but again, the cast are maladjusted weirdoes. Aside from them, there’s a parade of minor appearances from tokusatsu alumni, so keep your eyes peeled for fun cameos, as there were in Shin Godzilla.
I’ll certainly want to give it another viewing whenever it gets distribution, if nothing else because the dialogue was, predictably, fast-paced and dense, to the point where I kept having to pause to think “what was that about Planck space?” or “wait, did you say ‘terraKelvin’?!” A lot of the SF stuff was quite silly, but I have to admire Anno’s earnest attempt at amping up the jargon from the original series to make it feel a bit more grounded; incorporating more interaction between different government organizations in a natural way. Also worth noting is a decrease in title cards compared to Shin Godzilla, which makes sense as so much of the satire in Shin Godzilla was about the impenetrability of government bureaucracy, which wasn’t really the intent here.
Overall, I think this movie nailed it in terms of the balance of bringing what was cool about the 1966 series into the modern era while also leaving their own unique stamp on it. There’s obviously a lot more that could be done (the absence of fan favorites like Baltan, Gomora, Pigmon, and Redking speaks volumes), but with the ambiguous ending, we could be open to more Shin Ultraman or it could also happily conclude at that point. Either way, we know that Shin Kamen Rider is on the horizon, so even without more of this particular subset, the Shin Japan Heroes brand has a bright future ahead.
5/5
Bonus: Here’s Shinji Higuchi’s Q&A from the US premier!
Of all the new anime this season, the one that’s caught the tokusatsu fandom by storm the most has been Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department. The show has a lot of gimmicks to write home about, such as cameo appearances from a wide variety of Japan’s most well-established local hero characters, casting various major tokusatsu franchise alumni as voice actors, and a Pretty Cure pastiche getting promotional art by Slayers’ Rui Araizumi. The core concept, though, focusing on the overworked staff of the R&D department at an evil organization bent on world conquest, is a fun one, relatable to anyone who’s ever had to suffer the crunch of meeting deadlines for projects that ultimately wind up feeling worthless (in this case because the hero blows their latest monster up on a weekly basis).
One thing that I’ve found a bit amusing in the discourse around the series, though, is the occasional bemusement that such a program would revolve around a cute girl character, since, if you’re going to make the “villains” your heroes, an attractive female lead is the most natural thing in the world.
You see, there’s a strong tendency in the Super Sentai oeuvre, that, if you have a villainous organization aiming to take over the globe, there’s usually a “face” character, a maskless human among all those rubber monster suits serving as either a primary lieutenant or outright commander of the big bads, and more often than not, it’s a sexy lady.
Now, the pretentious explanation for this would go into ancient Asian mysticism, conflating the female (yin) with darkness against the light of the male (yang), or cite the ever-expanding roster of malicious female ghosts who’ve dominated Japanese horror stories for centuries. However, I honestly don’t think the cultural ingraining goes that far, since you’ll find similar phenomena in American superhero comics (e.g. Enchantress, Harley Quinn, Emma Frost) just without quite the same monster-of-the-week formula attached. Rather, the trope makes sense as a way to humanize your villainous cluster: you give them a token human face, and given that the shows tend to be written by and for male audiences, an attractive female face often winds up being the most appealing to look at.
While the program’s nominal heroines are constrained to (at least plausible) modesty so as to not scandalize audiences with the moral hazard of imitable actions, the villainesses have no such ethical constraint, and thus the bulk of a program’s sex appeal winds up resting on their oft-stylishly-padded shoulders. Villains are allowed to be transgressive, and them breaking cultural taboos can serve as intrigue as much as revulsion; a kid watching the show might be intended to think “good girls don’t dress or act that way” and side against the villain, but often as they grow older, those are the characters that they gravitate to the most. This keeps engagement up with older fans (and even sometimes parents of younger fans), often making for some of the higher-end merchandising of a given series.
(There’s a tangentially related discussion to be had about the enduring popularity of villains who challenge society’s very notion of gender with their existence as well, such as Mazinger’s Baron Ashura, Gatchaman’s Berg Katze, and Devilman’s Satan.)
Another benefit of the pretty-face villain is that she can conceivably have forbidden romantic feelings for or from their opposing male hero, an instant formula for dramatics that has played countless times across titles as serious as Jetman to as goofy as Carranger.
As to how the trope has evolved to the point where these once-ancillary villainesses came to headline narratives, rather than operating as supporting cast, perhaps a history of the trope can help elucidate. A key point of divergence between Japanese superheroes and their American counterparts is the structure of the villains: your Rider or Sentai rarely battle lone muggers or bank robbers, but instead massive, well-endowed, nefarious organizations bent on utter world domination, usually by means of monsters-of-the-week. There’s an easy throughline that can be traced here; from Shotaro Ishinomori’s Goranger back to his Kamen Rider back to his breakout hit Cyborg 009, which set the template that the genre followed thereafter. Cyborg 009 wears its influence on its sleeve, namely that of the contemporary hit, the 007, or James Bond series. James Bond likewise didn’t fight common criminals, but a global baddie syndicate called SPECTRE, which then explains how Japanese villain gangs such as Black Ghost, Shocker, and Black Cross Army evolved from that root. (Though SPECTRE is woefully lacking in their menacing rubber-suited cyborg department.)
A common trope in the 007 series is the “Bond girl”, an offshoot of film noir’s femme fatales, because, as a male wish fulfillment fantasy, that franchise is brimming with attractive women who desire the protagonist carnally, both on the good and bad side of the conflict, so the bad guy (emphasis on guy) would often have a lady lieutenant who wanted to jump James Bond’s bones. The success of the Bond franchise in Japan is likely the cause of a similar trope occurring in tokusatsu movies, particularly at Toho, who co-produced the 1967 007 movie You Only Live Twice. That movie features actress Mie Hama, who the same year played the aforementioned kind of villainess character as Madam Piranha in King Kong Escapes, the evil woman who falls for the hero and betrays her organization to help him, paying the ultimate price for it. Director Ishiro Honda’s kaiju filmography is rife with permutations on this tope, also including Miss Namikawa in Invasion of Astro Monster (1965) and Katsura in Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975), and is arguably a variation on Chika from Half Human (1955) or, stretching a bit, Emiko from the original Godzilla (1954).
Kumi Mizuno’s role as Miss Namikawa probably had the most lasting impact of that set, and as a result, tight-suited alien invader women started popping up elsewhere in the kaiju genre. However, unlike in Invasion of Astro Monster, the Kilaak villains in 1968’s Destroy All Monsters were not subservient to any male characters, nor were the Terrans in 1969’s Gamera vs. Guiron. X1, from 1971’s Gamera vs. Zigra, is a lady technically under the command of the villainous kaiju Zigra, laying groundwork for the “male villain=rubber monster suits”::“female villain=face exposed” dynamic that would be more solidified in the future.
The same year as Gamera vs. Zigra, the henshin hero genre literally exploded with the arrival of Kamen Rider. Rider’s villainous antagonists, Shocker, was pretty much a proverbial sausage-fest in the mold of previous Toei villain syndicates such as Giant Robo’s Big Fire, with the exception of one monster-of-the-week: episode 8’s Wasp Woman. Despite being a minor one-and-done disposable baddie, the character quickly became a fan favorite, inspiring merchandise, cosplay, and dojinshi for decades to follow, getting a cameo in the original manga, appearing in video games, and even getting brought back, in sexier redesign, in movies like Kamen Rider J and Kamen Rider Decade (not to mention a few porn parodies).
If the Wasp Woman seems like she went far from her humble monster-of-the-week origins, it’s just a drop in the bucket compared to the breakout success of another initially one-shot character who first appeared in the second episode of Devilman. The harpy-like demon Sirene was an interesting villainess from the outset, somewhat understandably ticked off that her former demonic comrade/paramour Amon had fallen for a human and was calling himself “Devilman” now, but it was her bare-chested manga incarnation, with additional backstory and more nuanced development, that truly made her an icon. Even in though in the manga she’s still disposed of relatively early in the story, she’s still managed to become an indispensable part of the Devilman mythos, a necessity in every subsequent adaptation, somehow second only to Devilman himself, more recognizable than the series nominal main villains or even the main love interest. Go Nagai has gone so far as to say that she’s one of his favorite creations, which is saying quite a bit considering the size of the man’s bibliography.
Needless to say, with this level of popularity in one of the most seminal works of manga ever, it should come as no surprise that Sirene’s had a few of her own spinoffs over the years as well, ranging from the goofy school comedy Sirene-chan to the dour Sirene: Tanjo Hen, which is sort of like the Devilman origin story but for Sirene.
While she didn’t appear in the show itself, Sirene also shows up in the opening credits of 1994’s New Cutie Honey, which is as good a reason as any to segue into talking about the Cutie Honey franchise. Starting in 1973 and often credited as the genesis of the modern magical girl format, Go Nagai’s third genre-defining opus of the early 1970s basically took a lot of tokusatsu conventions (particularly from Rainbowman) and perved them up with nudity and a gender-swap. The result was that our female lead now had a roster of female villains to battle against, in the form of the evil Panther Claw organization. Both the primary antagonist Sister Jill and the final boss Zora are women, and as such, Panther Claw in many ways feels like the nucleation of the stereotypical evil queen/commander dynamic that you often see in Sentai shows.
Where this trope finally came together in live-action, however, wasn’t in Japan at all, however, but in Hong Kong. Because the movie Super Inframan is so transparently derivative of tropes from the likes of Kamen Rider, Ultraman, and Mazinger Z, it’s very tempting to dismiss the evil princess Elzebub (or “Princess Dragon Mom” in the dub) as another element lifted whole-cloth from Japanese entertainment, in hindsight of the Super Sentai tropes. However, Inframan came first, predating Sun Vulcan’s Queen Hedrian by a good five years, making it the crystallization of the “evil queen sending out rubber suit monsters” dynamic that would later typify the genre.
Inframan didn’t get a theatrical release in Japan, so it’s not clear how much impact it could have conceivably had, though Japanese effects staff who worked on it (and also worked at Toei) might have passed materials around. At any rate, Toei caught up soon enough, first with recurring hench villainesses like Amazoness in Spider-man and Salome in Battle Fever J, gradually codifying the trope.
(I’ve also seen it pointed out that the Canadian/American-made sexploitation Ilsa series also started in 1975 with She-Wolf of the SS. While those movies did release in Japan, elements like Nazis, whips, and sexy lady commanders were all present in the genre prior to their release, so it’s not exactly a slam-dunk that there was any influence there, as most of the individual elements could just be a convenient shorthand for “bad guy” in the same way that devil horns are. But, there’s certain characters with stylistic similarities nevertheless.)
While Toei wasn’t quite on board the villainess commander train in 1975, their competitors in the anime space at Tatsunoko were blazing new ground with their series Time Bokan. A modest success, the show featured heroes who combat the Time Skeletons, a trio of time-traveling thieves, comprised of the sexy leader Majo and her two ugly henchmen.
This villain dynamic became the template for the rest of the Time Bokan franchise to follow, a sprawling marathon of sequels that ran continuously until 1983. The bumbling, ineffective Time Bokan trio became inspiration for numerous inept anime villain trios to follow, from the Grandis Gang in Nadia: Secret of Blue Water to Team Rocket in Pokemon to Pilaf and his goons in Dragon Ball. Particularly within the Time Bokan franchise the formula stayed quite consistent, which is especially fun when the characters cross over with one another in later installments.
If you recognize only a single character in the above lineup, I’d wager solid money that I know which one. The second Time Bokan series, Yatterman, far outstrips the popularity of the rest, having run for a whopping 108 episodes, with a 2008 remake doing a respectable 60 episodes itself, not to mention movies (both animated and tokusatsu), games, etc. Here’s the thing, though: that show’s villainess, Doronjo, is actually more popular than the heroes! Just about any images for Yatterman in any incarnation feature the gangsters prominently, even getting their own video game in 1996. More than just Yatterman, or Time Bokan, Doronjo herself has arguably become a representative character for the entire Tatsunoko studio, on par only with Ken the Eagle from Gatchaman and maybe Speed Racer’s car. And thus, this is where we can start to see a villainess taking center stage away from the heroes. Not too shabby for the “bad guy” role, but one of the key parts of her charm is just what an incompetently poor a job at villainy Doronjo does; such ineptitude for true evil is one of the common themes that you’ll often see in villainous protagonists further down the road.
Doronjo’s impact is so great that the 2015 show Yatterman Night, which was a done as a 40th anniversary tribute to Time Bokan, has her as the main character…sort of. Rather, one of her descendants (along with descendants of her two sidekicks) takes up the Doronbo Gang mantle to rebel against the tyranny of the “Yatter Kingdom” that the original show’s heroes seem to have been responsible for. It’s a nice inversion of the formula, but the groundwork had been laid for it from the beginning.
There are only a few 2D sex symbols of the 1970s that approach the popular saturation level of Doronjo, such as Cutie Honey and Galaxy Express 999’s Maetel, but the queen of them all is, unquestionably, Invader Lum from Rumiko Takahashi’s 1978 megahit Urusei Yatsura. The cute green-haired alien in the tiger-striped bikini is a perpetual icon and face of the franchise so much that people often forget that she’s not the protagonist; she’s technically the antagonist of the story! This is not only because she exists in direct opposition to the protagonist (her irredeemable horndog of a fiancé Ataru, who would decidedly *not* move as much merchandise as Lum would), but because she’s literally an alien invader who’s introduced in the first chapter as the princess of a demonic force out for conquest of Earth. Lum’s imperialist origins rarely play into the story after the pilot, in which the conflict pivots from Ataru having to defeat her to save the planet to him having to deal with her as an unwanted love interest, but it still plays into the overall zeitgeist of the sexy supervillainess transitioning into the cultural limelight. Lum’s impact on anime and manga as a whole can’t be understated, and even today you still see characters from Lala in ToLoveRu to Miia in Monster Musume to Zero Two in Darling in the FranXX to Jellymon in Digimon Ghost Game that are pretty transparent riffs on the most famous bikini-oni in Japanese entertainment.
Most of Lum’s expys are, like herself, fairly innocuous, but Kahm, the horned, bikini-clad, green-haired alien princess of an evil invasion force in Johji Manabe’s 1985 manga and subsequent anime Outlanders is shockingly into her role when she’s introduced, brutally killing a hefty number of Earth defense force troops before eventually failing to defeat, and falling in love with, the human protagonist of the series, becoming one of the good guys. Much like Lum, Kahm is the face of her series despite not technically being the main character, but never quite achieved Lum’s level of worldwide popularity… let’s face it; it’s a tough flex to pivot into a cutesy moe pinup when you’re holding a severed head in your first appearance. It just kinda hits different, ya know?
The shift in world-conquest organizations to humorous main characters continued in 1983’s Prefectural Earth Defense Force, a manga by Koichiro Yasunaga, and its 1986 anime adaptation. The series, about heroes and villains battling for the future of a small, remote part of Kyushu, is an unabashed spoof of tokusatsu conventions from Ultraseven and Super Sentai, but the titular heroes really take a backseat to the inept invaders of the Telephone Pole Gang, particularly their ditzy pink-haired commander (who also happens to be a cute schoolgirl) Baradagi (and yes, there’s a Varan the Unbelievable reference). It’s easy to see why the character is a favorite, playing the role more like an overworked, penny-pinching, put-upon office lady just waiting to punch out for the day than the usual malicious dominatrix associated with the type of role…she even dates the main hero when she’s off the clock! It worked out for her: honestly, I haven’t found a single piece of art for the series without Baradagi front-and-center!
Unfortunately, the Prefectural Earth Defense Force OVA, actually made by several Urusei Yatsura alums, was only ever released directly to ADV’s website in the US, so it’s a really difficult DVD to get ahold of. This is a shame, since it’s well-animated and hilarious…in another, fairer, timeline, it would be regarded here the same way as Project A-ko.
The evolution of the villainess to the proper title character came with 1996’s manga Excel Saga, about the hyperactive, spastic, overenthusiastic Excel, an officer at the evil Across organization, which is, naturally, bent on world domination. While there is a Sentai-like hero team opposing Across, they often disappear into the background cornucopia of unlikely antics going on, especially in the 1999 anime adaptation (the team, Municiple Force Daitenzin, did eventually get their own spinoffs, though, including an official hentai manga). Nowadays, Excel Saga tends to get a pretty bad rap for being a “it’s funny because the characters are yelling loudly” comedy, but it was massively beloved for its absurdity and audacity in its day, even though, yes, some of the charm does involve the incoherent word-vomit that Excel rants out at a mile-per-minute, so extreme that it led her English dub voice actress to suffer vocal chord injuries. It’s tempting to make everything more of a run-on sentence than I normally do just as a tribute to her cadence!
After the postmodernism boom of the 1990s, the deconstructionist approach to villainesses became quite the common trope, ramping up in prevalence across the 2000s, and even though the villainess may not be the main character, they were often primary supporting cast rather than actual antagonists. A few examples include:
The Cosmos House light novel series from 1999, which got anime and manga adaptations released stateside under a renamed based on the hero character: Dokkoida. The series is, like a lot of harem comedies that were popular at the time, about a single guy living in an apartment complex with a gaggle of hot ladies as neighbors. The twist is that our main dude is a superhero, one neighbor is another hero, three are super villains, and nobody knows each other’s secret identities. The villainesses all play into different kinds of archetypes (dominatrix, witch, android), but thanks to some strong characterization and the good judgement to *not* fall completely into the harem genre, it holds up pretty well.
I’ve talked a great deal in the past about the Heroes Are Extinct manga from 2003, because it’s just that great. The gist of the story is that a commander of an extraterrestrial invasion fleet, having spent his whole life watching TV broadcasts from Earth, dreams of going to battle the heroes there. Upon learning that it’s all been fictional, he snaps, secretly kidnapping five Earthlings and giving them advanced technology so they can fight, well, him. His direct supervisor, who he has to convince of things like “the best invasion tactic is to send a giant monster into the city each week, trust me” is the princess of the invaders, who serves as the romantic interest as well.
Also from 2003, Imperfect Hero sees the green ranger (AKA “the boring one”) from a stock sentai team have the queen of a group of subterranean invaders suffer a head injury and move in with him, magical girlfriend-style.
Sekihiko Inui’s Ratman (2007) also plays with the hero/villain dynamic, featuring a guy who joins a villain organization (because his crush and her older sister work there, hence the villainess angle) hoping to reform it from within, only to realize that the so-called hero characters seem to be the real bad guys.
The 2010s saw the supervillainess role in the forefront more than ever before. Aside from the aforementioned Yatterman Night, a few standouts are:
In 2014, World Conquest Zvezda Plot is a show about a little girl heading up the world-conquering evil organization, and the misfits who join her quest. Along with Yatterman Night, it really plays up the “moe” angle for the protagonist (heck, she carries around a stuffed animal!). This trend was possibly spurred by the popularity of The Saga of Tanya the Evil (which has a modern man get reincarnated as a little girl who’s also a thinly-veiled Nazi commander in an alternate history 1920s European war).
The 2016 manga Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General is, as though the title were not clear enough, about a bumbling archetypical commander in an evil organization, and her stalker-ly simping for the superhero Braveman (who’s Batman in all but name). A great deal of the series’ comedy arises from Miss Black General’s over-the-top advances and Braveman’s uncomfortable refutations… kind of like actual Batman, at times.
Superwomen in Love (2018) is a yuri manga about Honey Trap, an evil commander who abandons her post when she falls hard for the Kamen Rider-like heroine Rapid Rabbit. The duo then team up to battle a lot of Honey Trap’s old comrades, who, as it turns out, also don’t seem all that hostile.
2018’s Raw Hero is arguably cheating, since cross-dressing is involved, but hey, trope deconstruction is still part of the trope. Basically, through a series of blunders, a regular dude winds up under deep cover (in more ways than one) as the “female” lieutenant of a stock evil organization, and like in Ratman, the heroes might just be the real fiends. Things get quite raunchy in this title, but it’s from the author of Prison School, so that much is to be expected.
Even the pinnacle of Japanese superheroism, the Ultraman franchise, is starting to see this trope emerge. In 2018, the Kaiju Girls series, in which highschoolers become magical girls endowed with the powers and abilities of famous kaiju from the franchise’s past, opted to not have a traditional theatrical film focusing on the show’s characters, but instead did a spinoff titled Kaiju Girls Black, where a gang with the powers of Commander Black, Silverbloom, and Nova from Ultraman Leo poorly attempt to rain destruction upon Japan (making these particular kaiju cute moeblobs is quite a punch, considering that they’re based on some of the most horrifyingly destructive creatures in the entire Ultra franchise!).
Then there’s the Darkness Heels multimedia project, featuring a team of the most iconic evil Ultras from across the franchise: Belial, Camearra, Juggler, Zagi, and Evil Tiga. However, for the most interesting part, the manga, a new character named Lili joins their antiheroic band, and wouldn’t you know it, she also happens to be a cute girl, giving all these former baddies something to protect even as they try to topple her planet’s government (for, uh, good reasons).
Miss Kuroitsu will wrap up in April (unless it gets a second season), but fans of deconstructed sympathetic tokusatsu villainesses fear not, as the next season will bring Love After World Domination, about a taboo romance between a villainess commander and the red ranger on a Sentai team that opposes her. I’ve been negligent in checking out the source manga, but by all accounts it’s a delight, so the anime adaptation should hopefully be as well.
That completes this rundown of the sympathetic villainess protagonists on the wrong side of the superhero/villain conflict. There’s the occasional dude that fits the profile as well (*cough* Hakaider), but for the most part, they do seem to tend to trend towards the fairer sex. So, yeah, check out a few of these shows, and the next time you find yourself up against and evil queen or dastardly lady lieutenant, try to consider things from her point of view!
In this episode, Kevin sits down for an interview with the team behind Error 4444, an exciting new home video label that’s specializing in Asian genre film. We talk about the company’s origins, licensing philosophy, first few releases, and even tease some of their future plans. Their first Blu-ray release was stellar, and their second (which ships soon) looks promising as well, so if you’re a fan of Asian horror cinema, they’re definitely a brand to check out!
On this episode, Kevin is joined by Alex (Control All Monsters, 13AM Games, Seismic Toys), Connor (Easter’s Kaiju Kompendium), and Mike (Vintage Henshin) to discuss the latest entry in the Ultraman franchise, Ultraman Trigger: New Generation Tiga. Does the show make us Smile Smile, or did it turn us into Giants of Darkness? Give this a listen and find out, if you’ve got the GUTS for it.
On this episode, Kevin is joined by artist John Bellotti Jr of Robo 7 to discuss recent developments of the convention scene from the Artist Alley perspective. Topics include what it was like to be on the ground floor for the Covid-19 omicron variant at AnimeNYC, the seller experience at a virtual convention, and G-Fest’s recent policy change regarding fanart.
Warning: Part of the episode has John recounting the early days of the pandemic in New York City, which gets a bit grim, so be prepared.
2021’s been quite a year for franchise anniversaries! We kicked it off with some retrospective trivia for the 50th anniversary of Spectreman, had galleries for the 50th anniversaries of Kamen Rider and Godzilla vs Hedorah, and did a panel for the 60th anniversary of Gorgo. Those are certainly milestones, but it seems like one of the bigger achievements to celebrate in Japan is the 30th anniversary; for example, Godzilla rang in three decades with the Return of Godzilla reboot, Gamera with Guardian of the Universe, Ultraman with Tiga, even Toho itself with King Kong vs Godzilla. This being 30 years since 1991, we have some strong contenders to look back at:
But it’s December, so naturally that means time to look at the big winter special effects movie release of the year. You know, the sci-fi monster flick with cyborgs and spaceships and lasers and whatnot. The one that Toho was able to sell around the world.
…uh, the one *without* a hit piece on Entertainment Tonight about it.
That’s right, we’re talking about Keita Amemiya’s tokusatsu tour-de-force, Zeiram, originally released December 21, 1991, so let’s celebrate the 30th anniversary with 30 fun factoids related to one of the most iconic monsters in Japanese cinematic history and the badass alien bounty hunter that’s after her. This likely won’t be of much interest to those not already converted to Zeiram appreciation, but I strongly encourage anyone to check these awesome little effects extravaganzas out. They’re, simply put, the best, products of a brief period where ambitious science fiction filmmaking could channel huge imagination with reckless abandon, and weird, cool monsters could really sell a project.
So, if you haven’t seen them, I implore you to do so, and if you have, let’s get started!
1) Kicking things off on the most basic level,the title is actually inconsistently Romanized.
The Japanese ゼイラム is technically transliterated as “Zeiramu”, so the usual, most accepted rendering is Zeiram. However, the original 1994 Streamline dub and 1995 US release via Image Entertainment laserdisc and VHS (and later DVD) simply spelled it “Zeram”, like the character in the Book of Mormon. Many versions, however, gives the both the movies and the spinoff anime vanity umlaut treatment to seem more alien, using Cyrillic lettering: ZËIЯAM. While this looks cool, it would not be pronounced the same way (Я is actually closer to the “y” sound, so it would sound like “ziyam”) and could prove difficult to render in English, and sometimes you also see the compromised form ZËIRAM used as well. (Iria also gets rendered as I・Я・I・A in a similar situation, with a unique three-dot umlaut over the “a” that does not exist in any typeface I know of).
2) We have video games to thank for the franchise.
Keita Amemiya always had some interest in directing, but his career started off more as an illustrator and character designer. In 1986, he did designs for Namco’s game Genpei Toumaden (AKA Samurai Ghost) and got to make his pro directorial debut on a nine-minute live-action short promoting the piece. Evidently the company was impressed, because not only did Amemiya return for further designs on Namco’s 1988 game Mirai Ninja, but he was also allowed to adapt it into a feature film, marking not just Amemiya’s feature debut, but the first ever full movie based on a video game. Cyber Ninja (as Streamline renamed the movie) made enough of an impression that plans began for a sequel, but unable to secure the budget for setpieces on the required scale, the movie morphed into what became Zeiram.
Also of note is that the eventual film franchise retained many of Cyber Ninja’s staff, including actor Kunihiko Ida, suit actor Mizuho Yoshida, music by Koichi Ota, designs by Katsuya Terada, and modeling by Takayuki Takeya.
3) The video game connection actually got stronger later on.
The original title for the movie was HP9999 (which is pretty gamey), and it involved a boy getting pulled into a video game created by aliens – he had to beat the game in one night or he’d die for real. There was the idea that he’d be saved at the end by a female alien warrior, and eventually Amemiya decided to make her the protagonist, at which point the game theme was dropped, though the “trapped in a virtual space” theme remained via the Zone.
4) Much like Cyber Ninja, the Zeiram franchise blends classical Japan into its sci-fi imagery. Bringing Edo-era jidai-geki aesthetics into a science fiction setting isn’t exactly new (the movie that inspired Amemiya to become a director was Star Wars, after all), but Zeiram remixes it in a way that feels fresh and lived in, along with other unusual worldbuilding quirks. For the anime, Amemiya also took elements of Chinese and Vietnamese culture into the mix.
5) There’re modern influences, too. Aside from the traditional Japanese stuff, the movies tread on imagery similar to the likes of Hollywood action flicks like Star Wars, Alien, and Terminator. Amemiya had previously worked on Metal Heroes shows for Toei, and elements of that also show through in the designs, as well as the Zone feeling similar to the alternate spaces that heroes often battle monsters in for those programs. Iria’s tough-girl, armor-clad persona often gets compared to Samus from Metroid as well.
6) The movie kicked off a long line of collaborations between Amemiya and Yukijiro Hotaru. Actor Hotaru has gone so far to say he’s now the head of an Amemiya Appreciation Group, having appeared in Hakaider, Mikazuki, Garo, Moon Over Tao, Rokuroku, and Cutie Honey the Live.
7) Zeiram’s suit actor Mizuho Yoshida and Iria’s stuntman Akira Ohashi just keep fighting one another.
Yoshida was Legion in Gamera 2 against Ohashi’s Gamera, while in Giant Monsters All-out Attack, Yoshida’s Godzilla fought Ohashi’s Ghidorah.
8) Lilliput has a rare monster suit actress.
While Yumi Kameyama is usually cited as the first stuntwoman to don a kaiju suit for her role as Gyaos in Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, and some fans will recall Jennie Kaplan for her role as Pigmon in Ultraman Powered, Mayumi Aguni has both beat by a few years for her role as the monster Lilliput in the original Zeiram. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like she was able to make much more of a career out of it, as her only other appearance that I’ve found was as additional cast in a Japanese rendition of My Fair Lady.
Oh, and as long as we’re being feminist, please remember that the monster Zeiram is female; remind people to stop misgendering Zeiram.
9) Zeiram’s face is *not* portrayed by an actress, but a giant puppet.
The pale feminine face’s creepy and expressive enough that a lot of people watching the movie assume that’s an actress, but it’s not. Still, one has to wonder if it freaked people out on set. (Amemiya commented that one shooting session lasted 37 hours without sleep, at which point pretty much everyone would have been pretty loopy, right?)
10) Takeshi Koike once drew Zeiram for Animage. Long before he was famous, the future Redline director leveraged his experience as an animator by taking gigs rendering current live-action movies in anime style for the pages of Animage. While his rendition of Terminator 2 is probably more famous, I have to wonder if his Zeiram illustration sewed any seeds for the eventual Iria OVA.
11) A weird renga ran in Gekkan Afternoon that made Zeiram 2 look quite different. The piece showed off and described a “Zeiram Queen”, making it appear as the antagonist of the film, when no such creature appeared in the movie; either tantalizing worldbuilding extra backstory or a total misdirect, depending on your point of view.
12) The mercenaries in Zeiram 2 were literally crowdsourced.
For the scene at the beginning of the film where Iria is confronted by a huge group of mercenaries, it would have certainly stressed the designers and costume department to come up with hundreds of original background designs. So, instead, they placed an ad in the modeling magazine B-Club asking cosplayers to audition their original characters for a chance to cameo in the movie. It was quite successful, yielding the great, varied assortment of alien bad guys.
13) Masakazu Katsura is somehow involved in all three major parts of the Zeiram saga.
If you read the Masakazu Katsura retrospective, this is old news, but it bears repeating that Keita Amemiya and manga author Masakazu Katsura are old friends. So naturally Katsura made a cameo as a passerby during the Akihabara scene of the first movie.
Three years later he did some promotional artwork, which wound up being used on the Zeiram 2 laserdisc:
What’s interesting about this is that it renders Iria in his own art style, yet still looks completely different from how he rendered her for the Iria anime around the same time:
I guess she’s younger in the anime, but why the change in hair color?
14) Iria was briefly the face of anime, according to Central Park Media.
People who weren’t around in the mid-90s may not remember just how big a fish Iria was in the small pond that was the North American anime scene at the time. Not only did the OVA frequently run on the SciFi Channel, but CPM had posters made for video stores promoting anime as sort of its own brand, featuring Iria demanding, at gunpoint, that we ask the clerks there about their anime selection.
15) Moon Over Tao is kind of the third Zeiram movie.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an alien bioweapon monster is loose on the Earth, and it’s up to two human dudes and a sexy alien warrior lady to stop it. Sure, in Moon Over Tao the monster is the red, blood-drinking Makaraga instead of Zeiram, and they never explicitly say that the alien women (all three played by Iria’s actress Yuko Moriyama) are from planet Myce, but it’s easy enough to pretend that Amemiya’s 1997 samurai flick is a prequel, and that Avira could be some sort of ancestor to Iria. Of course, the DVD set released in Japan puts both Zeirams, Moon Over Tao, and Cyber Ninja together in the same package, while even Media Blasters’ “Keita Amemiya Collection” bundled Moon Over Tao with Zeiram 2 at least.
16) The cast of Zeiram cameos in Mikazuki, in bottlecap form. Further bindingthe Zeiram films to Moon Over Tao was Crowd Toys’ super-limited run of bottlecap figures. Keen-eyed viewers can spot them in a scene in episode 4 of Mikazuki!
17) The Zeiram manga tells an original story.
Often unfairly overlooked, Takashi Shimizu (not that one)’s 1996 Zeiram manga is a cool sequel because it features Iria returning to Earth and fighting Zeiram-based human hybrids that the Earthling government has been developing from the debris she’d left behind three years prior. Iria has a new kid sidekick this time around named Lute, who’s basically the same character that Kei was in the anime. Also, bionic armor.
18) The franchise goes almost full-Metroid with Hyper Iria. While the influence of the Metroid games on the Zeiram movies, even given their video game origins, is debatable, the 1995 SNES Hyper Iria is a platformer that leans heavily into the so-called “Metroidvania” genre. It’s not a bad game, to boot, and fortunately has a fan translation, though the plot isn’t exactly complicated.
19) Zeiram Zone features all sorts of new monster designs. Allegedly the final game developed by Megaman creator Akira Kitamura (I can’t find a primary source on that, though), the 1996 PlayStation action game Zeiram Zone features and original story along with a whole host of interesting new enemies for Iria to battle against….of course, they’re kind of blocky polygons, so you might have a better time just appreciating the concept art than looking at them in the gameplay.
20) There was a stage play version in 2007.
The Capsule Corps theater troupe, who have adapted works such as DNA2 and Karakuri Circus for the stage, performed Zeiram the Live seven times in July of 2007. The next year they followed it up with a stage version of Moon Over Tao.
21) There’re numerous options for video releases.
In the US alone, there have been seven releases of Zeiram, six of Zeiram 2, and six of Iria, across various formats. So, which ones should you get? Well, the original Zeiram is getting a 30th anniversary Blu-ray next week from Media Blasters, so, barring disaster, that should be the best version for that film. Their Blu-ray for Zeiram 2 easily tops the quality and features on their previous DVD releases. For Iria it gets more complicated: the in-print release is the Master Collection from Discotek, which has the best picture quality and updated subtitles, but the older 3-disc edition from Media Blasters has concept art and interviews with the voice actors not present on the Discotek release. (Iria is also pretty widely-available streaming, via Midnight Pulp, Tubi, Amazon Prime, etc. Zeiram 2 is also on Midnight Pulp, and I would not be surprised to see the original on there soon.)
22) Some of Iria’s figures are a little different. Crowd had big plans for their 1997 Zeiram figure line, which only launched with the second film’s Iria and Zeiram 2, but the packaging promised “look for these upcoming characters in the Zeiram line” with pictures of the original movie’s Iria and Zeiram (both of them with and without their capes), Kamiya and Teppei, Fujikuro, and Lilliput. None of those came to be, but we did get clear variant figures, as well as the strangely named Kilyco, described as “Iria’s doppelganger”, who doesn’t appear in any movie. A decade later, Kaiyodo issued a relatively screen-accurate figure of Zeiram paired with a pale Iria clad in red, black, and bone armor. Described as the “ethnic version”, this take on Iria isn’t really elaborated on any further. Best guess is just that Takayuki Takeya thought she’d be cool that way.
23) Even without movies, new designs continue in model kit form.
The September 2021 issue of Hobby Japan featured a kit with a new design for “Female Zeiram”, which is funny, since as we’ve established, Zeiram has always been female.
24) The series’ props are among the most popular bits of merchandise.
Crowd made a model kit series specifically for replica props from the films. Entries included: 1) Iria’s handgun (first movie version) 2) Iria’s communicator 3) Iria’s save gun, lighter, and grenade 4) the Kamalite, card, and Kannon from Zeiram 2 5) Iria’s handgun (second movie version) 6) Iria’s submachinegun
25) Zeiram 2 won the 1995 Seiun Award.
Winning the award for Best Dramatic Presentation from the oldest SF awards ceremony in Japan is no mean feat… even the Godzilla franchise didn’t manage to pull that off until 2016! Kamen Rider, Super Sentai, and Studio Ghibli similarly only have a single win a piece.
26) There are several parallels between Zeiram and Garo.
There was a time when Zeiram was definitively Amemiya’s magnum opus, but now the Garo franchise has eclipsed it by far. In fact, an average Garo episode has a budget roughly the same as the whole first Zeiram movie’s! That said, there are certainly echoes between the premises of the two: both revolve around a monster hunter who operates in secret from the main population of the Earth befriending a regular civilian and dragging them into their crazy hidden monster world. Both have a variety of gadgets, including a disembodied entity that lives on their hand and gives them advice, long flowing clothes as an outer garment, and armor that they can summon. Heck, both even have animated prequels of contested canonicity with character designs by Masakazu Katsura!
27) There’s a bit of a resemblance between Iria and Karin from DNA2. Masakazu Katsura began working on the DNA2 manga in 1993, between the original Zeiram movie and the Iria OVAs. So, as much as Katsura may have gleaned from tokusatsu Iria for Karin’s look, he then put it forward when he designed Iria for the anime.
28) Amemiya also recycled Iria’s look a bit for Justy from Juskiss. Released in 1996, the direct-to-video spoof Juskiss was an adaptation of a play about a female alien agent who comes to Earth pursuing a criminal. Naturally, for a character premise this close to Iria, you might as well get Keita Amemiya himself to do the heroine design, so as a result the parody element of this is intensified.
29) The movies may have even influenced the designs in Final Fantasy VII.
We all know that Keita Amemiya was involved in Final Fantasy XIV, which went so far as to have Garo armors available for their characters. But it’s also been suggested that some of the Zeiram designs may have been on the minds of Final Fantasy developers as far back as FFVII in 1997. It’s not as farfetched as it sounds, given that Zeiram 2 was a sizable hit in otaku communities and FFVII designer Tetsuya Nomura was apparently a fan of Takeyuki Takeya, who joined working on the franchise with the next entry, FFVIII.
By the way, for those skeptical souls that don’t think that the franchise could have had an impact on one of the most important video games of all time, please remember that Resident Evil 2’s final boss was originally planned to be named Zeiram.
30) It’s hard not to see parallels between Iria and Pacific Rim: the Black’s Mei as well.
Given that the Pacific Rim franchise is rife with tokusatsu homages, this has got to be one, though I haven’t seen any confirmation from the showrunners.
On that note, let’s kick back and enjoy the rest of Zeiram’s birthday. If you want to celebrate, remember the new Blu-ray release, as well assome newmerch comingout of Japan… who knows, if they do numbers, maybe Amemiya will finally make good on his promise of Zeiram 3!
This weekend is Kaiju Masterclass, the second annual meeting of the premiere online convention for all things kaiju-related.
There’re lots of cool guests this year, including Ryuhei Kitamura, Tom Kitagawa, Kazuki Omori, Fuyuki Shinada, and more; check out the schedule for when each interview will go live (though they’ll remain online in perpetuity)!
Of course, on the Maser Patrol front, Kevin will be giving a solo panel Saturday at 1PM EST, this time on the complicated entertainment business background of the Tsuburaya family, as well as joining Kaiju Transmissions‘ Matt and Byrd, along with The Lost Films Fanzine‘s John LeMay, 3PM Sunday to discuss the 50th anniversary of Gorgo.
On top of that, Amanda will be interpreting for several of the guests, including Tom Kitagawa, Reijiro Koroku (in his first-ever English-language interview), and Makoto Inoue.
It’s sure to be a fun, busy, educational weekend; hope everyone is able to tune in! Opening ceremonies are tonight at 8PM EST.
Now, clearly, Japan has no shortage of iconic slasher movies:
…but this is fundamentally a monster ‘blog, so mundane human slasher characters just won’t suffice. To that end, we want to look at a subcategory that I call, for lack of a better term, “slasher monsters”. To clarify:
“Slashers” are villains who stalk and kill a group of regular-folk protagonists (who are usually cut off from the help of the rest of society) one by one. Slashers generally work alone but stopping them serves a significant obstacle to the hero.
“Monsters” are physically abnormal creatures, either due to mutation, or magic, or displacement in space and time, which makes them incongruous with the setting of the narrative.
“Slasher monsters” are characters that fill both the role of slasher and monster, living at the intersection of the spaces:
Now, it’s arguable that these kinds of monsters have been around forever, and you can certainly make a case for various characters across the whole history of Japanese cinema, such as the Invisible Man in the 40s and 50s, the Jaguma ape in the 60s, the Venus Fly Trap in the 70s. But the slasher genre as we know it is really a child of the 1980s, so we’ll focus our attention around that timeframe. In that heyday, slashers were quite popular in Japan, from imports (see the previous retrospective on Friday the 13th, which somehow missed the manga short Final Girl), to co-productions (did you know that Daiei was on the production committee for Cheerleader Camp?), to original features.
Whenever the topic of Japanese slasher flicks comes up, the elephant in the room will of course be 1988’s Evil Dead Trap. The focus of the film is on a TV crew who, upon receiving a copy of a snuff film, decide to go investigate an abandoned military base themselves instead of reporting anything to the authorities. Naturally, the place is booby-trapped to ribbons, so the group is picked off one-by-one by a mysterious cloaked figure.
It may be a bit of a spoiler, but from the inclusion here, you can figure out that the killer Hideki is no mundane maniac. It turns out that he, much like the killer in a recent high-budget Hollywood flick (spoilers!) is actually a malformed conjoined twin bullying his brother into a murderous rampage. The effects here, both for the uncanny embryonic Hideki and his brother after suffering extreme burns, are great, and it was the picture that put Shinichi Wakasa on the map and led to the likes of Peacock King and his later Godzilla work. (The movie was followed by the misleadingly-titled Evil Dead Trap 2: Hideki, which was unrelated.)
As you can surmise from the English title, Evil Dead Trap (in Japanese Shiryo no Wana) was named such to exploit the popularity of the Evil Dead movies, called Shiryo no Harawata in Japan, meaning “Entrails of Departed Spirits” (the Japanese titles of flicks like ReAnimator and Day of the Dead also leverage a “Shiryo no <something>” title format). The Japanese title of Evil Dead, however, was itself likely intended to invoke the nasty pink film series Tenshi no Harawata, AKA Angel Guts, and in full circle, the main character Nami in Evil Dead Trap is named after the lead from an Angel Guts flick.
Anyway, it’s not clear whether director Kazuo ‘Gaira’ Komizu was trying to invoke Angel Guts, Evil Dead, or both when he came up with his own “Entrails” series, Entrails of a Virgin and Entrails of a Beautiful Woman, both in 1986. Both movies combine pink softcore pornography with sexual violence and monster horror, so depending on one’s threshold, it could be a bit much. Entrails of a Virgin has a group of photographers in the woods getting stalked by a rapist mud monster. While there’s a memorable part at the end where a survivor gives birth to a monster baby, the monster for most of the movie itself is relatively showed in shadows that made getting satisfying screencaps difficult, so we don’t have any here. On the other hand, Entrails of a Beautiful Woman is a creature spectacle, as its story about a sexually assaulted woman reviving as a demon who kills off her attackers keeps things much more brightly lit.
1986 was quite a busy year for director Gaira, since he also made Guzoo: The Thing Forsaken by God – Part 1. The flick (pronounced like “gew-zew”) was produced specifically for the Japanese horror magazine V-Zone, but alas, the magazine ceased publication before a part 2 could be produced. It deals with a group of four schoolgirls on a trip to a remote, abandoned resort, where a tentacle monster lives in the mirrors and comes after them. The concept and monster design for the piece was by Hitoshi Matsuyama, who would go on to write Battle Girl: Living Dead in Tokyo Bay for Gaira (often cited as the first Japanese zombie movie), as well as direct a lot of direct to video monster stuff like Monster Commando, Space Hunter Miki, and Welcome to the Vampire Onsen. It’s not a bad monster design, kind of a tentacled venus flytrap sort of deal, but unfortunately the sound it makes when it attacks is somewhere between the squeaks from the rubber stretching in a balloon and a flatulent whoopie cushion.
While the next movie’s name has Guzoo’s strange rhyming cadence and only-on-VHS status, 1987’s Conton‘s plot more echoes Entrails of a Beautiful Woman’s description about a wronged party turning into a monster and exacting gory vengeance on those that did them in, as the hero turns into a big nasty thing to go up against some yakuza at the climax. It’s the only directorial credit for Takuro Fukuda, but he’s since become a minor powerhouse of the TV tokusatsu screenwriting industry, writing for titles like Vampire Host, Ultraman Max, Ultraseven X, Kamen Rider Ghost, and Kamen Rider Sabre. I really wish Conton were available in better quality, since the creature does look pretty good.
The protagonist’s transformation towards the end doesn’t come out of the blue, since it’s set up across the whole flick through a series of dreams where he’s stalked by a mysterious armored demon.
The demon kind of resembles a samurai, which brings up a bit of a recurrent theme in the genre: jidai geki-inspired stuff is all over the place in Japanese monster slashers. Heck, it’s even around in American-made ones (look at BloodBeat or Ninja III: The Domination), so it goes without saying that it’s been a factor in Japan’s own flicks as well. Let’s look at a few, shall we?
Because I love this particular franchise, I’ll start the “period piece influence” discussion with Zeiram. It’s pure science fiction, but like some other major scifi franchises (*cough* Star Wars), it invokes some samurai movie aesthetics, particularly with the title monster’s head looking like a kasa (a traditional straw hat) in the first movie. In the second movie, the hat is actually a hat, and underneath it she’s designed to evoke a kitsune (fox spirit).
Anyway, Zeiram is one of the most iconic and intimidating creatures in all of Japanese cinema, managing to exude pure malice doing little more than standing there…it’s very Jason Voorhees of her. Anyway, I won’t say too much since we’ve talked quite a bit about those movies on the Keita Amemiya podcast discussion, and expect me to do something more by the end of the year (the original Zeiram is turning 30 in December), but if you haven’t checked those out, get those movies and the OVA series ASAP! (The original film is hitting Blu-ray in the US soon, and Zeiram 2 is already out.)
Zeiram’s combination of retro and sci-fi could also be seen the year prior in Macoto Tezka’s second theatrical outing, Monster Heaven: Ghost Hero. While nominally a sequel to 1986’s weird direct-to-video period-piece anthology Monster Heaven, Ghost Hero is completely different as it has a single plot throughout, all set in the modern day as a high-tech office building is terrorized by a maniac possessed by an ancient samurai spirit. There’s shades of Gremlins 2 in the premise, but the scene where the villain faces off against a glowing, holographic, silver-clad videogame heroine also foreshadows Iria and Zeiram’s impending series of duels across their own franchise. Anyway, Ghost Hero is a hell of a lot of fun, and hopefully Tezka eventually gets his due as a creative in his own right instead of getting pigeonholed as the guy who makes adaptations of his dad’s work.
Ghost Hero’s effects director Tomoo Haraguchi followed it up with a movie of his own (also with actor Masato Ibu, and a cameo by Tezka, to boot!), also featuring a killer sci-fi samurai: 1991’s Mikadroid, AKA Robokill Beneath Disco Club Layla (nobody calls it that, though). The film features an abandoned WW2-era killing machine reawakening in modern day under a night club, to predictable consequences. While not the best in the genre, the titular creature design is certainly memorable. In fact, it’s one of only a few on this list to ever get made into a vinyl figure!
Mikadroid was actually first conceived as a zombie flick titled “Mikado Zombie”, until the stigma associated with horror flicks following the otaku murder case led to it getting retooled. Samurai zombies did eventually become a thing, though, in 2008’s Samurai Zombie, which was directed by Tak Sakaguchi and written by Ryuhei Kitamura, of Versus fame, and similarly, the movie also features a group of people beset by an undead samurai in the woods…granted, Versus also has zombie samurai in spades, but this film bulks them up to closer to slasher status than the comical non-threat they were in Versus.
(Though truly, along those lines, all that got started with arguably the most slashery Japanese title that Kitamura ever worked on, his 1997 debut, Down to Hell (to which Versus is a sequel), where a murdered guy comes back as a zombie to dispatch his attackers one by one.)
Temporal displacement for slashers need not always just come from the past, as the 1986 movie Biotherapyshows. This film has the staff of a laboratory getting stalked by a figure in a fedora and black trench coat, with the twist at the end that the killer is a super-evolved bacterium from the future who’s after a medication that the lab is going to develop. Extreme gore aside, the mystery, tension, and wild concept of the whole thing plays a lot like an episode of Ultraseven, completed by the presence of Shouji Nakayama (Captain Kiriyama himself) in one of the lead roles…he was also in Monster Heaven: Ghost Hero, now that I think about it.
Of course, the bacterium wouldn’t have necessarily needed to grow to the size of a full adult human to be an effective slasher; as any fan of Chucky or Leprechaun could tell you, a killer imp can be just as scary. Case in point: Tsuburaya’s 1985 direct-to-video flick Gakidama, which I’ve talked about in the past and will continue to do forever until it gets a US release. While the first half of the movie is more body horror, as a guy who swallowed a spirit coughs up a sentient, malicious ball of flesh, but it goes much more slasher in the later half as the creature then stalks the guy’s wife, including an attack in the shower.
Getting a little weirder with the tinier terrors, one could make the argument that the titular Hiruko the Goblin in Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1991 adaptation of Daijiro Morohoshi’s manga Yokai Hunter manga also works like a slasher, in that she lurks in the dark and stalks people around an abandoned school. Of course, she does so in the form of a severed head with spider legs sticking out of it, so it may depend on if you consider John Carpenter’s The Thing a slasher as well…until the end, where it turns into more of swarm situation. (This is another film with a Blu-ray release coming soon to the UK and US, by the way!)
Speaking of The Thing, that and Alien are certainly the main inspirations behind the 1987 anime movie Lily CAT, dealing with familiar themes of aliens, cyborgs, and…well, a cat on a spaceship. The same year, another OVA, Black Magic M-66, aped the original Terminator, with a killer android on a kill mission. I kind of miss the era when anime would make neat little low-horror flicks shamelessly lifting the plots from Hollywood horror flicks, especially with their own spin. (Yeah, Black Magic was technically a manga before Terminator came out, but the OVA isn’t all that close to its source material.)
Slashers, and subsequently slasher monsters, really peaked in popularity in the 80s and 90s, but subsequent eras have had shades of them continuing into the 2000s, even as the Japanese horror landscape shifted more towards zombies, ghosts, curses, and whatever the heck you call the things that Yoshihiro Nishimura does. Among the Sushi Typhoon generation, you can most make a case for the slasher/monster-ness Predator-inspired titular alien in 2010’s AVN –Alien vs Ninja, whose producer Yoshinori Chiba actually started his career with Zeiram. (Japanese AVP riffs aren’t just limited to that, as Junya Okabe also made a really neat fan short for ZVP – Zatoichi vs Predator!) Another cool suitmation baddie was from 2015’s Gemu, a short independent flick from Shingo Maehata, which riffs on Hiruko (and Garo) as a student and teacher fight a huge man-eating creature at school at night.
One of the shifts in the effects industry in the 21st century is a greater emphasis on adaptations of popular manga series, which tend to be long-form in a way not particularly conducive to the slasher movie format, but there are times where sections can have that vibe. For example, there’s 2010’s Gantz, which while mostly an action franchise, has some slasher vibes on its first mission when the hulking Onion Alien goes up against the first batch of helpless humans pitted against him. Gantz’s author Hiroya Oku also did Inuyashiki, which has an absolutely chilling cyborg serial killer as its villain, and got a movie in 2018.
Purely in terms of design, I have to give it up for 2008’s Negative Happy Chainsaw Edge, though, as the film with some of the most undiluted slasher DNA in its antagonist. Based on the debut novel of Tatsuhiko Takimoto (Welcome to NHK), it’s about a girl who’s forced to go out and do battle against a silent, chainsaw-wielding maniac on a nightly basis.
It’s tempting to leave it at that, but that’d be omitting a pair of the most noteworthy characters, for the taxonomically awkward reason that they’re not technically in Japanese movies, but rather Hollywood films based on Japanese games. However, being some of the most iconic of all Japanese monsters, and especially titans of this subgenre, I can’t fail to bring up Nemesis (from 1999’s Resident Evil 3) and Pyramid Head (from 2001’s Silent Hill 2), both of which go far beyond being just memorable boss fight monsters and became the face (or lack thereof) for their respective franchises and genres. Either one of these dudes probably inspired more nightmares than the rest of this list combined.
As mentioned earlier, both the slasher genre and Japanese horror have seen ebbs and flows over the decades, and with a decreased appetite for practical special effects and a studio system generally more averse to risk than in previous generations, it seems unlikely that there will ever be a return to the glorious (and under-appreciated) level of this style of monster flicks that we had in the 1980s. However, there’s still a lot to pick from, and hopefully some of these get license rescued from their current prison of Japanese VHS-only releases, and shared with generations to come. Many of the movies from this era are pretty short, so they’re the perfect thing to pop on for an hour or so to get into the spirit of the season. Happy Halloween!
Special thanks to the horror community of The Yurei at Grimoire of Horror for suggestions for this post! The article will be cross-posted there as well.
Compared to other major occidental holidays like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Halloween has been notably slow to pick up momentum in Japan. The reason for this is mainly that Japan already has a spooky season: the summer, culminating in their festival of the dead, Obon, in mid-August (or mid-July, depending on where you are in Japan). There’s a particular resonance of spookiness on years like this, though, when Obon lines up with a Friday the 13th. Though the day-before-Satuday-the-14th’s superstitious unluckiness is much more a tradition in English, German, and French-speaking countries than it is in Japan, there is one horror-related aspect that they’ve wholeheartedly embraced about the day: Friday the 13th. The movies. Y’know, with that Jason fella.
The films of the Friday the 13th franchise, remarkably, all got released theatrically in Japan almost concurrently with their American counterparts, fueled by the ravenous appetite for horror and the video boom during the bubble economy. In fact, fandom was so strong there for a while that international collectors seeking the definitive editions of the movies would import from Japan; for example, Japan had the only 3D-formated home video version of Friday the 13th Part 3 (which, incidentally, was produced under the fake title “Crystal Japan”) for some time. Oh, and as some related trivia: that movie’s director, Steve Miner, was at one point going to direct the American-made Godzilla: King of the Monsters in 3D immediately following. There’s even a Godzilla nod in Part III, with a shot of one of Ed Godziszewski’s old articles.
Now that we have our obligatory Godzilla mention out of the way, let’s discuss one of the other most iconic monsters of cinema: Jason Voorhees. The hockey-mask-clad maniac is such a tentpole that people around the world know his image without having to see a single movie, and Japan is no exception. He might not have any real cinematic connection with the country (well, aside from strangling one Japanese-American character in Jason Takes Manhattan), but he resonated nevertheless, much more than, say, the couple of Japan-centric episodes of the Jason-less Friday the 13th: The Series. I mean, how often can you find a common element across titles as varied as Fruits Basket, Dorohedoro, Himouto Umaru-chan, and Sword Art Online?
So, to that, let’s kick off Obon festivities and celebrate the 13th with a look at some of the more memorable appearances and homages to the great Crystal Lake slasher in Japanese media.
Part 1: Crystal Lake at Yamanaka
In 2009, Yamanaka, the largest of the five Fuji lakes, officially renamed to “Crystal Lake” for thirteen days to promote the latest movie. During the same period, the Snoop steakhouse on the shore was rebranded as a F13-themed “Jason Diner” where the manager prepared Jason burgers while wearing a hockey mask.
Part 2: Magical Girl Spec-ops Asuka‘sVoorhees-class Disas
Makoto Fukami and Seigo Tokiya’s gritty, ultra-violent take on magical girl tropes weaponized for military purposes breaks its enemy monsters down into a number of classes inspired by horror cinema, and one of the first introduced is the lumbering brawlers in the Voorhees class. They’re not as magically powerful as some of the higher-ranking enemies, but still prove quite a lot to take on with conventional weapons.
Part 3: Irresponsible Captain Tylor’s Jason
Perhaps foreshadowing the events of Jason X, the crew of the space battleship Soyokaze in the classic scifi comedy The Irresponsible Captain Tylor includes one space marine known only as Jason. Like all the space marines, he’s prone to unnecessary fits of violence, wielding a chainsaw in situations when it’s rather uncalled for, and there’s a recurring gag about how he doesn’t work on Fridays.
Part 4: Tokyo Ghoul’s Yamori
A cruel gangster who runs Shibuya (the 13th ward of Tokyo), Yamori is known by the alias “Jason” for his imposing mask and sadistic demeanor. Keep in mind, this is in a franchise where the majority of the cast are monsters that eat people.
Part 5: Akazukin Chacha episode 67 “Dread! Friday the 12th”
Akazukin Chacha (or Lil’ Red Riding Hood Cha-cha, if you go by the official English name for it) is a cute show about a girl going to school to learn magic, but mostly getting into miscellaneous misadventures. The 67th episode sees the class go on a camping field trip, where they naturally hear spooky stories about Jason. They then run into a masked man with an axe in the wilderness who terrorizes them completely inadvertently, since he’s just a kindly lumberjack.
Part 6: Soul Eater‘s Sonson J. and Horror Dragon
Soul Eater shows off its horror geek cred by having a minor villain by the name of Sonson J, who, unlike the stereotypical hockey-masked Jason expy, wears a bag on his head like Jason had in his debut in Friday the 13th Part 2. We don’t spend a lot of time with Sonson, but he’s mentioned as the “Bloodthirsty Killer of Emerald Lake”, and one of the people evil enough to get targeted by the death god protagonists of the series. It’s an honor, since most of the characters like that are loosely based on real people (e.g. Jack the Ripper, Rasputin), and the only other movie-inspired one is the amalgam “Frey D Sadko”, of which you can probably parse out the original namesakes.
While it didn’t make it into the anime, the Soul Eater manga also has a “horror dragon” that looks kind of like if Cerberus if it was cosplaying the Freddy/Leatherface/Jason trinity.
Part 7: Kindaichi Case Files “The Legend of Lake Hiren”
The seventh volume of the Kindaichi Case Files manga (and the fifth episode of the anime), like every other story in that franchise, is a murder mystery, this time with young detective Kindaichi looking into a nasty series of slayings at a lakeside by an axe-wielding criminal explicitly described as wearing a Jason mask. The distinct triangle marking on Jason’s mask is gone in the anime version, but there in the manga. This is a popular story with Kindaichi fans, so sometimes you’ll see Japanese “Jason” cosplayers who are actually just doing Kindaichi Case Files cosplay.
Part 8: Slasher Maidens
Tetsuya Tashiro’s Slasher Maidens is set in a world populated by dangerous kaijin, so the best way to combat them is by equipping magical girls with powerful relics belonging to famous historical (and referenced in roundabout ways for copyright reasons) kaijin. In our main heroine trio, there’s one girl with a chainsaw and one with a fedora and bladed glove, but the leader inherits her mask and large machete from a certain vaguely-familiar slasher of old. Of course, sometimes these relics will take over and drive the girls to go berserk, which is when they have to be snapped back to their senses by a character who’s basically a less comedic version of Ataru Moroboshi. (In fairness, I don’t think we’ve ever seen Freddy Krueger kill anyone who was trying to blow in his ear at the time.)
Part 9: Bite Me If You Love Me
Naoyuki Tomomatsu has made one of my favorite zombie movies (Stacy) and some that make my brain hurt (Lust of the Dead), but his 2011 romantic comedy Bite Me If You Love Me definitely falls into the “great” camp. It follows a rabid horror fangirl who turns her boyfriend into a zombie because that’s her fetish, only for a weird love triangle to emerge when she also falls for her burly, mute, and mask-clad American classmate, Jason Yamada. There’s lots of laughs to be had as she playfully frolics around with Jason, surrounded by glittery romantic shoujo sparkle effects, and yes, there’s even an explicit sex scene between the two that goes on for nearly three minutes. True to the character, he immediately attacks her with a hatchet for her sexual conduct.
Part 10: Jason x Sadako shipping fan art
As major horror icons, both Jason and Sadako Yamamura from The Ring featured prominently in Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights events of the mid 2010s (along with the likes of Ju-On’s ghosts, Chucky, and Resident Evil zombies). Well, apparently, this was enough to trigger the “they certainly are next to each other, they’re probably a couple” logic of shipping fans, and a whole meme of Jason and Sadako being a couple exploded across fandom. The amount of fan art on this is truly astounding, including permutations where Chucky is one of their kids.
Of course, if if a cute romance with the petite Sadako isn’t really your thing, there are alternatives, as I’ve also seen a hardcore yaoi doujinshi or two where Jason gets down with the equally burly Leatherface. If nothing else, the horror community is a diverse one.
Part 11: Jason’s Blood Diner
Speaking of Halloween Horror Nights, Jason had haunted mazes at the event for three years in a row, with the 2012 and 2013 events being called “Jason’s Blood Diner” (some American sites list it as “Jason’s Bloody Diner”, but photos of the event contradict that), a more unique moniker than 2014’s stock “Friday the 13th”.
Exactly what Jason has to do with dining is not exactly clear, but at the same event, you *could* get Bloody Jason sandwiches, which were chicken and onion, with an impaled quail egg for his eye.
Part 12: Kotobukiya’s Bishoujo Jason
Japanese figure collectors have no shortage of options when it comes to their Jason Voorhees merchandise. They could go for an articulated Revoltech with lots of accessories, or a Deforeal if they wanted something cuter. Or a Pitanui plush if they wanted something *much* cuter. These are all nice, but not unlike similar merchandise available in the US.
So, that begs the question, is there a Jason figure so out there that only Japan would even attempt it? Well, Kotobukiya has you covered. In 2013 they launched their Bishoujo Statue line, based on Shunya Yamashita’s illustrations of beautiful girls based on comic, movie, and game characters. A good deal of the line is conventional, but an early announcement was for Freddy vs Jason. The outlandishness of the concept was so popular that sexy lady versions of Edward Scissorhands, Chucky, Ash, Pennywise, Beetlejuice, Michael Myers, Leatherface, and Pinhead (as well as an original Ghostbuster) swiftly followed. Interestingly, the concept art shows the design in a different pose as well, but the one produced is probably the better for display.
Part 13: Splatterhouse
In the name of saving the best for last, let’s talk about Splatterhouse!
One of the most iconic of all horror video game franchises, Splatterhouse wears its influences on its cut-off sleeves, with copious overt references to everything from ReAnimator to Aliens to Evil Dead to freaking Deadly Spawn and Rejuvenatrix… it’s a best-of-the-best of 80s horror. Most blatant, however, is the “ancient Mayan mask” that gives protagonist Rick the ability to go on his beat-’em-up quest through a haunted house full of nasty critters…arguably too much so, since the mask had to be altered to be red for the US release out of fear of angering the Friday the 13th rights holders (who had their own game the same time. Uh, I guess we should talk about that also). Sequels slowly made Rick’s mask more skull-like to get away from that, but ironically Jason himself wound up moving to look more like Rick when Jason X rolled around.
Nevertheless, for most, the iconic version of Splatterhouse is the original Japanese arcade game, as can be seen by cameos in other franchises from Tekken to Tales of Eternia to Point Blank, and merchandise, such as the dope figure line from Unbox. But really, the whole original trilogy is worth a shot, with fun gameplay and lots of monster gore (the original was one of the first games to get a content warning for violence on the box, and the third was brought up in the US senate’s video game panic of the 90s). Plus, they should be of interest as an evolutionary stepping stone between the horror gaming titans of Castlevania and Resident Evil. In short, Splatterhouse’s a blast.
Bonus: Friday the 13th (NES game)
Having closed things out on the high note that is Splatterhouse, it would be remiss not to cover the actual Japanese Friday the 13th game from a year later, though it’s admittedly nowhere near as good. I mean, I feel like it’s not even fair to compare an arcade game to a home console one from that time:
Nevertheless, the Friday the 13th for NES does have its share of fans, and, while panned critically and at release, it seems to be more popular than ever three decades later. The game is actually the third title ever developed by eventual industry juggernaut Atlus (Trauma Center, Shin Megami Tensei, Persona), after their original Megami Tensei and a Karate Kid tie-in game. Nostalgia aside, the game is notable for a lot of walking (and throwing rocks at zombies and wolves), a fighting engine reminiscent of Punch Out, and of course, a purple-and-teal Jason. The exact reasoning behind this unusual coloration isn’t exactly clear, but some have speculated that they modeled it after one of the Part 3 posters that was available in Japan via theater programs.
Those tacky colors may have resonated with modern collectors (or maybe just with manufacturers looking for an easy excuse to do a repaint), because tons of figures of this variant have popped up in recent years…even without any actual movies! The 2017 Friday the 13th: The Game used that as an alternate skin, as well, so it’s getting up there as one of the most iconic looks for the character.
On that note, hopefully this gives you some good Japanese-styled Jason fodder to celebrate this Friday the 13th and spooky summer season. Just stay away from Camp Blood, or you’ll be all doomed!
Wow, episode 50 already? Well, that’s not counting a handful of other panels like Kaiju Con-Line, Kaiju Masterclass, Anime Lockdown, and more, so maybe it’s not that much of a milestone… we’ll do something more commemorative next time. Anyway, this time is a panel from this year’s Otakon, looking at various adaptations of horror maestro Junji Ito’s work in cinematic form. Some of the content may be familiar, but I think I found a couple of gems that haven’t gotten much coverage in English so far as well, and some intriguing possibilities in the unmade “lost films” category to boot!
I was recently able to present at the Anime Lockdown online convention and salvage the doomed “Ultraman in Animation” topic from a few years ago. Thanks to John-Paul of Anime Lockdown for having me on and running a fantastic convention!
In this episode, I’m joined by Henning Strauß (not “Straub”!) to discuss the history of kaiju (and also of other tokusatsu, anime, and manga) in Germany, along with how the development of fandom there has in some ways similar or different to the US and other countries.
Germany has a vibrant otaku community that puts the US to shame in some regards, so it’s always neat to see what can be learned from our fellow Japanophiles around the globe.
Heidi, Girl of the Alps, whose crew included Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Yoshiyuki Tomino:
Operation Mystery (“S.R.I. und die unheimlichen Fälle”) is kind of like a police procedural show, I guess.
Surprisingly Winspector was one of the rare titles on tokusatsu titles on TV! It was even novelized (so was Saban’s Masked Rider).
German dubs are the only way to watch some Taiwanese edits. For example The Iron Superman is on Tubi in its German dub subtitled in English.
Shogun Warriors and Micronauts in German:
We didn’t mention it in the podcast, but Germany also got a proper release of Takeshi’s Castle (or, at least much less mangled than the US release). Here’s one of the episodes where Ultraman shows up:
Many manga anthologies in the early 2000s, including Banzai, which was the first foreign edition of Shonen Jump. Manga Power led the charge in the late 90s.
Numerous shows have original German opening themes, but Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball‘s banging Eurobeat tunes are my personal faves:
Those irritating FSK ratings on every home video release:
The German equivalent of MST3k: Die Schlechtesten Filme aller Zeiten (or SchleFaZ for short). They even got cameos in the Sharknado franchise!
Recommended reading (auf Deutsch):
Fan magazines:
1988-1989: 9 issues of “Godzilla Family”
1989-1998: 10 issues of “Godzilla Fanzine”
1996-2018: 41 issues of “Pranke” (continuation of “Godzilla Family”)
2006: 1 issue of “Asian Cinemagic”
Kaiju-con in Uelzen (not to be confused with German Kaiju Con, which was supposed to start in Hamburg last year, but got derailed by pandemic):
A documentary on kaiju fan culture:
Gazorra: The Beast from the Depths of the Earth, Jörg Buttgereit’s short from 1984.
For as many titles that the US has gotten but Germany hasn’t, the grass is always greener on the other side. Here’re some titles available in Germany but not the US, in case you’re up for some importation:
Anolis’s excellent transfers of Toho’s tokusatsu films
Terror Beneath the Sea subtitled
Necronomicon, Armicron in Outlaw Power (only available on VHS stateside)
Physical releases for Gantz: O, the Godzilla anime trilogy, Samurai Flamenco, Tomie Unlimited
The Next Generation Patlabor, Bloody Chainsaw Girl, Ninja War Torakage, Tokyo Ghoul S, Hentai Kamen, Ajin, Space Firebird 2772
Manga: Q, DNA^2, Katsura & Toriyama Short Stories, Billy Bat, most of Gou Tanabe’s HP Lovecraft adaptations, Killing Bites
Welcome to Maser Patrol, a weblog that covers Japanese genre fiction. But, it being April Fool’s Day, imagine if we did something crazy, like punking readers by instead talking about, say, SOUTH KOREAN genre movies. Haha; that would be ridiculous.
…let’s do it.
As a lot of genre fans are aware, SRS just released 1984’s War of the God Monsters, or, as we old-timers know it, The Flying Monster, or perhaps even Flying Dragon Attacks.
What’s not mentioned in SRS’s publicity material is that the movie is noteworthy for having effects almost entirely composed of recycled Tsuburaya Productions stock footage from Ultraman, Return of Ultraman, and Fireman, plus the Taiwanese movie The Founding of Ming Dynasty (which Tsuburaya staff worked on), with rare exceptions:
The process of repurposing foreign effects footage like this should be familiar in a modern context from the likes of Power Rangers, but it was not unusual then, either. After all, Taiwan was making new things using Japanese footage from Mach Baron and Kamen Rider, and South Korea had even already done something similar with the very same The Founding of Ming Dynasty, which, while harvested for a dragon fight in War of the God Monsters, had previously been used as source material for 1977’s Prince of Dragon King (AKA 3rd Son of the Dragon King, 용왕 삼태자). That movie is often confused with the 1977 Taiwanese flick Sea Gods and Ghosts, which is understandable, since they have the same stock effects footage, same title in Chinese characters, and even the same story structure.
Thus, if you’re going off memory, it’s easy to conflate the two, but if you actually watch the two movies in succession, it’s easy to see that these are not the same cast. Best guess is that one was made aping the other, like Universal’s Spanish Dracula, and the Korean version seems farther removed from the source there.
The mix-ups can be attributed to dearth of available documentation on these movies. While Japan’s effects films are famous worldwide, most of the Korean stuff hasn’t really been played outside of Korea, and even there it hasn’t always been widely preserved (for example, the original Korean audio for Yongary is lost, so if you want to watch the whole movie, you have to check out the English dub). You see this changing around the beginning of the 21st century, which is why many film fans, especially fans of Japanese genre content, will point to titles like The Ring Virus or Oldboy as the start of the conversation for Korean genre cinema, or kaiju fans might have a frame of reference limited to international co-productions like Yongary, A*P*E, and Crocodile Fangs. However, the South Korean tradition of such tokusatsu-influenced effects films is broader than that, which is what I thought might make a good subject today.
A lot of the content that does survive has not been reissued in higher quality for another possible reason, which ties back to War of the God Monsters and Prince of Dragon King: sourced from multiple locations and multiple inspirations, certain productions seem poised to run afoul of international copyrights. This is not to mention how exploitation mockbusters (e.g. how Crocodile Fangs lifts heavily from Jaws, or A*P*E from King Kong), despite being very much the vogue of the industry for a good couple of decades, can have a temporary boost by imitating a popular hit, but suffer irrelevance once hype for the source property declines. Anime fans are all too familiar with a few of the more suspiciously-trademark-straddling South Korean productions, but for tokusatsu fandom, it might be news.
I suspect the fast-and-loose approach to intellectual property back in the day might have something to do with the reluctance of licensors to allow a home video release of the country’s debut giant monster movie, 1967’s Big Monster Wangmagwi (우주괴인 왕마귀). Even though it may have been just a cheaper cash-in on the upcoming Yongary (even getting sued by that movie’s producers) and a retread of King Kong, the film is significant for being a breakout giant monster feature for the nation, and having a record-holding count of extras. So, there’d certainly be interest, but SRS was flatly refused the option to license it. Fans were bemused, speculating that the copyright holders were perhaps holding out for more money, or that the print was in incomplete condition (which has been refuted by individuals who have attended screenings of a restored version from the Korean Film Archive), but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s possible that they simply doesn’t want to verify that there’s no unlicensed stock footage, music, or sound effects present that they’d have to clear before duplication was allowed. Or maybe they’re just afraid of getting sued by the owners of Yongary again.
I suppose that’s as good an opportunity as any to start talking about Yongary, who, aside from his infamous neighbor Pulgasari to the North, holds the title of the most iconic creature associated with the Korean peninsula. It’s worth noting that much like “Godzilla” is a portmanteau of “gorilla” and “kujira” (whale), “Yongary” (용가리) is similarly a combination of “yong” (용, dragon) and “pulgasari” (불가사리, an iron-eating monster from mythology), and likewise “Yongary” has entered the Korean popular lexicon simply to the image of something big and strong.
(Of course, the latter term “pulgasari” is somewhat loaded in the English-speaking fandom context because of the 1985 North Korean movie by that name (which, if you don’t know, is a whole can of worms), but it’s kind of a genericized “unkillable monster” word in Korean (fun fact: also a homophone for “starfish”). One of South Korea’s first monster movies from 1962 was also titled Pulgasari (totally lost, unfortunately), and there was also the final episode of the fairy tale puppet show Once Upon a Time (옛날 옛날에, airing 1979-1980, with the finale in 1981) that did a giant monster Pulgasari story (which was awesome, because puppet shows and kaiju go together like chocolate and peanut butter). Even after the hullabaloo with the North Korean film, when Tremors was released in South Korea, its Korean title was “Pulgasari”, pretty much eclipsing all the other films by that title!)
Back on Yongary, we needn’t say too much, since both of his movies are available and well-documented (the original is on Mystery Science Theater3000, after all!). I think it’s fair to say that in all incarnations he’s very much a response to Godzilla, with the 1967 original popping in during the kaiju boom as Korean cinema was really starting to take off (the country had their first animated movie the same year), and the 1999 English-language remake Yonggary (called Reptilian here) exploiting 1998’s English-language Godzilla just as South Korea was becoming a power player on the international cinematic stage. And just like Godzilla, he’s had cute, animated adventures thanks to his position as a mascot for Yongary Chicken (dinosaur-shaped chicken tenders), along with his pals, a green triceratops named Yongyongi and pink female Yongary named Yongnali.
“But wait!” certain long-time die-hards might interject, “wasn’t there another Yongary movie between 1967 and 1999?” The answer to this is “No…..mostly.” See, there was a movie that came out in 1993, from the same director who directed the 1999 Yonngary, which some enterprising bootleggers back in the day figured they could sell as “Yongary 2”. A cursory glance at the monster makes it clear why:
But this movie, Young-gu and Princess Zzu Zzu (영구와 공룡 쮸쮸, which translates to “Young-gu and Dinosaur Zzu Zzu”, so not sure why everywhere lists it with the “Princess” title) actually has a lot more interesting of a franchise history than merely being a sequel or remake to Yongary. It’s an entry in the long-running Young-gu franchise, which is kind of like the Korean equivalent to Tyler Perry’s Madea or Jim Varney’s Ernest series: a dopey character gets into a variety of ridiculous situations. While the character of Young-gu entered the scene on television, he was immortalized by actor Hyung-Rae Shim in film starting in 1986, continuing until 2010.
Young-gu and Princess Zzu Zzu treads ground familiar to kaiju fans: while exploring an underground cavern during an earthquake, Young-gu finds and befriends a newborn dinosaur. After some ET-like hide-the-monster antics, the beast attracts the attention of gangsters, but also the parent dino. Young-gu and Zzu Zzu are kidnapped while the fully-grown therapod engages the military and trashes a city looking for its offspring. The movie is hardly spectacular, as the miniatures look amateur-tier, and while the adult dinosaur isn’t too rough (it has nice features like nostril wiggling and blinking eyes), the child dinosaur looks like one of those inflatable dinosaur Halloween costumes (though it also blinks). What’s more, while I don’t speak Korean, it certainly seems that the humor isn’t particularly sophisticated, relying on cues like “he made a funny face”, “he’s walking in fast motion”, and “his pants fell down.” That said, despite the timing of the release exploiting Jurassic Park’s dinosaur mania (i.e. it was released the same day), the titanic, bipedal, smoke-breathing saurian with a horn on its nose is nothing if not reminiscent of Yongary.
The movie is significant for being the first entry that Shim actually directed, and it served as the foundation of his studio Young-gu Arts, which would later make Yonggary and Dragon Wars. Shim sold his personal real estate investments in Gangnam to pay for the movie, wanting it to be a step up from the special effects in the prior films. Thus it was a major step towards Shim getting the perpetual rights to the Yongary character, and it shows his pride in the work that a statue of Zzu-zzu was erected outside of Young-gu Arts offices. For something still fondly remembered in the right Korean crowds, it’s a shame that no translated release (official or unofficial) has ever come to light.
Young-gu’s various cinematic misadventures frequently brought him into contact with science fiction and fantasy elements, likely due to Shim’s own interest and ambitions to establish South Korea in the special effects industry. Shim’s approach might generously be described as “backwards from conventional wisdom” (he views experience as a detriment, since it teaches you what’s not possible, so he prefers to minimize preparation), so the quality of the movies is usually significantly below what they’re attempting, but they have a charm to them in that respect, arguably peaking during the mid-1990s when Shim took the directorial reins.
Among the character’s earlier genre outings were Young-gu and Daeng Chiri (영구와 땡칠이, 1989), which was a riff on horror stuff, most notably the Mr. Vampire series out of Hong Kong, featuring Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman, jiangshi, etc. The costume work there is minimal, but it did lead to incremental improvements with 1989’s Young-gu and Daeng Chiri go to the Shaolin Temple (Young-gu fights a giant centipede), 1990’s Young-gu and Daeng Chiri 3: Youn-gu Rambo (which features a killer robot), and 1991’s Young-gu and Daeng Chiri 4: Hong Kong Granny Ghost (with werewolf ninjas!). After the character went solo, there was also Youn-gu and Dracula in 1992, part of a big stream of “Young-gu meets X character” titles like Young-gu and the Three Musketeers, Young-gu and Phantom Thief Lupin, etc, which is what led up to Zzu-zzu.
The follow-up to Zzu zzu was 1994’s Yong-gu and the Space Monster (영구와 우주괴물 불괴리), which sees an invading alien force attempt to conquer the earth with a bipedal boar-like monster. The monster’s name, Bulgoeli, means “bullshit”, and apparently the flimsy costume caused problems for the crew during production, but it doesn’t look half bad on screen. There’s also a lot of hijinks involving a tiny flying saucer that resembles the Enterprise if it were missing one engine and had a googly eye stuck to the other, and some martial arts with the alien foot-soldiers.
1995 saw the release of another Young-gu adventure, even though his name isn’t in the title: Power King (파워킹). While it’s certainly an attempt to cash-in on Power Rangers, it’s worth noting that it has the same name in Korean as the anime Muteking, so the main hero’s red costume and visor might have been an attempt to double-dip on name value. This one sees Young-gu transform into a traditional superhero and take on a stock supervillain syndicate, and has a lot of decent action sequences. So many, in fact, that this movie actually did get the Power Rangers treatment, having the actor sequences re-filmed in America so a white dude stepped into the Young-gu role for the first and only time (only they call him “Barry”). This version, Armicron in Outlaw Power, was only released on VHS in the US, but it’s available on DVD in Germany as Power Warriors and in Hong Kong as Masked Rider AMC. A sequel titled New Power King was announced (there were even toys sold by that name in 1999), but much like Yonggary 2 and D-War 2, the picture never materialized.
Shim did one more Young-gu flick prior to Yonggary as a sort of finale for the character (and his acting career), and that’s 1996’s Dragon Tuka (드래곤 투카), in which he travels back in time to the 1500s and gets possessed by alien cops (who basically look somewhere between henshin heroes and head-to-toe motorcyclists) that are out to arrest a space crook and his huge quadrupedal dragon. Needless to say, that one is pretty much a blast (also, there’s Mortal Kombat music. And zombies). In some ways the medieval Joseon-era setting and plot revolving around a dragon demanding a sacrificial maiden was a precursor to the higher profile Dragon Wars, and it was better-received by critics than any of Shim’s subsequent movies. There was also a tie-in shooter game for PC titled Dragon Tuka 3D the following year, which’s fondly remembered. Oh, it’s also noteworthy that Hee-jun Park (Brothers in Heaven) got his start working on that movie.
One movie that doesn’t overtly appear to be part of the Youn-gu series, though some have claimed it features one of Young-gu’s ancestors, is Tyranno’s Claw (티라노의 손톱), which Shim directed in 1994 right after Zzu-zzu. More violent than anything else in his filmography, the movie is essentially an update to the Hammer classic One Million Years BC, featuring cave people speaking gibberish in a world populated by quite impressive animatronic and suitmation dinosaurs. A biproduct of the dialogue-free format is that this is one that’s quite accessible without subtitles, perhaps deliberately so, which may have helped pave the way towards the filmed-in-English later films like Yonggary, Dragon Wars, and The Last Godfather.
Of course, the Young-gu adventure of most interest to fans of Japanese superheroes would be 1991’s Young-gu and the Golden Bat (영구와 황금박쥐), directed by Ki-nam Nam. Since the original 1960s anime was popular in Korea (it got around the ban on Japanese media because a Korean studio worked on the backgrounds), it’s neat that fairly accurate replications of the Japanese Golden Bat hero and villains show up in this movie, along with a hoard of lower-rent monsters (one of whom looks suspiciously like a store-bought Gremlins mask).
I have to specify that Young-gu met the original Japanese Golden Bat because Korea has an entirely homegrown version as well who’s completely different…namely, he’s just yellow Batman. The character featured in the animated movie Black Star and the Golden Bat (1979), complete with a poster that ripped off Gatchaman, and has actually been marketed around the world as a straight-up Batman movie. The story gets better, though, since that character was then itself ripped off for the character of Super Betaman in the second Star Zzangga movie, 1990’s Super Betaman and Mazinger V (스타짱가2 슈퍼베타맨)… including the same pose on the poster!
For the movie Betaman was paired up with a giant robot who’s also a knock-off of a knock-off: Mazinger V was a palette-swapped version of Mazinger 7, from 1983’s Korean animation Super Express Mazinger 7 (known in the US as Protectors of Universe), which, as you may surmise, was taking a page from Mazinger Z. Naturally, this was a way to resell old model kits.
The film combines our live-action hero, who does the requisite Kamen Rider-style karate against a bunch of low-rent monsters, with animated giant robot scenes, but weirdly also has animated character sequences as well. There’s a villainess who looks suspiciously like Sister Jill from Cutie Honey and a heroic visored character who also feels lifted out of another franchise, both carrying over from the original Robot Star Zzangga (로보트 스타짱가) from 1988.
(That wasn’t even the only Batman knock-off, either, since there was also Eagleman, the Warrior of Heaven (이글맨) in 1991, exploiting Tim Burton Batmania in Hollywood. Eagleman has a grappling hook and utility belt, wears all black and yellow, and despite being an “eagle”-themed hero, he fights crime by night like Bats. That said, the level of hand-to-hand chop-socky puts any of the Hollywood Batman movies to shame.)
Super Betaman was far from unique as a live-action Korean superhero to costar with an animated giant robot. We already mentioned the original Star Zzangga, which takes a similar approach (and sometimes gets accused of copying design elements from Xabungle), but it was just one of many. For example, 1987’s Hwarang-V Trio (화랑브이 삼총사), 1987’s Thunder Dragon from Outer Space (외계 우뢰용) (which took designs from Flashman), 1987’s The King of Black Star and the Super Prince (흑성 마왕 과 슈퍼 왕자) (which took designs from Gundam and Transformers), 1987’s Macarian Go (마카리안 고), 1988’s Alien Cobra (외계인 코브라) (whose robot resembles Dynaman‘s), and 1990’s Taekwon V ’90 (로보트 태권V 90) use the same method. Taekwon V is particularly noteworthy, since it’s been running as an animated film series since the 1970s (you might know the character as Voltar the Invincible or “that Korean Mazinger Z“), going for a live-action/animation hybrid with its ninth entry. Of course, there was also the attempt at a full live-action Taekwon V in 2009 that never went beyond a pretty decent proof-of-concept movie, but you can argue that a CGI robot carries on the spirit of all the hand-animated ones.
The animation/live-action hybrid format was popularized by the Wooroimae or Urume (우뢰매 can get Romanized different ways), or “Thunderhawk” series, which consisted of nine movies from Wuroi-Mae From Outer Space (1986) to Ureme the Invincible Fighter (1993). The series revolves around the space hero Esperman, played by none other than Hyung-Rae Shim.
The titular Thunderhawk is Esperman’s transforming robot, which turns from a hawk form into a humanoid warrior that…well, might look a little familiar. See, they repurposed model kits of the Phoenix Thunderhawk from the 1985 anime Ninja Senshi Tobikage for the merchandise line, and thus our protagonist wound up being an unauthorized knock-off of that mecha.
Eventually the series changed the design to avoid infringement on Tobikage, but it still played it fairly fast-and-loose when it came to influences, so some designs may look familiar, particularly to Diaclone fans. (One of the movies even used actual Zoids kits for props!) Esperman himself also got an upgrade for the sixth picture, at which point he looked an awful lot like Captain Power.
Plans for a Wooroimae reboot were floating around as recently as 2017, but even in the modern era, the franchise still manages to get itself into IP hot water. When a graphic novel was announced, whoever did it just copied Jim Lee’s artwork from Superman Unchained, which certainly ticked off the famous (and notably Korean American) artist.
Overt attempts at exploiting the popularity of anime aren’t limited to single elements, though, sometimes a hit title would just get lifted whole cloth. The standout in this category is the filmography of Ryong Wang, a martial artist/actor-turned-director who produced a whole host of live-action adaptations. Let’s start with the most famous one, because it’s an adaptation of one of the biggest hits in the history of Japanese animation: 1990’s Dragon Ball.
Despite being the first live-action adaptation of Akira Toriyama’s classic and a bootleg product, this Dragon Ball is somehow still the most faithful, most entertaining adaptation, heartily beating out both the Taiwanese Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins and the American Dragon Ball: Evolution. The characters look right and act in-character based on what fans of the property would know, including Hyung-Rae Shim himself in the Master Roshi role. It does take some liberties, such as having Nappa inexplicably there as one of Pilaf’s henchmen, and it throws in a couple of robot suits from Sparkman (we’ll get back to that title in a bit) as well as the giant centipede from Young-gu and Daeng Chiri go to the Shaolin Temple, but generally it’s a fun mash-up of wirework kung-fu, tokusatsu-style action, and gags from the source material. I really wish Shueisha, Bird Studio, Toei, and the other companies with the Dragon Ball rights could play ball (no pun intended) to get this movie rescued, restored, and re-released in higher quality than the VHS rips currently in circulation!
Apparently, there was a bit of a winning combination there, since in 1992 Ryong Wang re-teamed with his young actor Seong-tae Heo, still sporting Goku hair, for the Kangdagu Fighter (깡다구 화이터) series. It’s nominally based on Tatsuyoshi Kobayashi’s manga Little Cop, but also includes heavy elements lifted from SD Gundam (such as the hero robot) and Dragon Ball (such as the alien villains), which the studio Daewon justified since they were the Korean distributor for both properties at the time. The main character also uses a gun out of Winspector, and some Sharivan footage also shows up!
There were other South Korean Dragon Ball knockoffs at the time as well; such as the animated movie Super Kid (1995), and the live-action Dragon Boy (드래곤보이) from 1991, which features a kid kung-fu fighting aliens while dressed like the hero of Mashin Hero Wataru.
Shonen Jump’s other major martial arts property of the era, Fist of the North Star, has had unauthorized live-action adaptations around the world, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, even Italy (not to mention the authorized American version). Naturally, Korea got in on the game as well with 1993’s Bugdu ui Gwon (북두의권), also directed by Ryong Wang. Much like the more famous American effort, this movie is relatively bloodless compared to its source material, but it does get credit for attempting to recreate a few of the weird blurry/glowing martial arts effects from the anime.
As if that wasn’t enough Jump action, Wang also adapted Yu Yu Hakusho with The Crazy Ghost (정신나간 유령) trilogy in 1992. Oddly enough, despite being an authorized adaptation (unlike Fist of the North Star), Crazy Ghost is a pretty loose retelling, taking the broad strokes of the source material without being immediately recognizable… for example, Hiei is a weird monkey demon and Kurama is female. Still, for how popular the original is, it’s quite surprising that this isn’t better-known…perhaps it’ll have a renaissance when the Netflix live-action version hits?
The same year, Wang gave us Street Fire (맹구짱구 스트리트 화이어), which is pretty blatantly riffing on Street Fighter II. From the clips online, it doesn’t look like the best adaptation of the video game to live-action, but also not the worst. Also, it starts with some Super Sentai stock footage of buildings blowing up, for some reason.
(Note that this is not to be confused with Street Fighter (스트리트 파이터 가두쟁패전), a different, prior live-action adaptation made in Korea, which is actually a bit better. That one takes place in the far future of 2010, and the world is populated by radioactive mutants, explaining the weird character designs.)
(Oh, and there was also Taekwon V/Thunderhawk creator Cheong-gi Kim’s Street Fighter Q (스트리트 파이터 Q, 1992), which has nothing to do with the Street Fighter 3 character named Q, but does have one of the aliens from the Space Police series (more on that in a bit) and features the main cast getting trained by Dragon Ball’s Master Roshi. Basically, there were a lot of Korean Street Fighter adaptations, each one wackier than the previous.)
Ryong Wang did a few other knock-off movies, including adaptations of Iron Fist Chinmi and Magical Hat, but there’s only so many hours in the day. So instead, let’s pivot to an original (-ish) property of his that should appeal to tokusatsu fans: 1991’s Fighting Man (화이팅맨). Now, it’s oft speculated that there might have been some aesthetic influence of Metal Heroes on RoboCop (there absolutely is in the opposite direction), but this movie takes a bold stance in ripping off both and pitting a transforming metallic hero against a villainous RoboCopy android. Also, Seong-tae Heo shows up in a lead role again.
(Speaking of RoboCopy crossovers, there’s also a brief gag of one in 1993’s Hong Gil-dong vs. Terminator (홍길동 대 터미네이터), which was one a few Korean Terminator knock-offs at the time.)
(Heck, Korea loved RoboCop so much that he even got to share Yongary’s honor of selling fried chicken.)
It might not even be fair to say that Fighting Man was directly Metal Heroes-inspired, since there was actually a whole movement of Metal Heroes-inspired Korean cinema during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The high-water mark is likely 1988’s Sparkman (스파크맨) a Hyung-Rae Shim flick where he plays a little more serious, though there’s still a bit of comedy (including some toilet humor/nudity that might not go over well with all audiences). The film oozes with influence from Spielban and Maskman, and really does look as good in parts, with a cool hero, cool villains, and cool giant robots (who are live effects, not animated! They got reused for Dragon Ball, remember?).
One of the longer-running series of Korean superheroes was Mask Bandal (반달가면), or “Half-moon Mask”, who had six films from 1990-1992, and became sort of a calling card for BUM Production, one of the biggest studios for Korean children’s films at the time (and the successor to Seoul Fairytale Production, who had made the Thunderhawk films). As the name might imply, this is sort of Korea’s answer to Japan’s first TV superhero Gekko Kamen (“Moonlight Mask”), but the initial design was actually based on Mad Gallant from Juspion, figures of whom were repainted to make the first wave of Mask Bandal figures.
One of the initial gimmicks was that it wasn’t clear if the main character (notably played by singer Heung-Gook Kim, not a comedian like most heroes of the day) was actually the secret identity of Mask Bandal or not, as the two would sometimes share screen time. Of course, he actually was, and it turns out he had an assistant to step in and help out, resulting in numerous different Bandal Mask hero characters over the course of the film franchise.
It wasn’t just Metal Heroes that inspired imitation in South Korea; Super Sentai did as well, so there were a few color-coded hero teams running around. One that seems to come up quite a bit is 1992’s Space Police Human Power (우주경찰 휴먼 파워), about a trio of alien protectors representing love, fraternity, and service. Since the whole industry is kind of recursive, the film was directed by Taekwon V/Thunderhawk creator Cheong-gi Kim (hence the alien reuse for Street Fighter Q), and the team’s leader (who’s orange instead of red) was played by the dub voice of Goku in Dragon Ball! A sequel, sometimes called Space Police Human Power 2, but sometimes called Three Superpowers: Thunder Bigman (3인의 초능력자 썬더 빅맨), hit the same year, with a similar premise and similar heroic trio, but slightly differing in design.
That brings us to one of the wildest titles to generally fly under the radar in English-speaking fandom: 1991’s Morph Warrior Trans And Toady (변신전사 트랜스 토디), which I really think is due for rediscovery and cult film status.
So, I’ll just start with the elephant in the room, since it’s a quirk of the evolving English language: this movie features a team of five color-coded, transforming superheroes (of varying races, which was pretty much unheard of in Sentai knock-offs prior to Power Rangers!), and the name of that team is…well… they’re called Transman. You’ve got Trans Dragon, Trans Tiger, and Trans Jaguar (the guys), and Trans Lion and Trans Eagle (the girls), so it’s similar to Liveman or Jetman, except with the awkwardness of having to explain that, to the best of my knowledge, this was more about playing into the popularity of Transformers than making any statement on gender dysphoria.
(Of course, if the transgender community wanted to appropriate this team, they’ve already got a sweet logo ready to go onto t-shirts and patches and whatnot. Just saying….)
To really nail down that the “Trans” in the team name is for mockbuster purposes, the Transman team even have a giant mecha, Alpha Base Robot, which is basically Overlord from Transformers:
However, Transman aren’t even the real heroes of the movie, since that honor goes to Toady (or “Tody” as his T-shirt says), an alien frog dude. Toady has super kung fu skills and powers like shooting beams from his hands and streams of poison gas from his butt; he even dies and comes back to life! (As for why a suitmation amphibian martial artist would be the hero of a children’s movie in 1991, one would have to assume that a certain set of reptilian teenage mutant ninjas would be to blame.)
In true tokusatsu spirit, it wasn’t just the Alpha Base Robot that was merchandised, but there was also a soft vinyl figure of the villain kaiju Kukulgan and the crab robot Crobo as well.
Anyway, the movie (or movies, since the three-hour runtime is usually broken up into two parts) is a madcap delight, bouncing all over the place. Just take a look at a few random screencaps and tell me it doesn’t look interesting:
At this point, having mentioned animated robots superimposed onto live-action actors, designs from toys, and Ninja Turtles exploitation, I’m sure the savvy reader is screaming “what about the 1989 movie Our Friend Power 5 (우리들의 친구 파워 5)?” Have no fear, there’s no going through this subject and not mentioning the infamous, blatant attempt to coopt both TMNT and Machine Robo (American reviewers tend to call them Gobots) into one weird project.
Our Friend Power 5 is a weird kind of outlier in that it seems to be better-known in the English-language fandom than in the Korean one. To the best of my knowledge, it’s the only title on this article to have gotten fansubbed, and I’d have to credit the sizable Ninja Turtles fandom for that. However, I imagine for Korean audiences, the movie has none of the crazy novelty value for being a blatant unauthorized cash-in that it does with Western fans; if nothing else I hope I’m communicating the frequency with which these kinds of copyright nightmare exploitation flicks were produced in the late 80s and early 90s.
Actual TMNT fans will probably have a meltdown with the treatment of the property, since it’s evident that the characters were basically modeled after the Playmates figures with little else taken into consideration. There are five turtle heroes in the movie, they all have red bandanas, but they’re color-coded by their shells (pink, yellow, blue, brown, and black), and they’re aliens fighting another group of aliens, namely rat creatures based on Splinter. So, yeah, the giant robots are probably the least problematic element for die-hards. One would think these changes could have been made to obfuscate the characters for plausible trademarking deniability, but the toy-line referred to them as “Teenage Mutant Turtles” nevertheless.
The low-rent hero productions go on and on, and the more I look, the more crop up. Just to rattle off a few more, there’s the gold helmet guys in The Trio Stars (삼중성, 1991), or the yellow-and-black Space Warrior, Fireman (우주 전사 불의 사나이, 1991). There were also quite a few more Hyung-Rae Shim vehicles, like Don Quixote and Sancho Commando (돈키호테 형래와 산쵸 특공대, 1991), A Policeman Hyung-Lae and Trio of Insect (포졸 형래와 벌레 삼총사, 1990) from Vandal Mask director Jong-ho Lim, and Black Knight (흑기사 형래와 광대들, 1990), which has a pretty blatant Darth Vader helmet on the title character.
As far as straight-up creature features go, I’d also be remiss not to mention 1983’s Grudge of the Sleepwalking Woman (몽녀한), a Korean/Taiwanese coproduction. Unfortunately, the original version of this flick with a snake woman somnambulist appears to be gone, but the 1988 Godfrey Ho re-edit Scorpion Thunderbolt is available fairly widely, if you don’t mind gratuitous Caucasian actors sprinkled in. The monster, funnily enough, doesn’t look like either of the films’ posters would have you believe. (Fun fact: Grudge of the Sleepwalking Woman’s director Beom-gu Gam also directed A Monstrous Corpse (괴시), South Korea’s first zombie movie, in 1981. Japan wouldn’t start on the zombie game for another decade after!)
Of course, the late 1990s and early 2000s changed the Korean moviemaking landscape tremendously, and now it’s seen as a power-player on the international cinematic stage. One of the names leading the charge, Joon-ho Bong, has huge international special effects co-productions like Okja and Snowpiercer, and even won the Academy Award for his drama Parasite. Bong first got on a lot of western radar for 2006’s monster movie The Host, which I sometimes get called out for not including on my rundowns of kaiju films. Here’s my rationale: there’s nothing overtly “kaiju” about the monster on surface level, since it seems more like just another big CGI beastie than anything in the Tsuburaya aesthetic. There’s a case to be made for it, though, if you compare it to the 2002 anime WXIII: Patlabor, which also features a slimy, amphibious man-eater brought about by human pollution (which, due to its genesis as an adaptation of an adaptation of a parody of kaiju flicks, absolutely counts), but both the Korean distributors of The Host and the creators of Patlabor maintain that any similarities are coincidental…ergo, not “kaiju”. Which is not a qualitative judgement, just saying that it’s doing its own thing.
Modern Korean genre filmmaking has been doing its own thing quite successfully as of late, with excellent content like Train to Busan, Sector 7, The Mimic, Sweet Home, Arahan, Monstrum, and countless others. It’s got its own identity, and seldom leans on adapting Japanese or Hollywood content anymore (possibly owing in part to the country adopting the Berne Convention in 1996), with rare examples such as A-lister Jee-woon Kim’s Illang: the Wolf Brigade (adapting Jin-roh) or Power Rangers Dino Force Brave (an original sequel to Kyoryuger). And even then, some have been wildly unique takes, much to my personal chagrin with cases such as City Hunter. The relative availability of K-dramas, K-pop, and even webtoons compared to their conservative Japanese contemporaries is resulting in a global audience shift, and thus we’re seeing large American streaming sites like Crunchyroll and Netflix pouring resources into Korean productions. Rather than aping (A*P*ING?) other nations like it did before, Korean pop culture has become a heavyweight in its own right in just two decades, and I expect we’ll see a lot more of it in the future.
While I’m at it, here are a few of the Korean TV shows that utilize the henshin hero format. These are kind of after the time period covered in the article, but I know someone will comment otherwise. Maybe they’ll get their own run-through at some point in the future:
Earth Warriors Vectorman, (지구용사 벡터맨), 1998
Environmental Warrior Zenta Force (환경전사 젠타포스), 2003
After a long hiatus, it’s time for another episode of the Maser Patrol podcast. This time, we take a look at a show with a valuable life lesson:
That’s right, this time around Josh and Kevin discuss the sweet Swan Songs of the Valkyries in the Senki Zesshō Symphogear franchise. It’s largely a synopsis of the five seasons, but hopefully our enthusiasm (and a little bit of the historical context) gives a sense of why it’s a program absolutely worth checking out.
Warnings: Many spoilers. Also, the editing for this podcast might not be all that tight due to Audacity problems (but it’s Maser Patrol, so of course it’s a couple hours long anyway).
The marketing leading up to season 1 all implied that Kanade would be a main character, and not, say, someone who would die halfway into the first episode:
Talking about the show:
Hibiki Tachibana in a nutshell:
The Noise designs are very much like Tohl Narita’s Ultraman monsters:
Even more psuedo-Ultraman: The Nephilim was modeled after Zetton, while Hibiki turns into a red-and-silver giant at one point.
Yumi’s self-awareness:
Ignite module vs Kill la Kill god robe:
The mobile game
Symphogear XD Unlimited mobile game opening:
XDU Collaborations that’d be of interest:
SSSS.Gridman
Godzilla
ULTRAMAN
Nanoha Detonation
Attack on Titan
the Gamera trilogy
Nendoroids mentioned:
Hopefully that all sheds some light on why the franchise has such a devout fanbase, and why “watch Symphogear” has become a meme associated with rabid, proselytizing otaku. But seriously, if you’re even a bit curious, it’s worth checking out.
It’s now 2021, marking the 50th anniversary of the start of the 2nd Kaiju Boom, also known as the Henshin Boom, a period when Japanese television was flooded with transforming superhero characters. No doubt a lot of fandom is ecstatic to celebrate the half-centennial of Kamen Rider, which was made as direct competition to Ultraman’s return in the likewise seminal Return of Ultraman, but, there’s one title that beat both of them to air, debuting on January 2, 1971. This show even aired on American television alongside the likes of Ultraman, Johnny Sokko & His Flying Robot, and Space Giants, so every once in a while when I’m be out and about with some tokusatsu T-shirt on, a Gen-Xer will approach me and ask:
“Hey, is that Spectreman?”
The 63-episode show clearly made an impact on a number of young viewers, and is still a staple of gray-market convention tape traders to this day. A cornerstone of vintage tokusatsu content and a foundational link in the evolution of the genre, luxury merchandise from expensive home video sets to hyper-detailed vinyl figures continue to feature prominently in the Japanese market as well. In short, it’s a classic.
I’m sure others will do some sort of proper series retrospective for this anniversary, but for my part I thought I could round up some 20 fun pieces of trivia to celebrate the big gold guy’s 50th.
While the US version and the Japanese re-broadcast is titled Spectreman throughout, this wasn’t the case for the show’s original Japanese run. The first 20 episodes were titled Space Apeman Gori, after the show’s main villain, followed by Space Apeman Gori vs Spectreman until episode 39. The change to promote the hero more in the title seems obvious in retrospect (sponsors weren’t happy with the show being named after the villain to begin with), but at the time when the show started there were no similar hero programs on the air with which to conform.
Space Apeman Gori/ Space Apeman Gori vs Spectreman opening
Spectreman opening
2. The villainous alien apemen Gori and La were a deliberate attempt to cash in on Planet of the Apes, which was very popular in Japan.
3. Spectreman himself is very much a mock Ultraman: he’s an alien from Nebula 71 (not M78), he can fly, he has a human form that works with a government organization to combat monsters, he even has a flashing light that indicates when his power is running low. But he does have one advantage: his height, according to official stats, is however big it needs to be, which at times gets ridiculous.
3. The show was made by P-Productions, continuing the trend of golden heroes from Space Giants and their failed 1967 pilot Jaguarman. The animal theme of the latter carried over to Gori (not to mention Lion Maru and Silver Jaguar), while the size-changing aspect went to Specterman.
4. The show was rushed into production. The previous show in the slot, Akai Inazuma, ended abruptly in December 1970, leaving only 25 days to create a replacement, so Masaki Tsuji wrote the scenarios for first two episodes overnight. P-Pro president Tomio Sagisu’s proposed concept for Elementman, about a hero who could turn into solid, liquid, and gas, was also incorporated.
5. Before the series, a pilot was produced, with a very different look for the hero and villain. The Gori suit from the pilot was reused for La, and, being a hot otaku property, there is even merchandise of the unused Spectreman design.
6. The identity of the actor from the pilot is unknown. Originally it was reported as Jiro Dan, the very lead of Return of Ultraman, but this has since been debunked. There is a resemblance, though.
7. The early part of the show had a strong environmental theme, with pollution-based monsters with names like Dustman and Hedoron (“hedoro” meaning “sludge”), a precursor to eco-savvy kaiju flicks like Godzilla vs Hedorah and Gamera vs Zigra. This made the sponsors uncomfortable for some reason, and the messaging was phased out of later episodes.
8. And what could be more eco-friendly than recycling? The show reused kaiju from both the Jaguarman and Hyo-man pilots, and fans of Goke the Bodysnatcher from Hell might want to take a close look at Dr. Gori’s flying saucer.
9. Less eco-friendly: as a promotional stunt, producer Takaharu Bessho solicited viewers to send in their cockroaches for episodes 7 and 8. Some of the resulting fan mail actually did contain live cockroaches, to the disgust of the higherups.
10. You know how children somehow manage to get into rooms that they’re not supposed to all the time in tokusatsu movies? This also happens in real life, as the studio used for filming effects was pretty run down, so a child broke in and stole one of the Spectreman flying props! This prompted the production to move to a new studio with the 32nd episode.
11. The show was twice adapted for theaters as part of Toei’s Manga Matsuri. Episodes 9-10 played alongside Go GoKamen Rider, Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, Andersen Monogatari, and Mako the Mermaid, while the 27th episode played with Kamen Rider vs Shocker, Return of Pero, Moomin, and Sarutobi Ecchan.
12. The late, great manga maestro Daiji Kazumine was in charge of the comic adaptation, and it became one of the works most associated with him, running a whopping seven volumes. As with his Ultraman work, there are some original stories mixed in among the adaptations of TV episodes, and some deviations between the two, including more graphic violence and a more expressive main character. I should clarify, though, that this is only for the Spectreman manga that Kazumine did in the pages of Adventure King and Shonen Champion, since he also had a version in Delightful Kindergarten targeted at much younger children.
Shonen Champion / Adventure King versionFrom Delightful Kindergarten
13. While Spectreman himself doesn’t appear, his human identity Jouji Gamou does get a cameo in Go Nagai’s Abashiri Family. He says that he can’t transform to face the monster threat in the issue because it’s not owned by P-Pro.
14. The US dub of the show was directed and written by Mel Welles, best known for playing the penny-pinching boss in the original Little Shop of Horrors, but also a staple of English dubs for things like Magic Boy and The X from Outer Space. He punched up the dub a bit to suit his own sensibilities, though not as extremely as some English tokusatsu dubs (Ultraseven, Ultraman Tiga).
15. The US theme song is definitely a catchy and iconic piece in its own right. The backing uses Mystic Moods Orchestra’s “First Day of Forever”, which is notably uncredited, only listing Bob Todd, Gregory Sill, and Jeremy Winn for the song.
16. If you want to watch Spectreman in the US, your options are limited. While it doesn’t have as complicated a rights situation as Ultraman or Space Giants did, it’s never been licensed for DVD or Blu-ray stateside, so your best option is tracking down the Image release of the show on VHS and laserdisc. Even that only gets through about a quarter of the show, however, so hopefully it gets picked up some day!
17. Though Spectreman isn’t available on DVD in the US, Yudai Yamaguchi’s movie adaptation of the zany delinquent gag manga Cromartie High School is. Why is this relevant? Gori and La literally drop in for a scene!
18. Spectreman was among a few sources for footage compiled into the 1983 Leslie Nielson comedy Naked Space. Heck, I’m seeing Gori and La as the thumbnail on the trailer on YouTube:
19. Gori was one of a few Japanese influences (like Kagestar and Speed Racer‘s dub) on the villain Mojo Jojo from The Powerpuff Girls.
20. The showalso inspired the Franco-Belgian spoof Léguman, about a vegetable-themed tokusatsu hero.
Bonus fact: The main character Jouji Gamou is named after Russian-American physicist George Gamow, best known for work on the big bang theory (the actual theory, not the sitcom). Tomio Sagisu used the name as one of his many pen names for a while, so it was a natural fit for the hero in his story.
Apologies: I’ve been bad about making timely news recaps this year.
2020 has been terrible, and the general stresses of the world combined with some personal life situations/tragedies have made it difficult to find the time and motivation to pour through the news each week. My new years resolution is to try to get more on top of that, though, and to that end I put together a Facebook page, so all I have to do when I see something cool is hit “share” rather than mucking about in WordPress. That should also keep a roughly chronological account of neat news items, as well as other miscellanea that I encounter, and in turn will make it easier when it comes time to round up items to talk about for the ‘blog posts.
It seems like a fool’s errand to try to discuss everything that I’ve been neglecting to since October, but here’s a rundown of a few of the ones that come to mind:
Productions
In what I think is the most exciting development of the past couple of months, we have a trailer for Godzilla: Singular Point, due on Netflix in April. I think that Orange’s CG and Bones’ human animation both look on-point, and the soundtrack is great. Most of the fandom discourse has been around the monster redesigns, though claims that what seems most likely to be Titanosaurus is actually Godzilla because of Keita Amemiya’s old drawing of a Godzilla mosasaur is ones of the wilder bits of speculation I’ve seen bandied about.
A lot of fans are expecting this to be more action-packed and less esoteric than the other modern Japanese productions, but I’ve read enough Toh EnJoe works to know that he can go toe-to-toe with Anno and Urobuchi in the pretentious, impenetrable, techno-philosophical narrative department. I mean, just as one example, for a second the trailer does feature a riff on Kuniyoshi Utagawa’s famous woodblock of Tametomo and the giant fish, only with a red ocean and “古史羅” (“koshira”) written over it, sort of a pun since “koshi” is “ancient history” (NB: this is different than Godzilla’s usual kanji, 呉爾羅). Also EnJoe’s love of time travel and reality-bending narratives also make me think that the “Singular Point” of the title isn’t merely the gibberish that a few others seem to suspect.
Takeshi Yagi directed a 90-minute special for NHK titled Godzilla’s Leading Ladies (Godzilla & Heroine in Japanese), and it’s a lot of fun. There’s some rare behind-the-scenes video from the 50s and 60s that Tomoyuki Tanaka shot, Yumiko Shaku got back into her Godzilla x Mechagodzilla jumpsuit, Kumi Mizuno talks about working with Nick Adams, Shiro Sano oversees the show, and there’s a robot girl for some reason. It’s very dialogue-heavy, but apparently a subtitled version has been prepared, so hopefully that sees the light of day soon!
SSSS.Dynazenon is still a little slow on their reveals in the trailers, but the newer one has a bit more in the action department. They’re also wasting no time with marketing this time, as a figure of the title robot is already up for sale.
As if to respond to the Godzilla SP trailer (but really all just part of Netflix’s big anime reveals presentation), we also got a couple of stills from the unfortunately-titled Pacific Rim: The Black, as well as the leaked opening. I don’t expect much from Polygon, but the opening is in-line with a lot of Netflix openings, from Daredevil to The Haunting of Hill House, not to mention the original Pacific Rim‘s ending.
Somehow a stupid pun in the Monster Hunter movie resulted in an avalanche of outrage in China. The full explanation of the controversy is outlined here, but be warned, it’s all very, very dumb. The movie’s prospects would likely have been grim at the best of times, considering how preciously fans of the games erupt against the changes made for the adaptation, but without the Chinese market and a worldwide pandemic, its box office was dire. I personally plan to order the Blu-ray sight unseen, but have no movie that I’d risk attending in the cinema right now.
Hiroto Yokokawa is working on a new kaiju short for next year, Yatsuashi. That’s an impressive speed, seeing as how Nezura 1964 is debuting in January.
Kikai Sentai Zenkaiger is managing to somehow simultaneously be a celebration of past Super Sentai shows for the 45th anniversary while also not really resembling a Super Sentai team at all. Rather than the typical five matching heroes with the leader in red, this show’s main hero Zenkaiser is a rainbow-colored fellow like JAKQ‘s Big One… the difference being that Big One was an “extra ranger” who only showed up halfway into the show. Zenkaiser is also channeling Dragonranger and Akaranger in his design, but his belt and head crest could just as easily put him at home in a Kamen Rider series.
The rest of the team is not the usual spandex-clad matching heroes, either, but mecha reminiscent of the giant combined robots from Zyuranger, Gaoranger, Magiranger, and Boukenger… they’re even named Zyuran, Gaon, Magin, and Vroon. If anything they remind me most of Gaogaigar‘s support cast (complete with symmetrical docking), so it should make for an interestingly different anniversary series, if nothing else.
The third season of Thunderbolt Fantasy starts in April.
Platinum End is getting an anime adaptation. The series is from the duo behind Death Note, and represents a return to that same supernatural mystery/thriller genre, but also features a number of characters in a super-powered cat-&-mouse battle royale wearing superhero outfits to keep their identities secret from one another. It’s not quite as engrossing as Death Note, but still good stuff.
Mappa will be doing an anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man. The edgy (pun intended) manga has gained a lot of popularity for its insane antics and crass humor, and several readers felt like they were “getting away with something” by having it run in Weekly Shonen Jump, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that it’s been moved online to Shonen Jump+. But regardless, Mappa’s execution of shows like Dorohedoro inspires a lot of confidence in this being superb.
The Polonia brothers’ 2015 kaiju spoof ZillaFoot has been available to rent on Vimeo from SRS for a while, but with SRS’s recent kaiju home video boom, they’ve decided to extend its hour runtime to feature length, padding it out with additional footage (ala the US cut of King Kong vs Godzilla) sourced from their fans. Time will tell how this approach works out for them, but it’s an interesting idea, nevertheless.
Here’s a proof-of-concept for an independent flick titled City-Crushing Monster. Not much actual monster footage, for a POC.
Home video
Most of kaiju fandom is more excited for Godzilla vs. Kong than anything else, so it was a big hullabaloo when it was announced that WB’s entire slate for the next year was going directly to HBOMax. This seems a symbiotic arrangement, since WB’s upcoming slate (Dune, Suicide Squad, The Matrix 4) is overwhelmed by franchises that have flopped at the box office, and HBOMax has very little exclusive content of its own so far to bolster it as yet another streaming service in an oversaturated market. However, this was a jerk move to Legendary (who paid for most of Godzilla vs Kong), since they were only informed about this decision when it was made public, and they had to turn down a very lucrative offer from Netflix for the film.
It’s definitely a good decision to send the picture direct to streaming during the COVID pandemic, and possibly a good call to offer an alternative to cinemas even during normal times, but Netflix would have probably been a better home for the title, so it’s a shame that it got to the point where things have begun to get ugly between Legendary and WB.
SRS has picked up the rights to Monster Seafood Wars, one of the most exciting entries yet in their ever-expanding kaiju library. I hope they take a look at some of Minoru Kawasaki’s older titles that haven’t made it to the English-speaking world yet, as well.
Arrow’s release of Daiei’s Invisible Man movies is up for preorder for a release in March. A lot of their fans were salty about this announcement (evidently they saw that bandages were hinted at and thought they’d announce Darkman), but I’m ecstatic that anyone’s taking a chance on vintage tokusatsu titles with no prior international release.
Hakaider is getting a Blu-ray release from Media Blasters; I see they’ve eschewed the “Mechanical Violator” title. I don’t believe there’s a Japanese Blu-ray for the film, interestingly enough, so this might be the first HD version on the market.
Ultraman Taro is up for preorder, hitting January 12. As mentioned in the panel at Kaiju Con-line, it looks like the numbered classic sets are planned up through Ultraman Leo, and then they’ll do something different.
Howl from Beyond the Fog is getting a mass-market release on DVD. While it’s neat that getting the movie into Walmarts will get more people to see it, I’m not sure how well it’ll go over with that orange-and teal King of the Monsters mockbuster cover (a lot like a certain Total Film issue, below), though, since it’s such a different kind of film.
Scorpion is releasing Voyage into Space on Blu-ray. With all of Johnny Sokko on DVD, I don’t have a lot of incentive to pick up the compilation movie, but I’m sure some folks will be into it.
Not a giant monster movie itself, 1930’s Ingagi was a huge influence on King Kong, but has long been very difficult to see due to its banned film status. However, Kino Lorber is putting it onto Blu-ray, which should go well with their releases of Konga, A*P*E, The Ape, etc…
Discotek has licensed a bunch of classic mecha anime, including Acrobunch (nobody saw that coming), as well as Daimos and Daltanious (completing the set they started with Combattler V and Voltes V).
Comics
After their license expired for a while, Godzilla is back at IDW. First on the docket: a five-issue comic for “middle-grade readers”, evidently simply titled Godzilla. Erik Burnham, Dan Schoening, and Luis Antonio Delgado are running the book, all of whom have experience with licensed titles at IDW with Ghostbusters, which I’ve heard some good things about. The decision to go after a younger audience makes a lot of sense; the Scholastic market is a huge and under-appreciated segment of American comic sales, routinely trumping the likes of Marvel and DC.
I must confess that this launch title is a little less exciting than last time around, but it still seems worth checking out, and hopefully will lead to more diverse output from the company (but please, guys, see if you can reprint the old Dark Horse/Marvel runs in English!).
More details have been announced for Phase 6’s Aizenborg comic: Replicating the disparate aesthetics of the original anime/tokusatsu hybrid, the human scenes are being done in this version by Matt Frank using digital art, while Hiroshi Kanatani uses markers to represent the kaiju/hero pieces. It’s a pretty clever approach to take, and after seeing how Redman: The Kaiju Hunter turned out, this could easily bring Aizenborg to a whole new level!
Rise of Ultraman must be doing somewhat okay as a miniseries, since Marvel just announced that they’re continuing it with Trials of Ultraman in March. There was a little concern after the drop in sales between the first and second issues, selling around 30,000 copies; this isn’t huge numbers for Marvel, but perhaps the potential power of the brand is keeping them on it.
Skybound has a new Ultraman pastiche on the way, Ultramega. As a fan of Skybound as a line in general, I’d already be onboard, but since James Herrin was also involved with some giant monster stories in BPRD, I have a little extra confidence in it. I know a few Ultraman fans are concerned that it looks a bit like it’s trying edginess for its own sake without doing much original, but we’ll find out when the comic drops in March.
In very exciting and utterly unexpected news, Seven Seas picked up the license to Shotaro Ishinomori’s original Goranger(or, I guess, “Gorenger“) manga. It’ll be interesting to see how the manga (which is a little goofy at times) is received by the modern Sentai/Power Rangers fan base, and I absolutely love the way that Seven Seas are emulating the (woefully defunct) Shout Factory DVD releases with this cover design. August Ragone’s liner notes with background about the franchise should make for good reading as well.
Negi Haruba (most famous for The Quintessential Quintuplets) is doing another manga about a group of five, this time titled Sentai Daishikkaku (戦隊大失格, “Sentai Disqualification”). It starts in February in Shonen Magazine.
Koyoshi Nakayoshi’s manga Sentai Red Becomes an Adventurer in Another World (戦隊レッド異世界で冒険者になる) recently started running in Shonen Gangan. The popular isekai genre has had all sorts of everyday people get reincarnated as heroes in Dragon Quest-like fantasy realms, but this one turns the trope on its head by making the protagonist who dies and gets whisked away to the sword-&-sorcery realm the leader of a sentai team in his past life, bringing his transformations and mecha along with him. These two major genres have certainly met before (e.g. Rayearth), but never in a mash-up quite like this!
After Ultraman, Getter Robo, and Robot Detective, Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi are rebooting yet another classic hero character, with Batman: Justice Buster for Kodansha’s Morning magazine. Hopefully this one gets a US release; it can always be a crapshoot with manga but Batman has the best history of all American comic heroes in that department.
Monthly Hero’s is moving entirely online. The magazine going that way is a big deal, since it’s the number one Japanese manga anthology for superhero content at the moment. They’re a 7-11 exclusive, so hopefully this is a way to broaden horizons, rather than a sign that the imprint as a whole is in trouble.
Video Games
Symphogear XD Unlimited added Gamera to the ever-expanding list of kaiju franchises that it’s crossed over with. As with their ULTRAMAN, Godzilla, SSSS.Gridman, Nanoha, and Attack on Titan collaborations, it was a good mix of splicing the franchise mythologies together and giving the gears neat new armors based on the kaiju characters. This one apparently got some merch that I’ll have to be on the lookout for, such as posters, buttons, and acrylic standee figures.
A Godzilla skin showed up in Fall Guys.
ULTRAMAN‘s Ultraman, despite not being a giant robot, is a main feature in mech fighting game Override 2. (Also, I had to look up their character Watchbot to confirm that it’s not actually Draco Azul)
Miscellaneous
Part of the Godzilla Day festivities this year that I don’t think was on anyone’s bingo card was the return of Hamtaro collaborations. I guess with the 20th anniversary of the original Godziham products, it made sense to revive the merchandising line. Matt Frank designed the main image at the center of the new line!
Mega64 has been doing amusing sweded versions of titles like Dragonball Z and Metal Gear Solid for a while, but their Evangelion really picks it up a notch.
On a sad note, RIP to a few creatives who we’ve lost in the past few months.
Izumi Matsumoto, creator of the seminal romantic comedy (with ESP powers) Kimagure Orange Road. His work is a powerful, emotional manga at times, and one of the finest anime of the 1980s.
Tom Kotani, the director of the Rankin Bass pictures The Last Dinosaur, The Bermuda Depths, The Ivory Ape, and The Bushido Blade. The Last Dinosaur is a personal favorite of the entire 1970s tokusatsu canon.
Daiji Kazumine, arguably the most prolific kaiju mangaka of all time, with work on King Kong, Ultraman, Spectreman, Mirrorman, Godzilla, and countless other titles.
Yeah, it’s been one of those rough years.
But hopefully 2021 will be better. Best New Year’s wishes to all!
Note: this thumbnail was for fun and was not part of the unmade movie’s script
The early-to-mid 2000s were perhaps the peak of Japan’s soft power in Hollywood. Anime (or anime-inspired cartoons) dominated all the children’s networks, Hayao Miyazaki won an Oscar, blockbuster movies like The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Transformers flaunted their Japanese influence, and suddenly people knew who Ken Watanabe was. The horror genre, in particular, was indelibly impacted, by two Japanese titles remade in Hollywood in 2002: Paul WS Anderson’s Resident Evil (based on the 1996 video game), and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (based on the 1998 Hideo Nakata movie, in turn based on the 1991 novel by Koji Suzuki), kicking off new interest in zombies and ghost stories. Just as Nakata’s movie had inspired a glut of imitators in its native country, Hollywood scrambled to remake as many titles as possible from the contemporary “J-horror” boom: Dark Water (2005), Pulse (2006), One Missed Call (2008), Don’t Look Up (2009), Apartment 1303 (2013), among other remakes drawing from various Asian countries.
It wasn’t just the concepts, but also the talent, that was being brought over. Nakata himself was hired to direct The Ring Two (2005), Takashi Shimizu remade his own work with The Grudge (2004) and The Grudge 2 (2006), and Masayuki Ochiai got the job for the 2008 remake of Shutter despite having nothing to do with the original. Interest was high enough that American studios were starting to invest in Japanese productions, and the likes of Takashi Miike and Norio Tsuruta were getting gigs on Masters of Horror. This is the environment that Ryuhei Kitamura, having achieved the pinnacle of what he thought possible with Japanese cinema with 2004’s Godzilla Final Wars, found himself in when making his Hollywood breakthrough.
Despite an interest in Japanese horror and Kitamura’s fluent English skills, it was still an uphill battle to land a project, eventually landing 2008’s The Midnight Meat Train, which was unfortunately scaled back to dollar theaters upon release due to studio meddling. Even with a Hollywood film under his belt, Kitamura’s cinematic calling card remained the same: his notorious, revolutionary 2000 debut, the zombie/action/gangster cult-opus Versus. It was his claim to fame, and his most entwined picture, beginning as a sequel to his debut student film Down to Hell (1997), he poured his all into it, and it paid off big time, launching the careers of both Kitamura and his collaborators Tak Sakaguchi, Yudai Yamaguchi, Hideo Sakaki, et al. In 2004, as a sort of capstone to his whirlwind Japanese career before going Hollywood, he released The Ultimate Versus, an extended edition of the already-two-hour movie with a lot of newly-shot action sequences. He was always teasing the prospect of Versus 2, and the demand was certainly there; the movie’s American distributor Media Blasters had commissioned Versus’s action choreographer Yuji Shinomura to do something similar with Death Trance (2005) and star Tak Sakaguchi was tapping into the subject matter with his own directorial work (written by Kitamura), Samurai Zombie (2008). Thus, an American remake seemed like a no-brainer.
Kitamura announced the American remake while promoting Midnight Meat Train at Fantasia International Film Festival in July of 2008, telling a Dread Central reporter “The US Versus will be insane!”. The exact progression and number of revisions to the remake’s script is unknown, but it seems that the preferred version was completed around December of 2008, and has been brought up several times since, most notably in 2010 when he told Andrez Bergen:
“This year will be tenth anniversary year of Versus so I’m thinking of doing something special. The original film means a lot to me and has huge fans all over the world, so I can’t do anything easy or cheap – I can’t guarantee anything in the long run, it’s a definite that I’ll do the new Versus in the future for sure.”
After that, conversations shifted back to a Japanese-made sequel with Tak Sakaguchi rather than an American remake, which was what was touted during the promotions for No One Lives in 2013. However, in 2019 Kitamura told Cinapse:
“There will be no Versus 2. But I am working on a Versus reboot, which is 100 times crazier, bigger. It’s kind of like Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s all new, but the same. So, it is kind of like, Versus: Fury Road, that is what I am working on right now. So, I don’t know when. I have a lot of things going on, but I will do it in the near future.”
At any rate, things appear to have been in a holding pattern for a while. So, being more a decade removed from the draft that was, and on the heels of Versus’s recent rediscovery thanks to the Arrow Blu-ray release, this is a good opportunity to explore the film which could have been. The intent here is not to leak spoilers for the film in development, as I assume that whatever incarnation presently exists has evolved significantly from the 2008 version, but to evaluate that incarnation as a lost project in its own right.
The script draft I have seen is dated 12/01/08, presumably following the American convention to mean “December 1” rather than “January 12”, and is listed as JAZ Films, a production company who according to IMDB only produced two movies, both in 2008: The Objective and Reservations. The co-writing credits are more encouraging, however: after Kitamura is listed George Krstic, the creator of Cartoon Network’s tragically underrated Megas XLR and a writer for Motorcity and Star Wars: The Clone Wars, along with Mitch Wilson, best known as the writer/director of Knucklebones (2016). Krstic is a particularly inspired choice for collaboration, given his comedic sensibilities and familiarity with Japanese pop culture conventions (again, just watch Megas XLR); he and Kitamura would go on to pitch the Syfy series Orion, described as “National Treasure meets Firefly”, which was picked up for development in 2010 and was announced as on-track at Universal in 2013.
The script is 128 pages, a large portion of which is predictably dedicated to action choreography. The story of the original Versus is not terribly complicated, so several aspects appear to have been fleshed out to be more palatable to a wide audience. It’s an interesting mix of scenes that are nearly verbatim with the original and those that would otherwise be utterly unrecognizable; whether that compromises the simplicity of the original would likely have been a matter of debate.
To start with, in this version characters have names. While this seems like a no-brainer in film production, one of the unusual things about Versus is that nobody does, so invariably people discussing the movie come up with their own monikers for them like “the dude with sunglasses” or “facial expression guy”. Actually having names streamlines things a lot from a scripting perspective, and I don’t think that names associated with roles actively detracts from anything. While characters like “The Girl” have been replaced with “Jess” and “The Man” with “Kizaki”, the notable exception preserving the Clint Eastwoodian anonymous appeal is the protagonist, who’s still only referenced as KSC2-303, or “303” for short.
Every character present in the original has some analogue in the remake, along with their particular eccentricities (the one alteration I noticed was that it’s now the marshal with both hands who gets triggered by getting called an officer, rather than the one-handed one), but there are some new touches as well, such as the assassin trio now being Christian evangelicals. Being an American film, ethnicities have been changed to diversify the cast: 303 and the prisoner that he escapes with (who’s been amped up as a hoodlum similarly to a character in Kitamura’s Alive) are Caucasian, Kizaki and Tiny (Minoru Matsumoto’s character in the original) are Japanese, Lorenzo (Yuichiro Arai’s analogue) is Latino, Rick (Ryosuke Watabe’s short-lived character) is African American, the lead marshal is African American while his partner is white. Jess is only described as “pale”, and Reggie and Francis (the characters corresponding to Kenji Matsuda and Kazuhito Ohba) were not specified, which is probably wise so they could leave casting open to whoever could look psychotic and/or pretty enough. The progressively-minded will also likely appreciate that Jess has a bit more agency than The Girl did, actively shown fighting against the zombies, albeit without the insane bravado of the practically superhuman surrounding cast. On the other hand, she and 303 share a kiss, a cliché by Hollywood standards but which almost never seems to happen in Japanese action flicks.
Among the returning casts, the most profoundly altered is Ken (corresponding to Toshiro Kamiaka’s character), who this time instead of dying offscreen and contributing nothing more than a cool-looking leather duster, fills a kind of Kyle Reese-meets-Ben Kenobi role here as the only hero who knows what’s going on, interrupting Jess’s kidnapping and keeping her safe until 303 happened to drop in (unlike the original, our hero running into the gangsters was a coincidence not arranged in advance), all while speaking cryptically about destiny and hinting at their previous reincarnations. Much like the fake-out in the opening of the original film, the remake does make it seem for a while like this could be our hero, until he subverts expectations by kicking the bucket. There’s also a flashback to him and “the samurai” (303’s past life) training together in the feudal Japan, towards the end of the film, when we find out about the “princess’s” resurrection powers.
The two marshals are also a blast, amping up the bullshitting that we all love (this time he claims to be 1000 times faster than Evander Holyfield, instead of Mike Tyson) with a ton more ludicrous claims including how he worked for Area 51 and that must be the source of the zombies. The duo get a few more action scenes to take out zombie hoards (they don’t get their fight with the assassin, though), and, in a piece echoing one of the deleted scenes from the original movie, get fused together into one hyper zombie!
There are numerous new characters, as well: an additional gangster character (the one who actually abducted our female lead) named Kevin, an angry biker name Goat who 303 strips for his clothing Terminator-style and who eventually partners up with Tiny for some antics, and a host of bit parts, reminiscent of both the rapid character appearances and comedic tone of Final Wars.
The expanded cast is an indication of an expanded budget, and that’s certainly not the only clue to that. Rather than in an abandoned forest, the zombie pandemonium in this movie takes place in bustling Las Vegas with a ton of collateral damage, which I imagine may have been one of the more controversial deviations from the source material. (Vegas had also just been used for the setting of 2007’s Resident Evil: Extinction, from Kitamura-favorite director Russell Mulcahy.) The setting shifts across an array of locations: a few casinos, a swimming pool, a morgue, a brothel, a parking lot, and the climactic showdown is at Anasazi ruins. Ruins aside, these probably wouldn’t have the creepy atmosphere of the Forest of Resurrection, but decades of zombie flicks have demonstrated that an overrun cityscape can prove just as unsettling. The movie’s combination of numerous extra cast members with nonstop violence also keeps the zombie cycle self-sustaining, so even without the plot device of a mobster corpse-dumping ground, there’s no shortage of bodies to get zombified. (The script is explicit that the resurrections are associated with an eclipse, unlike the vagueness of the original when it comes to the subject. It’s possible that the woods were just always full of zombies, but that wouldn’t fly in a major metropolitan area.)
To navigate the gauntlet of locations, and also highlight the budgetary increase, there’s a plethora of high-adrenaline car chases… in fact I completely lost count of how many. Vehicle-fu in general is a recurring motif as characters pursue one another with, fight on top of, and run each other over with cars, jeeps, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters, and fighter jets. While the original film only implies a crashed armored vehicle preceding 303’s escape, this one shows him full-on leaping from a crashing plane in full flight…twice! Perhaps the comparisons to Fury Road reflect that some of these factors persist into Kitamura’s current draft, but honestly it feels a bit more like Crank.
Another piece that wouldn’t have been possible on the original movie’s budget is the ending fight scene, in which the portal actually swallows the combatants. Instead of merely representing otherworldliness with a simple orange filter, this version has them duking it out in a full-on hellscape, and then flashing through various reincarnations that they’ve had in different time periods: the Civil War, Medieval Europe, the Roman Colosseum, even some sort of Lovecraftian alien prehistory with cyclopean ruins and pyramids at non-Euclidian angles! This sounds like it’d be quite a challenge for the effects team, so I’m curious if it would have come across organically or looked more cartoonish with all of the required CG.
The Lovecraft connection is interesting given that similar subject matter had just been tackled in Midnight Meat Train, but it also represents another trend that I notice with this script compared to the original: the pop-culture seems a bit more on-the-nose. The original movie certainly makes no bones about being inspired by Sam Raimi, George Miller, Highlander, and more, but it rarely name drops nods very explicitly, while this one…well, there’s a part where the marshals take off in helicopter and “Danger Zone” starts playing. There are references to Terminator and JJ Abrams, parts reminiscent of From Dusk ‘til Dawn, and there’s even a scene where the one-handed cop is told he can join the likes of “Ash, Cobra, Luke Skywalker, and that mad cat from Rolling Thunder” (Space Adventure Cobra isn’t exactly well-known in the US, but a Hollywood version was announced in 2008. If Alexandre Aja had gotten to make his Cobra movie, perhaps audiences would have gotten the reference, but as it stands it’s wild to think of a joke in one unmade movie hinging on a different unmade movie – both remaking Japanese properties, no less!). One of the nods that I particularly got a kick out of was Ken’s refusal to explain the situation to Jess during their initial car chase, mostly because Kitamura has raved about how Schwarzenegger doing the same to Rae Dawn Chong in Commando is one of the greatest repartees in cinema history. I have to wonder if his work on Final Wars and LoveDeath (which both namedrop cinematic references left and right) influenced this direction at all.
There’s a lot of potential in the screenplay, and had it been made, perhaps it would have been a cult hit, inspiring memes and Funko pops and T-shirts with the main characters’ matching phoenix-shaped birthmarks of destiny. However, as much of an uphill battle the first movie was to make, this time would be harder, since Kitamura needs to top himself, keeping somewhat faithful without coming across as simple rehash, which is a delicate balance. Versus was certainly able to utterly surpass the scope of Down to Hell, but it’s not clear if that’s scalable, especially given the monolithic cult status that it had since achieved. There have been remake cases where everything worked (The Grudge comes foremost to mind), but it’s a difficult balance, and Kitamura’s original support network might not have been able to drop everything and fly to Hollywood to compose music, design costumes, and action-choreograph the film… critical components for a movie that’s the unironic epitome of “style over substance”. So, he’d need to find people stateside who could realize his vision, not to mention find a cast capable of embodying these over-the-top characters, a tall order even when there isn’t an economic crisis putting a pinch on investors (again, this was 2008). Fallout with Lionsgate over Midnight Meat Train had stalled Kitamura’s career taking off stateside, resulting in him getting more work in the direct-to-video range than theatrical, and interest in Asian horror films was starting to wane. Altogether a confluence of troubling factors, no fault of the script, appear to have put the American Versus into stasis.
Time will tell what becomes of Kitamura’s aspirations for the film, but I remain hopeful that he can, as he alluded to with Fury Road, pull off something with all the gusto and energy that he did decades prior. In that case, it’ll be interesting to compare not only to the original picture, but also this screenplay, to see what’s been retained and what’s changed over the years, since at this point the draft’s composition is considerably further removed from the present than it was from the original Versus. Regardless, it was still fascinating to see what could have been and imagine what it would have been like if such a project had come to life a dozen years ago.
I recently sat down for a conversation with Media Blasters to discuss the past and future of the Tokyo Shock line. The brand has been particularly active lately, with Zeiram 2, Zebraman, Devilman, and Gappa getting Blu-ray releases, plus Hakaider, 964 Pinocchio, Zebraman 2, and more on the way.
Well, thank you for agreeing to chat. Tokyo Shock has been a big influence on me ever since seeing Moon Over Tao and Story of Ricky on VHS 20 years ago. How did you first get interested in Asian cinema?
Oh, that was through I would say Miike. I remember when I saw Fudoh and was blown away. I knew that Japan was making some special stuff.
That’s a strong entry.
Yeah, Fudoh I still feel [is] one of his best early works.
How did Media Blasters come about? It’s a pretty diverse company between the labels, with Anime Works, Tokyo Shock, Kitty Films, etc. Was that always the vision?
It came about because of a Star Trek convention and I saw my first anime, Project A-ko … I went [to] horror, anime, and all types of conventions and found all these great titles.
I see! Back in the day there was quite a mix of content at the conventions scenes.
Yup, and no where else to get it. If not for conventions and college clubs [we] never saw this stuff.
Is that still how you find content to license?
Not as much, the internet changed everything.
So, looking for reviews or talk about titles online now is the main method?
Pretty much, but as we got bigger we saw them in production. Before the public.
That’s neat! So you were able to do set visits outside of the Fever Dreams productions?
Yes, or even in preproduction.
Are there certain studios that you’re able to work better with because of that?
Yeah, very good with Nikkatsu, Shochiku, Media Suits.
Is there a licensing philosophy behind the Tokyo Shock label? Like the sort of thing that makes you think “this is a good fit” or “this not so much”.
Director mostly and type of content.
The director aspect makes sense. You certainly did more than anyone else in the US for Takashi Miike, Keita Amemiya, Ryuhei Kitamura.
Have there been any titles you can talk about that you thought would have been great fits, but weren’t able to license?
Audition.
Ah, yeah, that seems very much up your alley.
Or maybe many Toho.
On the subject of Toho, you released several of Toho’s giant monster movies, and I know that there were some issues with getting the two Godzilla movies to market. They have a reputation for being very protective of the Godzilla brand specifically; did they treat those releases any differently than they had the prior ones?
Not really, just we were too excited and we went overboard. They really approve no extras. We did all these extras and this became an issue later.
But yes, Godzilla is special to them.
Right, I think those were all new while the other discs were extras from the Japanese versions.
Yup, and we had to correct them all and only barebone release they approved.
Although, I remember you did a new edit of Frankenstein Conquers the World, right?
No, whatever they have is [it] …While fans were happy we took a hit for sure.
That’s a shame.
It is ok. Maybe one day work [with them] again.
So, no plans for any of the other Toho flicks on Blu-ray for the time being, it sounds like?
Not at this time, Toei and Nikkatsu to start. Shochiku has not many films we really like that much. Pony soon.
Because Blu-ray is the same region code in the US and Japan, there’s more opportunity for reverse importation than there was with DVD. Has this affected how studios treat licensing?
Not really.
That’s encouraging; it’s something that a lot of fans speculate about.
Sure.
Have there been unique challenges working on Korean, Hong Kong, or Thai movies as opposed to the “bread and butter” of Japanese stuff?
No, they are easy; just Korea is very expensive and Hong Kong is fine, just not as well organized. Korea makes great stuff. Thai, very good too.
Which titles have been surprise hits for you?
Hmmm… hard to say. Guess you are taking Tokyo Shock?
Mostly, but feel free to talk about the other labels as well.
I would say biggest surprise probably on Tokyo Shock be Visitor Q. I really thought “just not much there”, but did really well.
That’s a very strange film, but I remember it was my roommate’s favorite in college.
Yeah just too strange. She was a contest. The directors given low low budget and make a film.
A lot like Aragami, in that regard.
So, I notice that Anime Works seems to have an equal distribution between movies and TV series, but Tokyo Shock leans a lot more heavily into the movie side. Are live-action shows more expensive to license, or do they not perform as well?
[They do] not perform as well, and just too much work for that many episodes.
I mean, shows like Ultraman or Ultra Q [are] exceptions, but not many. We looked into those shows but they were messed up back then.
Yeah, the rights were tied up in a legal battle.
Yes.
In the last year, Tokyo Shock has made a huge return, with several times as many releases as we’ve seen in previous years. Why is now the time for them?
I recently went Japan prior to COVID, and then after COVID we were able close deals finally. So that visit, which I had not done in years, was very important.
Also we stopped producing.
Producing dubs?
Producing movies. We recently did Shinobi Girl, Flesh for the Beast. Voodoo Virus is it.
Ah, I see. Okay, well, I’ll let you go now, but thank you very much for your time!
Thank you.
Keep up with the latest Media Blasters announcements on their Facebook page.
Confession: I was struggling to come up with another iconic monster to round up for this year’s Halloween article, and as such, a suggestion came my way – why not focus on a monster movie subgenre that isn’t constrained to the individual monster’s form? Or, that form itself is without constraint? Basically, I got a request to cover Japanese body horror.
Body horror isn’t about fear of the monster itself (exclusively, anyway), but rather the process of a person involuntarily transforming into one. Naturally, this has overlap with many major monster types: werewolves who don’t want to be werewolves, zombies decaying as they retain their humanity, the people who have an adverse reaction to eating mermaid flesh. In the interest of time I certainly can’t hit them all (having procrastinated on starting this until right before Halloween), but I’ll try to cover the titles that are best, best-known, and potentially interesting to readers here.
To start with, while “body horror” is usually assigned as a genre beginning with Cronenberg and his ilk, the idea of fear at a gross unnatural physical change is fundamental to human psychology and dates back throughout literature. In Japan, you could look to the rapid aging of Urashima Taro at the end of his legend or the protagonist’s gradual draining of vitality during the Peony Lantern story as such, the same with cautionary tales about deformed-and-deforming vengeful spirits such as the Kuchisake Onna and the Teketeke.
The second World War brought about deformity on a larger scale than previously encountered, enhancing the taboo of the subject but also cementing it in the collective subconscious, and thus prompting a certain level of metaphor to be tactful about the topic (lest one handle it outright and get banned, like the haunting Prophecies of Nostradamus). This, as with most subjects, brings us to the topic of Godzilla. Very much analogous to radiation victims, the world’s most famous kaiju was designed with hide resembling the keloid scars that developed on a-bomb survivors. While I’ll credit Shin Godzilla as the entry that leans the most heavily into this “gradually evolving, unpredictably amorphous” take on the character, Godzilla’s role as a mutation has been a staple of the franchise since the beginning.
The body horror in 1954’s Godzilla isn’t really realized from the human perspective, however, but that came from some of the science fiction films that Ishiro Honda directed in its wake. The next worth mentioning is 1958’s The H-man, in which people are attacked by blob monsters and, in turn, become blob monsters themselves (the same time period saw other countries making liquid creature movies, such as The Quatermass Xperiment, The Blob, and Caltiki the Immortal Monster; blobs were in vogue). However, while horrifying, these melting transformations were relatively quick; there wasn’t a sense of lingering with the effects…that would arrive with what’s arguably Honda’s best horror film, Matango.
A moody horror drama, Matango focused on a group of misfit castaways stranded on a remote island without food. They discover irradiated mushrooms with devastating effects: ingesting the fungus gradually turns the person into a mushroom monster, sort of a zombie predating the modern zombie phenomena. But how long can a starving person hold out? Those mushrooms are delicious after all…
Of course, the mastermind behind such monster effects was none other than Eiji Tsuburaya, so I guess it’s a fine time to bring up the Ultraman franchise, which has a number of arguable appearances. While the character of Kanegon has become quite a cute mascot with numerous appearances, it’s easy to forget that he’s supposed to be a human child karmically transformed into a money-gobbling freak, and the Ultra Q episode “Kanegon’s Cocoon” was actually a major influence on Shinya Tsukamoto when conceiving Tetsuo the Iron Man – the *definitive* Japanese body horror flick (though one can argue that Kanegon’s rotting appearance in Redman is a horror unto itself). Another iconic character with a tragic backstory is A. Jamila, an astronaut who was mutated into a kaiju only for Ultraman to murder. Those are both examples from the 1960s, without a graphic fleshy component of the transformations, but the franchise got there eventually, as is evidenced by the gradually evolving, live-organism-absorbing Beast the One in Ultraman the Next.
That’s not to say that there weren’t graphic transformations during the golden age, though. The most notable title of the time is probably 1959’s The Manster, which is admittedly a mostly American-made feature filmed in Japan. Our hapless hero is the victim of medical experimentation and winds up growing an entire evil twin out of his shoulder.
Medical experimentation is certainly a source for a fair degree of body horror, from the notorious Horrors of Malformed Men (the banned Toei picture about artificial mutilation, itself stitched together from five unrelated Rampo Edogawa stories) to the equally notorious Guinea Pig pictures of the 1980s (which Charlie Sheen famously mistook for actual snuff films) all the way to the insanity of the modern manga Franken Fran, in which the cute girl protagonist performs miraculous surgeries that sometimes turn her patients into monsters in thematically ironic ways. On the particularly monster-movie-heavy side of these, the 2018 gekimation flick Violence Voyager is certainly an experience, centering on a theme park where the proprietor has lured in various children to turn them into boxy-headed misfits.
However, such operations are also the source of a great many Japanese superheroes, ranging from Cyborg 009 to 8man to Kamen Rider. This causes no end of angsty pontificating as the protagonists lament their own lack of humanity, but for the most part they were physically indistinguishable. It was out of this concept that some of the next set of heroes came along, such as Inazuman, Demon Lord Dante, and even Kazuo Koike’s version of The Incredible Hulk, who (despite not having been surgically altered) represented more grotesque transformations. The most significant of that wave is certainly Devilman, a series that started as a repackaging of ideas from Demon Lord Dante and wound up not just being Go Nagai’s magnum opus, but a veritable essential classic that spawned countless spinoffs, retellings, and imitations. A lot of the horror in Devilman focuses around demons cruelty towards humans and vice versa, but the handful of “Devilmen” (those who are possessed by demons and transform but still maintain human will) are appalled at the creatures that they they’ve become; easy to imagine with Nagai’s ghastly imagination and psychosexual imagery at the helm.
Devilman was a huge influence on Hideaki Anno for Evangelion and Clamp for X, but from a body horror perspective, I think the most noteworthy direct descendent is Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte. The parallels are obvious, only with alien parasites instead of demons: the series begins with a human who is improperly possessed, retaining his humanity, moves on to him hunting down the successfully possessed who are eating people, and culminates with the revelation that regular people afraid of monsters are capable of inflicting cruelty beyond even the monsters’ imaginations. Iwaaki actually penned a story for the Neo Devilman spinoff, in case there was any room for plausible doubt. Anyway, the aliens cause the heads of the humans possessed to be amorphous shapeshifters who can change disguises and turn into various bladed weapons (James Cameron wanted to adapt the series at one point, raising immediate comparisons to the second terminator), but our hero only has his hand taken over (putting him into the “possessed talking hand” camp with the leads of Midori Days, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Vampire Hunter D), thus body horror. One nice thing about the series that one can rarely say is this: every version is good. Read the manga, watch the anime, watch the live-action movies; you’ll have a great time with any of them.
The gory excesses of Nagai’s manga work married well with the splatter boom brought about by home video in the 1980s, and thus a glut of hyperviolent works began flooding store shelves, bringing about a new level of excessive, painful transformation sequences as well. Suddenly there was a flood of heroes in titles like Shin Kamen Rider, The Guyver, Baoh, Guy, Biohunter, Genocyber, Apocalypse Zero (which has no shortage of fucked up content, for sure!), and more whose henshins were more the stuff of nightmares than an imitable pose for kids to copy at home.
Often the source of such hero’s powers was something dangerous that constantly threatened to consume them if they weren’t careful. The idea of this borrowed dark power taking over is a big part of Devilman, but has become a ubiquitous trope in all sorts of media (heck, take a look at all the recent Ultraman storylines with Belial widgets), but is accompanied by physical changes of varying levels of grotesqueness in the likes of Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, Garo, Ushio & Tora, Tokyo Ghoul, and the current Jujutsu Kaisen, to name a very few, when the enhanced combat abilities may result in a hero growing tails, claws, extra eyes/mouths, and so on.
Of course, it rarely gets quite as out of control as it did for Tetsuo, the antagonist of Katsuhiro Otomo’s seminal work Akira. I feel like I shouldn’t even have to explain this one, since it’s such a classic, lampooned from Robot Chicken to South Park and used in Absolut Vodka commercials, but if for some reason you like body horror and still haven’t watched the most technically well-made anime picture ever produced…well, do it.
What’s often less reported is how Akira is in many ways a send-up to the classic Mitsuteru Yokoyama work Gigantor (AKA Tetsujin 28): The titular Akira refers to himself as #28, the hero is named Shotaro Kaneda, and Tetsuo’s name means “Iron Man” as a play on Tetsujin’s “Iron Person”. I say this mostly as a way to segue to a movie that hit the next year, coincidentally also pronounced Tetsuo (albeit with different kanji), and also meaning “Iron Man”, naturally released abroad as Tetsuo the Iron Man.
Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo has been a strong bit of genre contention in my circles since the recent Arrow box set put it back into the limelight. The premise is that a person, in retaliation for a past wicked misdeed, is cursed and begins growing metal and machinery from his body, as well as the ability to absorb such within himself. I think that’s a stretch to define as “cyberpunk”, since there’s not really anything “cyber” about it, but upon debate I’ve found many titles less deserving of the moniker also get lumped into the genre. What the movie certainly is, however, is body horror, with our nameless protagonist slowly having a meltdown as he…well…melts down into a pile of unrecognizable scrap material. The sequel, Body Hammer, does feel a bit more scifi and methodological, perhaps due to the “cyberpunk” label that was placed on the original (Tsukamoto apparently had to have the term explained to him after the international acclaim of the first film).
If you decide to watch the Tetsuo trilogy, I would also recommend tracking down the origins of it, the 1986 short The Phantom of Regular Size, which was basically remade into Tetsuo (not included in the recent box set due to music rights issues, but it’s floating around the internet), as well as A Snake of June, which maintains several of the same themes, only more sexual. Of course, Tsukamoto’s filmography has quite a bit of flesh-destroying body horror, from Hiruko the Goblin to Tokyo Fist to Vital, so it really depends on what your stomach can handle.
Curse-based transformation is a recurring motif in Japanese horror, and in the late-1980s economic bubble environment that gave birth to Tetsuo, there were independent creators knocking out offbeat horror flicks for the video market on a fairly regular basis. A few that come to mind include Conton (1987), which has a haunted protagonist puke up snake-like things and eventually turn into a big monster at the end, Gakidama (AKA Hungry Devil Spirit, 1985), in which the hero coughs up a flesh ball with a life of its own, Entrails of a Beautiful Woman (1986), that ends with a rape victim turning into a demon and laying waste to her tormentors (ironically only available in the US, not in Japan), George Iida’s very Cronenberg 1987 debut The Unborn (AKA Cyclops), where a woman pregnant with a monster baby is pursued by a freakish man, and the long-delayed, eventually-released Bloody Muscle Bodybuilder in Hell, which is true to its reputation as the “Japanese Evil Dead”, not to mention extreme anime titles like Wicked City, Dark Cat, Iczer 1, and so on. (There’s also 1988’s Evil Dead Trap, which features *spoiler* a serial killer with a malformed conjoined twin…maybe that’s body horror? Or maybe it just lives with other Japanese video nasties like Biotherapy, Sweet Home, and Guzoo, a woefully under-appreciated part of the cinematic landscape.)
There are more modern examples as well. By now I’ve probably talked Hajime Ohata’s Henge (2011) up enough that most folks reading should be aware of it, since it turns into a kaiju flick at the end, but it’s a nice little love story where a wife takes care of her demonically possessed (?) husband as he morphs into something terrible. 2017’s Vampire Clay has hapless art students who get bitten by creatures sculpted from blood-soaked clay turn into mushy clay people themselves, smooshing and stretching in disturbing ways. There’s also Sion Sono’s 2007 flick Exte, about living hair extensions taking over their hosts, which is like something out of a Junji Ito story.
Oh, gosh, that reminds me, we haven’t talked about Junji Ito yet.
I’ve got some mixed feelings about Ito, since he’s awesome and his work is awesome, but, a lot like how Tezuka is the only classic manga author to get a foothold in the US market, Ito is now unironically referred to as “the guy who makes all of the horror manga”. I’m sure he’d feel similarly, given his reverence for other foundational Japanese horror maestros like Daijiro Morohoshi, Hideshi Hino, Shigeru Mizuki, and Kazuo Umezz who, incidentally, have also done their fair share of body horror:
The only non-Ito name to seem to be getting some Western cred in the horror manga field lately is Shintaro Kago, who’s largely an ero-guro type (though some titles like Dementia 21 are pretty great). I honestly had to search a while to find a representative Kago piece that wasn’t too disturbing for the blog!
But Junji Ito is the brand name that you can buy t-shirts of at Hot Topic, so I guess he deserves some deep focus. As salty as the prior statement may seem, it is legitimately great that he’s having his day in the sun, since his work has been excellent, and, frankly, this was a long time coming. He made his debut in 1987 and gradually racked up a bibliography and rep for stellar short stories, but the popularity poop really hit the fan in 1999 when his first story Tomie was adapted into a theatrical film, and it was a massive hit. There have now been eight theatrical Tomie flicks plus a TV miniseries, OVA, and there was going to be an American remake until Quibi died, so the fate of that one is unknown. The biggest J-horror franchise to not yet get an Americanized treatment, it makes sense that Tomie was viewed as problematic, since it’s at least gynophobic, possibly misogynistic, in that the main antagonist is an unkillable schoolgirl creature who gets her jollies driving men insane and goading them to kill each other, potential suitors, and her. Tomie’s various forms as she regenerates from a lover’s psychotic dismemberment are indeed grotesque, but since she’s hardly a sympathetic monster and doesn’t seem to mind, I’m not sure if the body horror label is appropriate for her or not.
Junji Ito is more than Tomie, though: in addition to the first Tomie sequel, nine other live-action adaptations of Ito’s work occurred in 2000 alone! Of these, the best two, coincidentally the two available stateside, and the two with the most body-horror, were both directed by Andrey Higuchinsky, a music video director who cut his horror drama teeth on the 1997 Eko Eko Azarak TV series. The first of these is the theatrical adaptation of Ito’s long-running (by Ito standards) manga Uzumaki, about a town plagued by the abstract concept of spirals, which is still generally considered the best cinematic adaptation of his work, and a contender for a spot in any pantheon of top Japanese horror movies, assuming you can get your head around (and around and around and around) the cooky premise. The spiral infection takes on many forms, from people contorting themselves into spiral shapes, removing their own fingerprints and cochlea, growing out hair into prehensile spiral tendrils (I told you it was like Exte), and even turning into snails. The story is very much a series of vignettes leading to a climax, but the creepy creativity keeps it up throughout. It’ll be interesting to see how the animated adaptation for Adult Swim compares when it hits next year!
A few months after Uzumaki hit theaters, Higuchinsky was back, this time adapting Ito’s short story “Long Dream” across a two-part television event, which has been edited into a single movie for its DVD release here. This one is interesting, since it starts as complete, a faithful adaptation of the story (presumably the first half when it aired on TV), then, as though they realized they had to kill some more time, it has an original, much more conventional horror story tacked onto the plot for the finale. As much of a letdown as the back half may be, the setup is compelling enough, with a patient at a sleep clinic suffering from Inception-esque time dilation in his dreams: a night’s sleep seems like days to him, then like years, then like millennia. He gradually evolves into the next step in human evolution as so much time passes in his own mind. Keep in mind it’s on a TV budget, though it’s a lot more cinematic than a lot of the television productions of the time!
Junji Ito has countless other stories, so it’s a fool’s errand to try to run through them all; perhaps for some future Halloween I’ll do a run-through of the various movie and TV adaptations, though. Most of them are mediocre, but every once in a while you run across something like these Higuchinsky flicks, or the brilliant Tomie Unlimited, which was a good fit for the franchise because of the director selection of Noboru Iguchi, the unhinged master of gonzo Japanese splatter.
So, uh, I guess we better talk about Noboru Iguchi now. Initially a porn director, he started down a path towards what Wikipedia would have you think is “mainstream film” with some early horror comedies like 1997’s Kurushime-san and 2003’s Larva to Love getting acclaim, then moving on to Kazuo Umezz adaptations like Snake Girl and Cat Eyed Boy. What really put him into the international eye (for cult film junkies) was the 2006 adaptation of Go Nagai’s Sukeban Boy (AKA Delinquent in Drag), featuring a whole bag of what were to become Iguchi’s hallmarks: school uniforms, gratuitous nudity, wanton violence, scatological humor, and grotesque body horror far exceeding even what was in Nagai’s original. As the characters sprouted guns from bloody stumps and shot projectiles from their horribly mishappen nipples, audience cheered; suddenly lead actress Asami had become an action star and a whole new subgenre was born.
Sukeban Boy could very well have been a one-off fluke had foreign audiences not taken notice, but what really cemented that this was going to be *the* new voice of Japanese cult cinema was American distributor Media Blasters, hot off their first original co-production Death Trance, courting Iguchi to do a follow-up. Thus, Machine Girl was born, and the decade that followed was a whole movement of similar splattery content, including the entire Sushi Typhoon label at Nikkatsu, much of it tailored towards a cartoonishly exaggerated view of Japan for Western audiences. Examples of this 2000s Japansploitation include Iguchi’s own RoboGeisha, Mutant Girls Squad, Karate Robo Zaborgar, and Dead Sushi, and extends to others in the wake like Go Ohara’s Geisha Assassin and Psycho Gothic Lolita (which also has some nice monster transformations!), Seiji Chiba’s Alien vs Ninja, Kengo Kaji’s Samurai Princess, and so on. In short, it was a major boom.
The name raised the most by this movement was undoubtedly Yoshihiro Nishimura. Mostly an effects guy early on, Nishimura had already been collaborating with Iguchi for a while by the time Machine Girl rolled around, having previously done gun-breast effects in Sukeban Boy, and before that in one of Iguchi’s hardcore porn films featuring future Samurai Zombie star Nana Natsume (according to Iguchi, his inspirations for this were Shotaro Ishinomori’s 009-1 and, of course, Devilman). During Machine Girl’s production, Media Blasters asked Nishimura if he’d like to helm a movie of his own, to which he dug up his old 1995 student film Anatomia Extinction, and decided a remake was overdue. The result was Tokyo Gore Police, a huge step up in every direction.
While Anatomia Extinction is a neat little dystopian indie that transparently apes Cronenberg and Tsukamoto, Tokyo Gore Police feels very much like its own, fully-realized vision, in which an out-of-control virus has caused some people to spontaneously sprout weapons from their bodies in a cornucopia of unsettling ways, necessitating a police force equipped to respond. There are certainly elements that feel like earlier splatter flicks and cyberpunk works like Bubblegum Crisis, but the overall effect is something that I feel like Nishimura’s been trying to recapture for his career ever since…and what a career it’s been!
Nishimura’s been all over the place since 2008, with his fingers in everything from Tormented to Jellyfish Eyes to Shin Godzilla, racking up producer credits along with effects, writing, and direction. His directorial works have literally gone around the globe, getting invited into international anthologies like ABCs of Death and The Profane Exhibit. He’s really good at collaborating with other directors, as he has with erotic zombie maestro Naoyuki Tomomatsu on Vampire Girl vs Frankenstein Girl, or Shinji Higuchi on the Attack on Titan TV miniseries, or Noboru Iguchi and Tak Sakaguchi on Mutant Girls Squad. I think he really shines in these collaborations, and they wind up being more than the sum of their parts….much like some of the weird semi-human creatures in the films.
One of Nishimura’s recent directorial outings is 2017’s Kodoku Meatball Machine, which deserves special mention as the third installment in the Meatball Machine franchise. That series revolves around tiny aliens who take over human bodies and pilot them around like mecha, augmenting them with weapon enhancements along the way. It started in 1999 with Junichi Yamamoto’s low-budget Meatball Machine (now marketed as Meatball Machine Origin), which was remade in 2005 with Yudai Yamaguchi in the director’s seat, Nishimura on effects, and the great Keita Amemiya on character designs. So, in a way, Nishimura winding up at the helm for the third one feels like a natural progression, bringing his own manic energy to the already pretty over-the-top trilogy.
(Hey, while we’re on the topic of aliens taking over human bodies, does Goke the Bodysnatcher from Hell count as body horror? Eh, whatever.)
Speaking of Keita Amemiya, he, along with Mahiro Maeda and Blade of the Immortal’s Hiroaki Samura worked on a video game that’s kind of body horror: Dororo. Or perhaps it’s the opposite of body horror. It’s based on the classic Osamu Tezuka manga that’s also been adapted into anime twice (the recent Mappa version written by Yasuko Kobayashi is real good) as well as a live-action film. The premise is that our hero Hyakkimaru had his various bodyparts stolen by demons as an infant, so now he’s a kind of Edo-era cyborg with swords for hands and whatnot. He goes around killing the demons, and each as he ganks each one it returns an eye, an ear, a tongue, skin, etc, so he becomes more whole as the work goes along, which is kind of antithetical to the usual subgenre route of someone losing their humanity.
Tezuka was a doctor by training, so his work often intersects medical fantasy, particularly when the eponymous surgeon in Black Jack builds a body for his daughter/love interest who was initially a sentient vestigial twin, or the main character of Ode to Kirihito is turned into a strange dog man by disease. Hey, that’s all kind of body horror, come to think of it.
On that note, perhaps it’s time to wrap this piece up. I think we’ve covered the major titles, and there’s not much else I want to talk abou-
The recent Godzilla SP announcement proved to be the kick in the pants that I needed to get a new post together…however, WordPress had some other plans, changing up the interface something fierce, hence this being a bit delayed. At any rate, I’ll see if I can figure out the new layout enough to get a news recap post out, just to cover some of the most major highlights of the past few months, with a few opinions and a bit of conjecture sprinkled in.
For those who missed it, Godzilla: Singular Point will be an anime TV series debuting on Netflix next year. The first rumblings of it were October 6 when a newly-formed English-language Twitter account announced it as its third post , which was certainly met with healthy skepticism (especially since it self-described as “fake news” as a joke), but it actually panned out to be true, with an official announcement the following day.
At any rate, as the rare “anime person” in tokusatsu fandom, I’m obliged to provide two cents on the announcement. The obvious knee-jerk is to compare expectations to the anime movie trilogy, since that was also a Netflix joint, but there’s no overlap in staff between the productions, and this is television as opposed to feature films, so I can’t imagine they’ll be very comparable. I’m simultaneously more and less excited for this than I was for the trilogy (which I don’t hate, btw).
On the good front, Bones and Orange are two superb animation studios, as opposed to the bottom-of-the-barrel that one gets with Polygon Pictures. I’d advise those anxious about the use of CGI after getting burned by the movie trilogy to look into Orange’s work on Land of the Lustrous or Beastars; they do some of the best work out there with the medium. While I’m not a particular fan of Blue Exorcist, my gripes with that stem more from cliché plot points rather than the character designs, so having Kazue Kato on character designs seems like it may turn out well… there are an assortment of characters seen already, but I’m curious to know how they’ll look in animation. The folks we’ve seen in the preview image sure look pale!
Toh Enjoe isn’t as hot a commodity as Gen Urobuchi, but he’s been around the block a bit as a science fiction writer. I confess that all I’ve really encountered firsthand is Empire of Corpses (which I adore) and his couple of episodes of Space Dandy, but I’ve heard good things about Self-Reference Engine and his Ghost in the Shell short story. I get the impression that he’s a fairly literary type, so I’ve got to wonder if the people expecting this to be more smash-em-up than the previous anime will get what they want.
Atsushi Takahashi is a relatively unknown quantity as a director; he did the Blue Exorcist movie and one of the Doraemon flicks (which I never checked out), the TV series Rideback (on which I have no particular strong feelings), and individual episodes of several generally good titles like Monster, Space Dandy, and Abenobashi. Maybe he’ll really shine with this, though. A lot is being made from Takahashi being an assistant director on Spirited Away, as well as kaiju designer Eiji Yamamori’s background at Studio Ghibli, but I don’t expect much based on that, since Ghibli has a reputation of demanding that everyone do exactly as Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata say without a lot of room for staff to put in their own creative touches. I also never got into Yowamushi Pedal, so it’s hard to know what to expect from composer Kan Sawada. Hopefully they all have a big break with this and do something unique, but we shall see.
As for the decision to go forward with a TV series, it makes sense, given the apocalyptic atmosphere for cinema in general during the pandemic, and Toho and Legendary’s contract forbidding work on new movies at the same time. The countless delays on Godzilla vs Kong will make it harder for Toho to keep their momentum going if they restrict themselves to features. There were also rumors that Legendary was interested in a Godzilla TV series for HBO Max, but much like Godzilla SP, I’ll wait until there’s an official announcement to give it much credence.
In other Godzilla stuff:
While the movie itself was delayed until May 21 (for now), the Making of Godzilla vs Kong is still on track for a November 17th release. Of course, there was a lot in Godzilla King of the Monsters that never made it into that Making of book, so perhaps the movie will still have a surprise or two in store. The tie-in comics, Godzilla Dominion and Kingdom Kong are hitting in March.
Along with the much-lauded Godzilla ziplining attraction at Nijigen no Mori on Awaji Island, there’s also a museum, shooting gallery, and theatrical short directed by Kazuhiro Nakagawa (Day of the Kaiju). I don’t know about the ziplining, but a new short and display seems like it’d make it worth the trip! (Not to mention the weird food items…)
Ultraman Z has been going generally well, considering the pandemic and the most unfortunate passing of head writer Kota Fukihara. I get the feeling that the true scope of the chaos behind the scenes won’t be known for a while, but certainly things like the teased Olympic themes, the early advertisements of lots of Ultraman Geed involvement, and the total lack of set-up surrounding Jugglus Jugglar give us a taste of it. A few aspects do still feel like regressions after how well Ultraman Taiga was executed last year, but the action and creative miniature work has proven top-notch.
Marvel’s Rise of Ultraman is turning into be quite a ride. While the first issue had segments for Kaiju Step and Ultra Q, the second issues did not, so I have to wonder how much side-story content of that type they have planned. The story is certainly decompressed, since we’re 40% of the way through the miniseries as Hayata and Ultrman are still in the process of merging, I’m thinking we’re probably going to round things out with a single giant monster fight across five issues. Still, it seems like a solid gateway for people new to the franchise, and the writers appear to have done their homework on parts of the lore like the Ultra language.
Ultra Galaxy Fight: The Absolute Conspiracy starts November 22 on YouTube, and if nothing else, the presence of a pre-corruption Belial sparks some interest. Needless to say, speculation of where this fits into the already-fraught Ultraman timeline is running wild, along with people wondering if this could be a reincarnation, clone, Zarab-seijin, etc.
In the ultimate reversal on the Chaiyo rights debacle, Tsuburaya productions has now not only been granted excusive rights to their own properties, but also to their co-productions Jumborg Ace & Giant and The 6 Ultra Brothers vs. The Monster Army. These two would certainly make for an interesting double-feature in some sort of box set, especially if it came with a full break-down of the legal battles and weird Chaiyo attempts like Ultraman Millennium as extra features.
The first teaser for SSSS.Dynazenon isn’t all that exciting by itself, but the prior series was so excellent that we can all have solid confidence that this spinoff should at least turn out decent.
Redman: The Kaiju Hunter might be over, but Phase 6 has teased another TsuPro project upcoming, namely Izenborg. Matt Frank and Hiroshi Kanatani appear to be involved, going off of their Facebook posts.
Other kaiju stuff:
While Kaiju Ward Gyarasu (or “Gallas” as it’s better known in fansub circles) fizzled out on Toei’s streaming service after a single episode last year, the Kaiju Ward concept was recently announced as continuing in manga format. It’s being redone as an anthology, with the first two chapters available now on the Toei Tokusatsu Fan Club. The first (the same as the tokusatsu) is Gyarasu, which was drawn by an artist known as Uzuki, while the second, Discargot (rhymes with “escargot” since it’s a snail monster) was done by Kaiju Retto Shojotai‘s Kotaro Yuki. It’s planned for five chapters, so hopefully the manga has a better fate than the live-action series did!
Nezura 1964 seems to be coming along. While The Great Buddha Arrival was certainly interesting, there are times when it felt a little “kitchen sink” in its approach; I’m hoping that the follow-up will be more focused. They have said that there will be a fair bit of CG involved here (no surprised given Hiroto Yokokawa’s background), but how it’ll all come together is still a bit mysterious.
Hot on the heels of our 15th anniversary of The Great Yokai War panel at Kaiju Con-line, Kadokawa announced a sequel, making our closing remarks immediately outdated. Nevertheless, it’s quite excellent that The Great Yokai War Guardians is happening. Takashi Miike is back in the director’s seat, with Yusuke Watanabe writing (his filmography is all over the place, from Robo Rock to Gantz to Gatchaman) and Hiroshi Aramata continuing in a producer role. Kokoro Terada (Damian from Tokusatsu Gagaga) is set to star, and it sounds like the yokai roster will be a bit international (perhaps playing on the original manga?)
Daisuke Sato and Keizo Murase are teaming up again, this time for Brush of the God. They’re collecting funding by Kickstarter now, and while they’re not offering a completed copy of the film as a reward, there is a digest version as an option. Howl from Beyond the Fog was really good, so I’m eager to see what they can achieve with a bigger budget.
Naoki Urasawa’s Asadora is getting a US release in January, part of what seems like a nice return for the artist who was ignored stateside during his Billy Bat years. Asadora is, as typical for Urasawa, a longform ongoing mystery drama, but in this case there’s some kaiju at the center of events.
Other heroes:
I completely missed everything leading up to Kamen Rider Saber, and now it’s an ongoing series. Haven’t really checked it out…uh…no comment, I guess.
Looks like the next Super Sentai will be Zenkaiger. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of Kiramager so far so things seem on a good roll, but since the upcoming show is a 45th anniversary, I have to wonder what Toei has in store.
Rafael Segnini’s Jaspion 3D fan trailer is complete, and getting some well-deserved attention. Also, look for a cameo from On the Rocks!
Seven Seas picked up the license for Superwomen in Love, coming out (no pun intended) next April. I’ve heard a lot of great things about this henshin-hero-yuri-romance, and it’s great to see them bringing more superhero content to English-speaking markets.
Video news:
Just in time for the franchise’s 25th anniversary, Gkids picked up North American home video rights to Evangelion. There was immediate speculation about what extras would be included, which is hard to guess since Gkids hasn’t really done much with TV series releases in the past. I would expect the dub to be the same as the version on Netflix, or at very least not the ADV dub, since only a handful of companies (i.e. Discotek) seem to go that far to preserve all the alternate versions, and Khara seems to dislike the original dub (hence Netflix getting the newer, and arguably worse, redub).
SRS got the rights to Howl from Beyond the Fog, which will definitely be the crowning achievement of their growing kaiju lineup for a while.
Media Blasters has been on a tear lately, with a ton of their classic titles getting reissued on Blu-ray. In addition to Zeiram 2 and Gappa, Zebraman and Devilman are up for preorder, and they’ve promised Hakaider. On the new movie front, they also teased Rise of the Machine Girls, which, considering that the original was one of their productions, seemed like an obvious get.
One of the staples of Media Blasters that they’re not issuing now is Versus, and that’s because Arrow is putting out a pretty deluxe edition of it. They also have Burst City on a recent Blu-ray release, so they’re hitting a lot of Japanese punk classics!
Discotek picked the rights to Symphogear G, so hopefully they can get through the whole five seasons. The first season has already started shipping!
Speaking of Discotek, they also have more Urusei Yatsura movies coming next summer, and Ninja Senshi Tobikage on the way.
A nice look at some of the creatures in the upcoming Monster Hunter movie:
Love and Monsters comes out next weekend, and appears to have some behemoth beastie action.
Miscellaneous:
Netflix is making a new Spriggan anime. I love their commitment to bringing back nostalgic titles like Devilman and Baki; at this point I wouldn’t be surprised by a new 3×3 Eyes or Ogre Slayer materialized.
Cinema Lab seems like a hot new label, having recruited the likes of Mamoru Oshii, Kazuya Konaka, One Cut of the Dead‘s Shinichiro Ueda, and Katsuyuki Motohiro (Ajin, Psycho-Pass). The label’s debut project, directed by Motohiro, is Beautiful Dreamer, which (at least seems to be) about a group of students making their own movie based on Oshii’s classic second Urusei Yatsura flick.
To leave things on a high note, here’s a bizarre little AIDroid music video that Koichi Sakamoto put together. It’s entirely likely that I missed something major, but as always, feel free to leave a comment if you notice a glaring omission. Take care!
Hi all, Kevin here. The blog has gone sadly neglected for the past few months, for which I apologize; the stressful current state of world events has certainly taken its toll.
However, I have not been completely off the radar! Here are a few activities you might have missed:
First of all, Alex of Control All Monsters and I sat down to recreate our G-Fest panel from last year on the Gamera trilogy, in time for the Arrow Gamera set.
Amanda and I were also on Kaiju Transmissions to talk about the Ultra Q movie and what a translation nightmare it posed to fansubbers for decades. I also joined them (along with Justin) to talk about Masaaki Yuasa’s new Netflix series Japan Sinks 2020. Again, if you’re not subscribed to them, I’d encourage doing so.
This weekend is Kaiju Masterclass, the year’s second online convention for giant monsters. The guest list is jaw-dropping for a first-time convention (or any convention), so I’m quite honored to have three panels over the course of the three days: a solo deal on Toho Tokusatsu on Television, one with Matt Parmley and Stan Hyde on the 1970 Osaka Expo, and a 25th anniversary panel on Godzilla vs Destoroyah with John LeMay and the Kaiju Transmissions crew. Full schedules are posted on their website, but keep an eye on their YouTube page in case you miss anything; all will be available after the livestreams. Hopefully you can attend this weekend, but if not, you should be able to check out the videos below:
I might start up a Maser Patrol Facebook feed to keep some bite-sized findings and fun-facts up-to-date between longer blog posts. I’ve been experimenting with the format on another page, so if you want an idea (or just want to read up on tokusatsu-related manga), give that a look.
On that note, I’ll wish everyone a safe continued existence during these unusual times. We’ll return to normalcy at some point, and Maser Patrol will get back into doing some proper write-ups again as well.
Since I’ve been negligent for the past couple of months, I thought it might be good to do a quick rundown of some of developments regarding the recent and upcoming kaiju/henshin hero/J-horror releases that folks on this side of the Pacific can spend their time and money on. Some of this might be repeating things from previous posts, but hey, a reminder can’t hurt. So, let’s get to it!
As a special for Ultraman day, Mill Creek made a little set titled “The Birth of Ultraman” exclusively available via Deep Discount. The set has seven episodes with their English dubs, based on what TsuPro had complete access to at the time, and the black-and-white Birth of Ultraman stage show that aired in Japan a week before the first episode. It’s hard to justify spending $20 for that unless you’re a hardcore fan, but many of us are; I just hope this doesn’t encourage future releases with a single 20 minute episode each like the Japanese sometimes have.
The Kaiju Con-line panel and subsequent Q&A with Keith Aiken helped to put a lot Ultraman-related speculation to rest. Of particular note:
Ultraman Taro will be coming around January, followed shortly by Ultraman Leo, which is the end of the mural sets. They might start a new mural for the 90s/2000s ones.
There’s no problem with Johnnys or 4Kids holding up Ultraman Tiga. They’re considering issuing the 4Kids dub separately.
The movies and direct-to-video specials would be included with the sets for Ultraman Tiga, Ultraman Dyna, and Ultraman Gaia.
They don’t have the rights to Ultra Q the Movie, Ultra Q Dark Fantasy, Ultraman Great, Ultraman Powered, Ultraman USA, ULTRAMAN, or Ultraman vs Kamen Rider due to co-production status. Or, obviously, anything Chaiyo.
The Ultraman Zero releases will (predictably) be messy. It sounds like Ultraman Zero the Movie and Ultraman Saga are each getting their own separate releases, but Killer the Beatstar will only be included with the Ultraman Zero the Chronicle clip show series. All the Ultra Galaxy stuff, movie included, will be in one set.
They don’t have the rights to the Heisei Ultraseven productions for some reason. Ultraseven X they have, though.
They don’t have Ultraman Story or any other Showa movies.
They do have Ultraman Zearth, The☆Ultraman, and amazingly, Ultraman Kids 3000.
They don’t have Andro Melos because the masters looked bad. Which is odd, since that DVD is available in Japan.
They don’t have Ultraman Nice, Super Fighter Legend, Ultraman Graffiti, M78 Love & Peace, Ultra Nyan, or Kaiju Girls. So, keep watching the Kaiju Girls series on Crunchyroll and the movie on HIDIVE.
They don’t have The Men Who Made Ultraman, Revive Ultraman, Ultraseven that I Loved, or similar specials.
They don’t have Ultraman Taiga or Ultraman Z yet, but want to get them as soon as they’re available for licensing.
They have Gridman, but no other TsuPro hero shows. So, keep watching Mirrorman on Toku. Gridman is probably a long way out for a Blu-ray release, so maybe it’ll coincide with SSSS.Dynazenon.
Mill Creek also recently put of a Blu-ray of The H-man and Battle in Outer Space, joining their Mothra steelbook to complete an upgrade the old Icons of Science Fiction DVD set content, audio commentary and all. Unfortunately, like that set, it has partial dubtitles on Battle in Outer Space.
Arrow
The already exciting Gamera: Complete Collection set continues to look better and better. There was a panel at Kaiju Con-Line that went over some of the features in great detail with a few surprises (Garasharp artwork, David Milner’s Noriaki Yuasa interview) that should whet the appetite, and based on a couple of other audio commentary clips I’ve been lucky enough to preview, it should be an impressive and informative assortment. Get it August 18th!
Further tokusatsu releases from Arrow have been teased, but plans for their future releases haven’t been elaborated on (it’s a bummer that they ran out of time during the Kaiju Con-line panel, since that would have been the perfect opportunity to clarify). What is known is that they recently picked up rights to Warning from Space, and about a year ago Kim Newman mentioned in a post (since deleted) that he’d been interviewed by them regarding The Invisible Man Appears and Invisible Man vs. the Human Fly. The Gamera set did balloon a lot in scope from the original conception, which likely would have moved any other tokusatsu plans back, but hopefully those are all still on the way, and hopefully won’t be exclusive to the UK if so. At any rate, it’s interesting how heavily they’ve been working with Kadokawa.
(edit: Per the aforementioned Kaiju Con-line panel, they have also looked into the Yokai Monsters trilogy, but only one of the movies had HD elements available. If true, that’s quite unfortunate, since those movies are a lot of fun.)
Arrow has not only licensed Lake Michigan Monster, but also been promoting it quite heavily, with a character from the film hosting the slate of upcoming titles. It’ll be available on their channel August 3, so hopefully a physical media release will follow. (Edit: they have confirmed a Blu-ray release.)
On the audio commentary for Arrow’s release of “Solid Metal Nightmares: The Films of Shinya Tsukamoto“, Tom Mes repeatedly teases the possibility of a second set including movies like Hiruko the Goblin, Gemini, and Tetsuo the Bullet Man, contingent on the first set selling well. It’s hard to tell how seriously to take these claims, as Mondo Macabro recently released Gemini on Blu-ray, so such a released might be prohibited in the US. Also, Phantom of Regular Size was excluded from the set due to music licensing rights, so we’ll have to continue to seek that one out via alternative means.
Media Blasters
Zeiram 2 is getting a Blu-ray release on September 22nd! There’s been a fair amount of confusion as to why they’re starting with the second film, and I have to assume that it’s a licensing restriction, the same as why they released it first back in the day. It is a shame that they aren’t able to get both films at the same time, to replicate the awesome Japanese Blu-ray double feature release, or that they never got to bundle Zeiram, Zeiram 2, and Iria back when they had the rights to all three. At any rate, this ought to be an upgrade from the 2001 DVD. (Edit: Carl Morano at Media Blasters confirmed that they are trying to get the rights to the first movie, but that it would need to be part of a package.)
The Blu-ray re-release of Death Kappa did not, in fact, have the Japanese ending included, contrary to what Media Blasters’ Facebook page had previously stated.
Shout Factory
Weathering with You is coming out on Blu-ray September 15, or, if you want to hold off for a fancy deluxe special edition with soundtrack and booklet, November 17.
Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna‘s US theatrical run got buried by coronavirus, but it’s getting a home video release October 6. Here’s hoping it’s more coherent than Tri ended up becoming.
The double-feature of The House Where Evil Dwells and Ghost Warrior is now officially out of print, so if you want a copy of a 1980s version of The Grudge or Hiroshi Fujioka as a slasher villain, get it soon…Amazon has two left as of this writing!
Other labels
The spoof Notzilla has found a distributor, Allied Vaughn. Per Avery Guerra, it should be available on demand and on disc on August 18th, but I haven’t seen it actually up for preorder at any retailers yet.
The Mighty Kong actually got a DVD release from Tricoast Entertainment way back in October, but I didn’t notice until Astounding Beyond Belief pointed it out more recently. It’s also streaming on Amazon Prime, and, apparently, cropped.
Streaming services
Shout Factory
Both the original Kamen Riderand Kamen Rider Kuuga are streaming on TokuSHOUTsu, as well as Tubi (original, Kuuga). As a collector and fan of physical media, it’s a little disheartening that three of the four Kamen Rider shows available legally in the states are exclusive to streaming services, but perhaps if they do decent numbers on the streaming front they’ll consider Blu-ray sets down the road.
Kamen Rider Heisei Generations Forever will be arriving on the service August 1. It may seem an odd move when you consider that only one Heisei series has actually been released here, but it’s wise to acknowledge that most of the potential audience is caught up via fansubs and wants to see the newer stuff rather than trying to release everything in order.
Shout Factory announced a deal with Mill Creek to stream their entire Ultraman catalog on TokuSHOUTsu. This is a good move for Shout, since the selection of titles on TokuSHOUTsu was pretty much limited to a dozen Super Sentai titles with two Kamen Riders and one Ultraman, but this shifts the balance with a lot more shows, including ones from this century (which they were definitely anemic on before).
The excellent Australian pastiche of tokusatsu (among other 1970s genre elements) Danger 5 is now streaming on Shout Factory TV.
YouTube
Ultraman Z is streaming weekly on Tsuburaya’s YouTube account, with each episode hitting Friday nights at 8:30 EST (basically a live Saturday morning broadcast in Japan) and remaining up for two weeks. The show is already fantastic, but I get a special kick out of the semi-broadcast experience, complete with commercials for Ultraman stuff during the breaks.
Speaking of director Kiyotaka Taguchi, his independent web series UNFIX continues to update with new episodes as well on a relatively monthly basis, with subtitles! Check it out to see the mature tokusatsu stories he can tackle without the constraints of Bandai product placement.
Not only has The Godzilla Channel been keeping a steady stream of new Godziban episodes coming (some of which have been *wild*), but they’ve also recently started a weekly Chibi Godzilla short, under the name Tadaima! Chibi Godzilla, to run for 12 segments until September 30.
Ever testing the bounds of what can reasonably be done in a movie, the One Cut of the Dead franchise has a new short filmed entirely during lockdown: One Cut of the Dead Mission:Remote. As the original film is picking up more and more recognition stateside, I’m really hoping that the second one (Operation Hollywood) gets translated to complete the trifecta.
There’s always a stream of interesting new content coming to Netflix, including recent titles like BNA, Dorohedoro, Beastars, and the third seasons of Castlevania and Baki. Among other things, Studio Trigger has a tie-in to Cyberpunk 2077 (titled Cyberpunk: Edgerunners) coming in 2022 that should be great, as well as an eventual second season of Love, Death, & Robots. But of particular interest for tokusatsu fans:
Masaaki Yuasa’s Japan Sinks 2020, a remake/side story/reimagining of the classic Sakyo Komatsu novel, dropped earlier this month and has garnered a decent amount of attention from anime fans, tokusatsu fans, and the general entertainment-going public. I’ll be going onto Kaiju Transmissions for a review at some point in the near future to share broader thoughts about it.
Ju-On: Origins has been better-received than the most recent American reboot by a mile. I admit that I still need to finish it, more due to too much content fighting for time than anything else.
Season 2 of ULTRAMAN is “coming”, without a release date yet. It is interesting that this trailer seems to pass right over a couple of forms that Ultraman Taro had in the manga…hopefully not just because they were harder to animate.
Still no word on when Polygon Pictures’ Pacific Rim series will materialize.
Funimation
Deca-Dence has post-apocalyptic robot-vs-monster elements reminiscent of Attack on Titan, Macross, Pacific Rim, and The Dragon Dentist…at first, before some table-flipping revelations in the second episode. Strong Trigger-era Gainax vibes as well, so if that’s your thing, you can check it out streaming each week; it’s something else.
The fan-service-laden sentai spoof Super HxEros is streaming new episodes weekly. It seems to be ramping up the cheesecake factor from the already racy manga, which might be a selling point or a caveat depending on your viewer.
Others
The independent superhero flick Rise! Dharuriser is available now on Amazon Prime.
Toonami has updated their drop date for Uzumaki from “this year” to “2021”. This is surprising considering that the amount of press for it had picked up in the past couple of weeks; I was expecting it to be hitting within a month or two. Also coming in 2021 is Blade Runner: Black Lotus from the ULTRAMAN team of Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki.
Quibi’s adaptation of Tomie from Alexandre Aja has also been getting some more press, including casting Adeline Rudolph (Agatha from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) as the title character, but given Aja’s tragic history of adaptations (Cobra) and Quibi’s struggles to gain a foothold in the market, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s really happening.
Comics
Naoya Matsumoto’s Monster #8 recently began serialization in Japan, and despite not being available translated on the Shonen Jump app (as far as I can see), it is up free on Shueisha’s MangaPlus. Weirdly, the English release appears to be lagging behind, as it’s still on chapter 1, while the Spanish translation (under the title 8Kaijuu) is already up to chapter 4.
Marvel’s The Rise of Ultraman is hitting in September, but a preview of the five-issue miniseries is already available. Still not sure what to make of this, but it’s kind of reminding me of Ultraman Powered so far.
Viz’s release of ULTRAMAN continues to plug along, with volume 14 coming October 20th.
In less fortunate news, there hasn’t been a new release for Seven Seas’ Ultra Kaiju Humanization Project since volume 4 hit in February, and no further volumes have been solicited. It’s a shame that we only got halfway through the story (which recently wrapped up in Japan), but it was always a hard sell, relying on a lot of gags that refer back to specific Ultraman episodes that hadn’t been released stateside yet. I’d like to think that if the timing had been a little different (after the Mill Creek releases), it would have been able to find an audience a bit better. As I’ve said before, it’s the most fun of any Ultra manga released here.
Redman: The Kaiju Hunter recently wrapped up its run with volume 3. It’s not up on Amazon (yet) but you can order directly from Night Shining. It was a heck of a revival!
Image has a new kaiju-versus-giant-hero series, Big Girls, starting in August. It’s from Jason Howard (The Astounding Wolf-man).
Sneeze: Naoki Urasawa Short Story Collection is hitting from Viz on October 20th. Particularly noteworthy here is that this anthology includes his kaiju story “Kingdom of Monsters”, which was a delight to read. On this very blog back in 2013, I said not to hold your breath on an English release; well, now you can breath easy.
Kaijumax has been getting slowed down by, well, everything, but issue 4 of season 5 is expected on August 26.
Unconventional (deconstructionist?) giant heroine series Gigant seems to be moving along at a good pace, with Seven Seas releasing volume 2 on August 4 and volume 3 on October 13. This is in contrast to Dark Horse’s re-releases of Gantz in omnibus editions, which appears to have stalled out after volume 5 in March.
There have been no solicitations from Yen Press yet for Kaiju Girl Caramelize after we got volume 3 in May, but it’s a little early to panic. The series only released volume 4 in Japan in March, so perhaps they’re spacing things out. At any rate, it wouldn’t hurt to go support the US release, since it’s an adorable little romcom.
Attack on Titanvolume 31 is hitting August 25th. Very close to the end!
Sadako at the End of the Worldis getting its US release October 20th. Who wouldn’t want to read about Japan’s most iconic onryo taking care of orphans in a post-apocalypse?
The 12th volume of the supernatural thriller (with superhero costumes) Platinum End is due January 5.
The villainess-protagonist comedy Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General is getting its fifth volume released on November 17th, over a year after the previous volume.
The raunchy cross-dressing supervillain comedy Raw Hero will see its third volume released October 20th.
The second volume of Dororo & Hyakkimaru will be released just in time for Halloween on October 27th.
Mermaid Saga has its first omnibus edition hitting November 17th.
Books
JL Carrozza is working on a book tentatively titled SF: The Japanese Science Fiction Encyclopedia. If his work on Otaku USA isn’t enough to persuade you, he also managed to coax Patrick Galvan, John LeMay, and myself into doing a couple of guest essays.
Speaking of John LeMay, he also helped out Benjamin Chaffins in putting together a book of interviews, titled Discovering Tokusatsu. It should be an interesting read!
Still speaking of John, he recently authored a book all about lost projects for everyone’s favorite cinematic shark and its imitators, Jaws Unmade.
John has also recently started the Lost Films Fanzine about all sorts of rare and unmade genre media. Connor Anderson (of Easter’s Kaiju Kompendium and our own Gridman review) contributed to the second issue!
Finally, on the note of something that John hasn’t got anything to do with, the Evangelion Anima novel series will get its third volume released August 25th and its fourth volume on November 24th.
Toys
Despite Godzilla vs. Kong being greatly delayed, Playmates’s line of action figures has started showing up on Walmart shelves as though the film were already incoming. I won’t go into some of the potential spoilers that are out there (you know where to look), but it seems that they’re taking a page from the Jurassic Park toys by having each monster feature removable chunks of flesh.
Also, Nozuki appears to have been renamed Warbat.
Rumors are swirling that Playmates’ hold on the Godzilla license for Godzilla vs. Kong has pushed Neca out of the Godzilla figure game for the time being, as they sent out notices that they will no longer sell Godzilla products at all after mid-August. They previously hinted back in March that they wouldn’t be making anything new after the latest wave (the 1989 and 2003 Godzillas), but this is still a bit of sad news for a fine line of figures; buy any you want now or forever hold your peace. On the plus side, they are giving us a sweet King Kong figure in September.
Mezco is doing a few Ultraman figures for their 5 points line. In other retro-styled figure news, Mego also has some Ultraman stuff in the works, if that’s more your speed. I’ll probably stick to Bandai imports, but depending on price/look, these could be intriguing.
There’s also a lot of different Ultraman pins hitting the market, for the pin collectors out there.
I realize that I could probably have a whole section regarding upcoming video game releases, but I confess that those are somewhat harder to keep track of. With that, let’s call this roundup a wrap!
…apologies for what the above post may have done to any bank accounts.
Also, because I forgot earlier, I did guest spots on three episodes of Kaiju Transmissions without posting about them here. I wholeheartedly suggest adding Kaiju Transmissions to your podcatcher feed to make sure you get every episode, but I was also on the show to discuss:
Apologies for the lack of blog posts during all the lockdown. A lot of steam was let out of the weekly news recaps due to all of the depressing coronavirus-related news, so they’ve basically fallen on hold. However, both myself and Amanda have been doing well, and I was able to participate in a number of virtual events to keep social during the pandemic (arguably more social than I was beforehand!). Last weekend was the stellar Kaiju Con-Line event from KaijuCast‘s Kyle Yount, and I had the good fortune to present two panels. But seriously, check out the whole playlist; there’s a lot of great content.
As for my panels:
Great Yokai War or Greatest Yokai War
Before Kadokawa rebooted Gamera to be more Brave or gave Daimajin a brand new Kanon, they revived their third most-popular monster franchise: Yokai Monsters. The resulting picture, The Great Yokai War, has an interesting history tying together Japanese mythology, manga, and popular culture in a way that hasn’t been replicated before or since. Join Kaiju Transmissions’ Kyle Byrd and Kaiju for Hipsters’ Kevin Derendorf as they unpack this maze of monsters, Miike, Mizuki, and Megolopolises.
…and
Non-Kaiju Movies! (…with Godzilla and company)
Controversial opinion: We should sometimes watch something other than kaiju movies. The world of cinema is vast, and there are many wonderful aspects to enjoy in other genres…including appearances by Godzilla, Gamera, Guilala, and Ultraman! This panel covers some to the less-discussed, often zany minor appearances by our favorite monsters outside of their usual kaiju eiga stomping grounds, and discusses why we might be more likely to see a Godzilla cameo in Hollywood than in Japan.
Thanks to everyone who watched live in the broadcast, and for those who have yet to see them, enjoy!
Arrow’s Gamera: The Complete Collection is hitting on August 17, with an assortment of amazing special features hitherto unseen for the franchise. To celebrate this incredible boxset, we decided to plunge the darkest depths of Gamera apocrypha and dug up something that was not included: Gamera vs. Morphos, a short story by Nenpei Moo for Animage in January 1999 to promote the upcoming Gamera 3. This was a special bonus Animage issue, so it was very difficult to track down, and the story hasn’t been reprinted in the 21 years since. As usual, we encourage everyone to support official releases if possible, so please discontinue any circulation of this translation if an official one becomes available, and try to pick up a copy of the Japanese edition of this story if it’s ever reprinted.
No translation notes on this one, since it’s pretty straightforward. Hopefully it whets the appetite for the Gamera goodies that Arrow has in store for this summer!
Welcome back! Hopefully everyone is following good social distancing guidelines, but in case you need some help, our favorite kaiju heroes are here to help:
Starting things off on a bit of a bummer, Nobuhiko Obayashi passed away this past week. He was a real trooper, surviving three years and eight months on a three-month cancer diagnosis, but he was always the type to subvert expectations. Needless to say, we’re big fans of his work here.
We look forward to his final picture, Labyrinth of Cinema, being released in Japan later this year.
In happier news, Toei Tokusatsu World is now live. Things were looking a little dicey on the first day, when the studio accidentally did automated copyright strikes on their own videos until the whole channel channel got deleted. Thankfully, things were restored by the next day and ever since things have been running smoothly. So go check out the weird Fushigi Comedy shows and other stuff that otherwise would never stand a snowball’s chance in hell of getting any attention internationally!
A YouTube screw-up was hardly the worst thing that happened to Toei tokusatsu in the past couple of weeks, as Kiramager‘s lead actor Rio Komiya was diagnosed with COVID-19. He’s since been released from the hospital, but the studio was shut down for decontamination, and this will surely throw a monkey wrench into the show’s filming schedule.
After nearly a decade, a second season of Tiger & Bunny (which arguably helped pave the way for other 2010s superhero hits like One Punch Man and My Hero Academia) has finally been announced for 2022. Why it took so long is anyone’s guess, but hopefully the quality will hold up after such a hiatus. (Double Decker was great, which is encouraging, though.)
After appearing in a few other Hasbro properties, Godzilla will be showing up in Magic the Gathering, specifically as part of the “Ikoria: Lair of the Behemoths” expansion, in which regular cards are being reskinned with classic kaiju. Expect them to be a pain to collect.
Rarer still will be the initial-run Space Godzilla card titled “Death Corona”, which has predictably been renamed given the current world events.
We’ve got another look at the intriguing manga Sengoku Gridman, as well as Neon Genesis Middle Schooler’s Butler Cafe, which will both be running in Monthly Shonen Champion starting in May.
A short anime titled Kaiju World Conquest has debuted on Twitter. It’s based on a four-panel comic about four space monsters that intend to conquer the world, but wind up just kind of hang around an office lady’s apartment.
Discotek announced another batch of titles for Blu-ray. While there was no tokusatsu (*sheds a single tear*), they did reveal the the Crusher Joe movie, Ninja Scroll TV series, and, shockingly, Astroganger! Who knew that would get a US release before the original Getter Robo?
The proof-of concept footage for the fan film Godzilla Heritage, which Toho brought the hammer down against like an angry god, was released to the film’s Kickstarter backers. It’s nice that the footage is out there, even if the project didn’t pan out.
In an unexpected turn of events, Gunhed is making an appearance in Super Robot Wars X-Omega. It’s got a pretty hyped trailer, demonstrating the movie’s lasting cult appeal.
Premium Bandai is selling figures of Kamen Rider 01‘s Izu. Always nice to see the non-masked characters getting some representation in the merchandise, but this character is getting quite a lot (see this plushie…or this one).
Finally, a new short debuted for an Ultraman/Uniqlo collaboration.
…is it any weirder than Evangelion selling Civics, really?
This weekend, an octet of kaiju-centric podcasts will be gathering on Discord to do one live commentary each on their favorite giant monster movies. The Maser Patrol podcast itself isn’t among them, but I did get invited to join the Kaiju Transmission crew for coverage of Invasion of Astro-Monster at 4:30 CST on Saturday. Drop by and ask us questions that we can answer live on-air; that way we won’t have to worry about talking about what’s going on in the movie the whole time!
In the overall scope of world events, this March has been one of the most impactful months in recent memory, as COVID has interrupted plans on all scales. On the Japanese pop culture end, events ranging from the Tokyo Olympics to Comiket to the premier of the Ultraman Taiga movie have been pushed back, and in terms of this blog specifically, Anime Central has been canceled (perhaps we will still record the panel we had planned for that as a podcast), and G-Fest, while not cancelled yet, has been getting lots of criticism for its attitude regarding the situation… at very least Japan has been issuing travel advisories which might impede guests flying over, but time will see how things develop. On a more personal note, both myself and my fiancee have fortunately managed to remain employed during this pandemic, and our hearts go out to all those who have had their livelihoods threatened both economically and health-wise. I hope everyone reading the blog has managed to stay safe!
The good news, in the likely event that you’re confined to your home right now, is that there’s no shortage of excellent entertainment to keep you busy. Personally, I went through the entire run of Return of Ultraman and Ultraman Orb: the Origin Saga thanks to their recent Blu-ray releases, along with anime Somali and the Forest Spirit, Beastars, and the new season of Castlevania (a fourth season of which has been announced, hurrah!), along with starting Brand New Animal (there’s a lot of furry-type stuff lately, huh?), Kiramager, and In/Spectre. On the manga front, there have been new volumes of Ultra Kaiju Humanization Project, Creature!, and Gigant released stateside lately, which is as good a batch as ever for kaiju fans, and there was also the finale to the very anime-inspired cartoon Steven Universe, complete with a giant monster.
If you’re more of a reader, I’d have to recommend my buddy John LeMay’s new book, Writing Japanese Monsters, for going through the script revision process of the most noteworthy kaiju and tokusatsu films. I’d say you should read it even if I wasn’t in the dedication, but hey, even more so now.
But that’s just the tip of the distribution iceberg! Let’s get started:
The motherload of streaming news this month is that Toei is launching the Toei Tokusatsu World Official Youtube channel next month with a whopping 70 classic Toei hero shows, all with English subtitles (for the first two episodes, at least; after that they’ll be crowdsourcing subs). While some of these have gotten US releases before (e.g. Message from Space, Juspion), the vast majority have not, and some, such as the Fushigi Comedy franchise, have barely ever been touched by fansubbers…it could be a great way to drum up interest. With new (admittedly raw) episodes every day after, there’ll be an overwhelming amount of content, so it’ll be interesting to see how long episodes remain online, if fansubbers step up to help out in the subtitles, and if they can sustain this model without moving to a subscription service.
Shout Factory has officially licensed the original Kamen Rider, and are now streaming it via Shout Factory TV and Tubi. They also have a dedicated Pluto channel, TokuSHOUTsu, for showing Kamen Rider, Ultraman Leo, and their handful of Super Sentai series. Speaking from experience, the streaming channel has already made a fun watch-together for tokusatsu fans wanting to hold a virtual movie night, though the episodes can get a little out of sync depending on what set of ads each viewer gets targeted with.
Bravestorm is finally getting a US release via GVN Releasing (an independent DVD label who haven’t done any other Japanese films, so far as I can tell). I’ve been an advocate for this film for a while, so it’s nice that more folks stateside will finally be able to check it out. There have been some grumbles that this is DVD-only, but keep in mind the Japanese Blu-ray release has English subtitles, so if you really want it in high quality, that is an option.
Speaking of Japanese releases with English subtitles, Garo: Under the Moonbow included subtitles on its Japanese Blu-ray. Since Kraken’s Garo releases seem to have halted lately, this seems like a good compromise for English-speaking fans who want to keep collecting the series.
Another Keita Amemiya flick, Rokuroku, has finally gotten a Japanese home video release. Not sure about whether subtitles are included on this one (since I just found out about it recently), but it’s been a long time coming to video…I missed a screening in Philadelphia two years ago and have been kicking myself about it ever since!
While Crunchyroll licensed the original Kaiju Girls TV series, they appear to have since cooled on their enthusiasm for Tsuburaya products lately (SSSS.Gridman aside), so it seemed that the theatrical film Kaiju Girls Black would have dismal prospects in the international streaming market. Thankfully, HIDIVE has stepped in and picked up the movie, so it can finally be seen in translation. Who knows, maybe if it does well in streaming, one of the Section 23 companies could print a few discs? (please?)
Media Blasters announced a new Blu-ray for Death Kappa. Since I’ve previously asked about getting the ending to the Japanese version included on a US re-release, I reached out again, and was quickly told that they will include it… but everything else is not listing that as a feature, and I’ve seen them tell others that this is identical to the previous release, so there is definitely some mixed messaging. Since the ends are significantly different, it’d be nice to see the Japanese version available here.
US ending
Japan ending
Since the Mothra steelbook did quite well, I guess it’s no surprise that The H-man and Battle in Outer Space are also getting put onto Blu-ray by Mill Creek. Despite claims that this is the Blu-ray debut for both, Battle in Outer Space had a lackluster release before from Sony (MOD), so hopefully this surpasses that one. No word on if it’ll retain the commentary from the DVD, but it seems possible.
Arrow had previously released the live-action The Guyver on Blu-ray in the UK, but they have now licensed it for Canada as well. The prior release was region-free, so this probably won’t make a huge difference.
Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century got a Blu-ray release recently via Dark Force Entertainment. So far it seems like it’s only been made available to subscribers to their home video plan, or on double-feature with Giant Spider Invasion, since their manufacturing plant was shut down due to COVID.
Like Yeti, another “giant monster, but not really kaiju” flick that I’ll mention just-because is Orca, since that’s getting a Blu-ray release as well thanks to Shout Factory. It did already have a Japanese BD release, for what it’s worth.
GKIDS announced that Lupin III the First will be getting a theatrical release in North America in 2020. I’d love to see Takashi Yamazaki get more of his stuff released here, so hopefully this gets him some credit as a director and not just for the Lupin franchise.
A short kaiju spoof titled Monster Challenge was published online. It stars Patton Oswald and was directed by Cloverfield composer Michael Giacchino (it’s got part of his Cloverfield music in it, to boot).
Manga Cross, who publish, among other things, Island of Giant Insects, has a new horrific giant monster survival series in their anthology: Umigui. It’s from the duo Yuki Fujisawa and Yasunari Toda, the latter of whom drew the excellent s.CRY.ed manga.
So, that’s some great licensing and recent release news, but what new content is in development or coming soon? I’m glad you asked.
Details have been revealed for Ultraman Z, starting in June. It seems they really want to play up the master-to-student legacy thing, with Zero stepping into the mentor role (like he did a little in Ginga S and more so in Geed). Zero is kind of an ideal character to plop into any series that Tsuburaya needs to, since, like Zoffy, he’s unburdened by a strong connection to any particular secret identity/actor, so you can understand them bringing him back around again.
Also, since this is the first new show since the Mill Creek stuff took off, I wonder if the chances of a simulcast will go up?
The new Garo series, Versus Road, debuts April 2. It’ll be interesting to see how this VR setting thing plays into the franchise, and how it goes as a 15th anniversary project. Things have been a little quiet for Garo lately, but if the quality is good, I don’t mind.
Mamoru Oshii has a new anime titled Vladlove, and this is encouraging since it’s his first proper TV series in 30 years, is a comedy, has Kenji Kawai and Junji Nishimura on board, and is attracting comparisons to Urusei Yatsura. It won’t air until fall, but a promo video was briefly online…until someone realized it wasn’t finished and pulled it back down. Hopefully that’s not a bad sign.
Some more details have come out about Masaaki Yuasa’s upcoming adaptation of Japan Sinks for Netflix: it sounds like a lot more of a family drama than other versions have been, focusing on teenagers and their parents. I’m curious to see how this stacks up against the monstrous success of Yuasa’s previous outing with Devilman Crybaby; it’d be nice if it caused a wave (no pun intended) that led to the live-action versions getting released as well… heck, or even a rescue of the Takao Saito manga.
Btooom mangaka Junya Inoue is launching a new manga titled Kaiju Jietai (Monster Self Defense Force) on in Monthly Comic @Bunch on April 21. Not much info on this yet, so we’ll just have to keep an eye on it.
A trailer was released for Monster Seafood Wars, and it looks about what I’d expect from Minoru Kawasaki:
It looks like maquettes are coming along for the monster in Nezura 1964. Now to see the actual suit!
A look at the independent kaiju flick Savage Monster Barrigular, which I hope to see in full some day:
Some unfortunate news regarding Pili, as far as I can glean from here (Chinese is not one of our languages), as well as some 4chan chatter: it seems that one of the puppeteers referred to COVID as the “Wuhan virus” and had some Taiwanese-independence-leaning posts on Facebook, which has led to China flat-out banning their next production, What’s the Use for My Talent, Anyway?. Without the Chinese market, the show is dead in the water, which spells big trouble for Pili as a company. Thus, the next season of Thunderbolt Fantasy could be in jeopardy as a result, which is a damned shame. Hopefully the Japanese market (and heck, that sweet Netflix money for War of the Dragons) can keep them afloat for the foreseeable future, and the studio’s tensions with Chinese censors ameliorate.
A trailer is up for the TV adaptation of the ecchi Sentai parody Dokyuu Hentai HxEROS. As with a lot of these sex comedies, it may be funny or might be cringe-inducing, but we’ll see in July.
A trailer for Sayonara, Tirano…will it redeem Kobun Shizuno for dinosaur fans?
A wave of merchandise has appeared for Toei’s Spider-man. The chogokin is getting reissued, this time with a full-size Spider Bracelet rather than the vinyl figure that the original came with (I’ll stick with my original release, thanks), there’s going to be a Super Minipla of Leopardon, and Spidey himself is getting a Figuarts (with an unfortunate crotch sculpt). I continue to wonder how the increased exposure of the character is fitting into Marvel’s grand scheme, but here’s hoping for the Spider-verse sequel, and fingers crossed a home video release stateside someday.
SSSS.Gridman is continuing to Evangelionize their merchandise by featuring the heroines in outfits that have noting to do with the actual show. The latest is cheerleaders! For those keeping track at home, they’ve been brides, witches, musicians, Santas, kimono-clad, wearing swimsuits (not the ones from the actual swimsuit episode), Uchuusen mascots, and kaiju girls. Presumably nurse, mermaid, nun, catgirl, and apron-clad versions are on their way, because they’re going to check all the boxes eventually.
On a sad final note, RIP to Stuart Gordon, who directed a great many wonderful films, but most notably for readers here is Robot Jox, quite possibly the finest live-action mecha put to film. And, while he has not passed on, I also have to lament for Hiroshi Yamamoto, who suffered a cerebral infarction and has lost much of the cognitive function that made him such a wonderful science fiction writer (seriously, go read MM9 and Stories of Ibis!). Both of these men have made some amazing art, and it’s worth tracking down their work if you haven’t done so.
Hopefully the topics here give everyone cooped up at home an idea of how to pass the time during the coming months. Stay safe, stay indoors, and keep enjoying kaiju, scifi, and superheroes, everyone!
While there hasn’t been a new Maser Patrol episode in a hot minute, Kevin (along with author John LeMay) had a chance to drop by the Kaiju Transmissions podcast this week to discuss Kinji Fukasaku’s 1980 disaster film Virus, AKA Day of Resurrection. If you want to get your mind off of current events…well, this might not be the movie for you right now.
In a rare event, there was actually so much kaiju-adjacent news in the past week that rather than posting at the standard biweekly rate, I’m opting to do a recap today!
To start with, Minoru Kawasaki’s Monster Seafood Wars has a poster, giving us a first look at the actual kaiju in the movie, and a May 23 release date. If that is the Calamari Wrestler costume recycled, it’s been modified a little.
Toei and Shochiku have a new movie in the works titled Daikaiju no Atoshimatsu (“atoshimatsu” meaning remediation or cleanup), with a premise similar to Marvel’s Damage Control: the people who dispose of hazardous materials left by giant monster attacks. It’s from comedic director Satoshi Miki, so I assume that it’ll be another relatively low-budget spoof.
A little late since this trailer debuted in front of Sonic the Hedgehog, but Paramount’s animated kaiju wrestling movie Rumble debuts next year. It’s a very vague title, even if it’s arguably a multiple entendre.
Fukuoka’s local heroes will be crossing over for a new TV series Dogengers, starting in April. The series is handled by Fumie Arakawa (director of ToQger Returns and Zero: Dragon Blood), so it ought to be in reasonably good hands; unfortunately the appeal could be pretty limited for those not from the area.
I missed the announcement of GigaBash back in September, but apparently Passion Republic Games brought it to PAX for the public to try this past weekend. It looks like fun!
Platinum Games has a teaser for the the third installment of Hideki Kamiya’s “hero trilogy” (after the stellar Viewtiful Joe and Wonderful 101), and it looks heavily Ultraman-inspired. This ought to be excellent, given the pedigree.
Speaking of Ultraman and games, the official North American website for Ultraman launched, and it’s called Ultraman Galaxy, the same name as the 2013 puzzle game (not to mention potential confusions with Ultra Galaxy and Ultraman Ginga). Anyway, they announced another game there, one with another unfortunate name: Kaiju Kombat. Sounds like it will be a chess battler rather than ta fighting game, and forum members can try it out now….let’s see if Wizards of the Coast gets uppity this time, too.
Another Ultraman development was some new details from the Marvel comic series. It seems that they’re going for a straight remake of the original series, although there is at least one original character (“Kiki”) and the uniforms are different. Writer Kyle Higgins is beloved by Power Rangers fandom for his work on the Boom Studios comics in that line (for however much PR fans can be trusted) and writer Matt Groom’s Self/Made seems to have encouraging reviews, plus artist Francesco Manna is decent (NB: Marvel is promoting with Ed McGuiness Ultraman art, though).
Shifting to the toy collecting world, an unexpected piece of merchandise has been realized due to Redman’s meme-centered revival: A figure of the Redman version of Icarus-seijin. Now you can recreate your favorite slasher movie moments with our hero stalking the innocent alien through the bamboo forest!
Neca announced two new Godzilla figures at Toy Fair: 1989 and 2003. Since these are two of the most popular iterations of the character (especially of the ones not yet handled), it’s a bit of a no-brainer, but it is still a shame that Toho seems against them developing the more “off the beaten path” designs. Both will be hitting in June, so I imagine many will be seen at G-Fest.
SH MonsterArts will be doing Monster Hunter figures, which makes perfect sense with the Toho-produced movie version incoming in September. I also guess some more publicity photos are out for that movie, though it’s just more of Milla Jovovich and Tony Jaa standing in the desert.
I’ve been a little disappointed at the lack of decent figures for Zyuranger‘s space witch Bandra, but Hasbro has a decent one coming in August for the Power Rangers’ dub of that character, Rita. Of course, there’s a catch, or even several:
The figure comes in a two-pack with Saban-original character Lord Zedd. Since the Zedd figure has already been released, many PR fans are grumpy about this since it means rebuying the same figure, as well.
It’s a GameStop exclusive, and those can be notoriously sparse in terms of stock.
You’d be supporting Hasbro, who still haven’t gotten their Super Sentai DVD releases back up and running.
Procrastination and distraction has gotten the better of me again, but the inundation of kaiju news items in the past couple of days has made it impossible to put off a recap any longer.
Production news:
A Godzilla vs. Kong image from Toyfair has been making the rounds online, giving a better look at how the Legendary Godzilla will be tweaked this time. The back spines seem to be reverting back towards the 2014 design, which is puzzling, though I suppose only the most diehard of fans would particularly care.
This student film Giganto Makhia looks quite promising:
A new Garo season has been announced, titled Versus Road. The premise, being set around some sort of VR headset, initially seems rather out-of-character for the franchise, though if they tie it into Vanishing Line‘s computer stuff it could work nicely.
Kobun Shizuno has an upcoming film, Sayonara Tyrano (sic). It’s adapted from the same book series as Heart and Yummie and You Are So Yummy – Happy to Be with You, but I don’t believe there’s any direct connection between the movies themselves.
A new Digimon series has been announced for April, and because they’re completely creatively bankrupt, it looks like a straight remake of the original Digimon Adventure (right after the alleged “last movie”). This doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence, Toei.
The trailer has been posted for the last two installments in the Rurouni Kenshin film series, The Final/The Beginning. It’s fantastic that the entire manga’s story is finally getting adapted!
Home video news:
Arrow’s Gamera box set is up for preorder, and it’s a doozy. Audio commentary from Ed Godziszewski, Steve Ryfle, David Kalat, August Ragone, Kyle Yount, Matt Frank, and (apparently) the team behind Japan’s Green Monsters, the best possible transfers, and a reprint of the Dark Horse Gamera comics make this an easy shoo-in to buy, but it sounds like there are still more features left to be announced!
Speaking of Arrow, they have a Shinya Tsukamoto set on the way as well. I’ve lamented that Tetsuo the Iron Man and its sequel have been woefully out of print for far too long stateside, so this is a welcome upgrade, along with new copies of Tokyo Fist, Bullet Ballet, A Snake of June, Vital, Kotoko, Killing, The Adventure of Denchu-Kozo, and Haze. Audio commentary is by Tom Mes, who literally wrote the book on the man, so it’s a solid collection as well.
Raiga vs. Ohga (now titled God Raiga vs. King Ohga) is up for preorder from SRS. Make sure to preorder stuff from them to ensure they get properly pressed discs instead of BD-Rs; Attack of the Giant Teacher only did 60 copies in preorders and had to be burned instead of pressed.
SRS has also licensed Norman England’s The iDol. Previously the film was only available as a special feature on the German DVD release of New Neighbor, so hopefully some more Americans will be able to see it now. It’s quite a fun little picture, and the 13 years it took to get US distribution is far too long.
Keith Aiken confirmed on Facebook that Mill Creek is also working on a release of Gridman the Hyper Agent. Given the success of SSSS.Gridman, it’s a no-brainer, but still a pleasant surprise.
Disney+ will be adding Marvel Future Avengers on February 28. I’ve long been perplexed at the myriad Japanese Marvel projects not getting US releases, so here’s hoping this does well. We’d really like to see Disk Wars!
Video game news:
A Kickstarter campaign to port The Wonderful 101 to Switch was funded in no time. This is no great surprise, since it’s been one of the more conspicuous titles to so far have not been updated for the newer platform.
A Record of Lodoss War game is coming to Steam. It’s a platformer where you play as Deedlit (fun fact: MM9 author Hiroshi Yamamoto was the guy who played Deedlit in the original D&D campaign that Lodoss was based on!)
There’s also a Kickstarter up for Kaichu, a giant-monster-themed dating sim. That’s a pretty good pun for the title.
Symphogear XD is finally available internationally! Just in time for that, they got a collaborative crossover campaign with Attack on Titan. They’re hitting all the big kaiju franchises!
The ULTRAMAN anime is getting a novelization. I guess that’s what happens when you’re the most-watched anime on Netflix.
Other news:
Godzilla is getting his own Monopoly and Jenga games. I assume there’s a lot more demolition of the hotels than there is in traditional Monopoly?
It’s nice to see how even though Yasushi Nirasawa passed too soon, his redesigns of Ultraman monsters continue to be realized in merchandise. Acro has a Metron coming in April.
Happy new year (admittedly a couple weeks late)! I’ve been distracted from putting together news recaps for a while, but that just means a lot more things to cover this time around. Let’s break it down by category:
Godzilla news:
Kicking things off, there were some leaked images from the Godzilla vs Kong toy line. They may or may not constitute a spoiler for the film, but they sure are interesting…honestly I’ll say they make me more intrigued with the picture.
The first three minutes of the Shinkalion movie (The Mythically Fast ALFA-X That Came From Future) have been posted online, featuring a battle between Godzilla and Hatsune Miku. This has been a bit of a thorn in my side, since numerous outlets are reporting this as an “upcoming release” for 2020, when it came out in December. Also, people keep reporting it as “Ice Godzilla” instead of the actual “Snow Godzilla” name.
Godzilla manga artist Takayuki Sakai’s Godzilla Comicalize Magazine did a Batman vs. Godzilla doujinshi for this winter’s Comic Market, finally realizing the unmade project.
Speaking of Godzilla cameos and Comiket, Weathering With You got its theatrical release in the US this past week, and as a Toho movie, there was a little background cameo in that one, too.
Other kaiju news:
The Great Buddha Arrival director Hiroto Yokokawa has announced another kaiju film, and similarly to his previous work, it’ll be about the making of a lost picture: this time the unmade Daiei flick that led to Gamera’s creation: Nezura 1964.
Much like Great Buddha Arrival, we’re getting promised a parade of industry cameos (including the returning Yukijiro Hotaru and Yoshiro Uchida), and I imagine publicity will be fairly mute until it debuts. I do like the giant-sized Nezura, which I believe is unique to this interpretation.
A whopping 22 years after their prior release of the film, Media Blasters is re-issuing Gappa the Triphibian Monster on Blu-ray. There’s been some grumbling since the (longer) international cut does not appear to be included, but this will almost certainly have better image and sound quality than the ancient DVD and VHS releases.
That Gamera box set from Arrow has been more officially announced. Still no word if it’ll be available in the US or UK-exclusive yet.
Ultraman news:
Ultraman Ace and Ultraman X now have preorders for BD: May 12 and April 21 respectively. Both are solid shows, and it’s exciting to add them to the collection.
ULTRAMAN was the most viewed anime on Netflix in Japan last year. As much as the outrage from Evangelion fanatics is a lot of fun, I do have to sort of ponder this, since the series honestly wasn’t all that great.
The Ultra Kaiju Humanization Project (which is secretly the best Ultraman manga available in English) just wrapped up its run in Japan. Hopefully the whole thing is able to make it to US shores!
RIP Shozo Uehara. His tokusatsu work was excellent, so if you have the recent Blu-rays of Ultra Q, Ultraman, Ultraseven, Return of Ultraman, or Juspion, or older ones like Inazuman and Red Baron, or even anime like Captain Harlock or Fist of the North Star, watch a few episodes in his honor.
SSSS.Gridman news:
A stage play featuring the Neon Genesis Middle Schoolers is due out in May.
Acro has new figures up for Nanashi A and B, while Good Smile is proceeding with a Devadadan. The roster of kaiju with vinyl figures is slowly filling in…
I appreciate how SSSS.Gridman takes deep cuts even in little stuff like magazine covers. A recent appearance in Uchuusen featured Akane and Rikka cosplaying characters from 1983 issues of the magazine.
Other hero news:
We’ve gotten our first look at this year’s Super Sentai, Mashin Sentai Kiramager. The costumes are fine (a female green is a neat shake-up), and the preview of the mech battle looks really exciting. We’ll have to see how well the “collecting shiny gems” motif works with the “machines” one, but with Naruhisa Arakawa writing, my expectations are pretty high.
Jushin Thunder Liger, the real-life pro-wrestler based off the Go Nagai hero character, has finally retired after 35 years in the industry.
A new Gantz spinoff has been announced, this one set in the Edo era: Gantz: E. I wonder how the inherent scifi of the premise, setting, and aesthetic will mesh with a jidai geki setting, but time will tell.
Here’s a trailer for the Mini Force movie, Deeno The King Of Dinosaurs. I still haven’t checked out Mini Force, despite it being on my Netflix queue for months, so perhaps I should get on that.
After years of no updates, it seems the English-language print edition of the Ambassador Magma manga has been cancelled. Not a great look for DMP.
Other news:
A trailer dropped for Voltes V Legacy, a live-action project out of the Philippines adapting the classic anime. A lot of people are concerned since this is from GMA, who previously did the lackluster Shaider tie-in Zaido, but, given that Zaido was 13 years ago, I think it’s fair to give them another chance at this point.
Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna is getting a US theatrical release March 25.
The second Thunderbolt Fantasy movie, Bewitching Melody of the West, is now on Crunchyroll.
In “neat concept” stuff, the new Hentatsu TV series is apparently set in a post-apocalyptic Nakano Broadway.
Looking for a last-minute Christmas present? Well, you’re in luck, because John LeMay has a varied bibliography on topics ranging from history, UFOlogy, horror films, cryptozoology, spaghetti westerns, and a whole smattering of kaiju/tokusatsu-related titles, with a special emphasis on lost and unmade movie projects. Since the new editions of The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monsters: The Lost Films and Terror of the Lost Tokusatsu Films are now on the market, it was a great time for John to stop by the podcast and talk about what he does.
Unfortunately we had some serious Skype lag during the call, but for the most part I was able to clean it up in post, so it only gets confusing on occasion.
As December winds to a close, I find myself reflecting back…. back on how many podcasts, blogs, and YouTubers seem to have already done their decades in review, yet we haven’t gotten around to it here yet. But seriously, the past ten years has given rise to a lot of great content and interesting media trends, and yes, even this very blog. So, whether it be to reminisce, let lapsed fans know what they’ve missed, or simply to get some time travelers up-to-speed, I thought it’d be nice to recap a few of the major events and most noteworthy new titles that came about in the 2010s.
Uh…different sort of “Decade in Review”
There’s no rankings here, just a chronological walkthrough without much in the way of commentary (I’ll leave that to others). However, I will say that this was initially conceived as a “tokusatsu of the 2010s” timeline, but it quickly expanded to anime, manga, games, novels, and similarly-inspired non-Japanese media, while ignoring certain tokusatsu genres entirely (e.g. samurai and war films). In short, it turned into a list of the kind of stuff Maser Patrol focuses on.
Because of that, there will be some glaring omissions if you really want to hear about Japan’s classically “best” content: titles like Your Name or Erased or The Tale of Princess Kaguya are wonderful and technically science fiction, but they lack certain visual factors (like monsters and superheroes) that’d make them crossovers for the tokusatsu enthusiast, so they’re not listed, let alone compelling human dramas like Yuri on Ice, Kids on the Slope, and Keijo. (If you want to hear about the tons of great anime out there, you can check out Anime World Order‘s excellent year-by-year breakdown, so it need not dominate things here.)
With that out of the way, let’s start where the decade began!
9-Jan
Higanjima: Escape from Vampire Island released
14-Feb
Tensou Sentai Goseiger debuts on TV
2-Apr
Daimajin Kanon debuts on TV
2-Apr
Clash of the Titans remake starts Legendary Pictures down the path to focus on giant monsters
Garo: Red Requiem released, reviving the Garo franchise. It’s also Japan’s first full movie filmed with 3D cameras.
27-Nov
Mazinkaiser SKL OVA debuts
1-Dec
live-action Space Battleship Yamato released
21-Dec
Mega Shark vs Crocosaurus released
23-Dec
Ultraman Zero the Movie released
7-Jan
Puella Magi Madoka Magica magical girl anime debuts on TV, becoming a massive hit. The series takes some inspiration from Kamen Rider Ryuki.
29-Jan
First live-action Gantz movie released
13-Feb
Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger debuts on TV, kicking off an era of crossovers and revivals at Toei
11-Mar
The Great Tohoku earthquake causes a tsunami and meltdown at Fukushima’s Daini nuclear power plant. This traumatic event forever changed Japan, and its impact continues to be felt in media, pop culture, and artwork.
3-Apr
Tiger & Bunny superhero anime debuts on TV
8-Apr
Ghastly Prince Enma: Burning Up debuts on TV
23-Apr
Gantz: Perfect Answer released
April
Studio Chizu founded
12-May
Nobunagun manga begins publication
14-May
Tomie Unlimited released
14-Jun
Mappa studio founded
6-Jul
Clip show Ultraman Retsuden brings Ultraman back to television
8-Jul
Blood C anime debuts on TV
8-Jul
The Hero Yoshihiko debuts on TV
23-Jul
Alien vs. Ninja released
23-Jul
Helldriver released
23-Jul
Yakuza Weapon released
10-Aug
King of Tokyo board game franchise begins
16-Aug
Ready Player One novel published, featuring Ultraman, Kiryu, and Leopardon
22-Aug
Studio Trigger founded
4-Sep
Kamen Rider Fourze debuts on TV
17-Sep
Henge released
24-Sep
Garo: Makai Senki debuts on TV
1-Oct
Monthly Hero’s manga anthology begins publication, including ULTRAMAN and Hero Company (hits Killing Bites, Majestic Prince, and Sword Gai are added shortly after)
15-Oct
Noboru Iguchi’s Karate Robo Zaborger movie released
16-Oct
Ultra Zone debuts on TV
4-Nov
Bite Me if You Love Me released
26-Nov
Earth Defence Girls P9 released
9-Dec
Ranma 1/2 live-action movie released
6-Jan
Symphogear magical girl anime franchise begins
12-Jan
Confusingly-named Another horror anime debuts on TV
15-Feb
Gyo anime movie released
25-Feb
Zombie Ass released
26-Feb
Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters debuts on TV
27-Feb
Danger 5 debuts on TV; the spy pastiche contains many anime/tokusatsu aesthetic references
17-Mar
Ultraman Sisters novel published
19-Mar
Monster Musume manga begins publication, starting a boom of monster girl material
24-Mar
Ultraman Saga released
2-Apr
Zetman anime debuts on TV
6-Apr
Hikonin Sentai Akibaranger debuts on TV
18-Apr
One begins Mob Psycho 100 manga, which will go on to anime and tokusatsu adaptations
21-Apr
A Letter to Momo yokai anime movie released
12-May
Sadako 3D released
1-Jun
Wit Studio founded
14-Jun
Yusuke Murata begins redrawing One’s webcomic One Punch Man, to great acclaim
10-Jul
Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo debuts as part of the Tokusatsu Special Effects Museum
15-Jul
Impromptu G-Fest panel reveals footage from Wolf-man vs Godzilla, leading work on the fan film to resume after decades
21-Jul
Iron Girl released, kicking off a DTV series
21-Jul
Wolf Children released
2-Sep
Kamen Rider Wizard debuts on TV
5-Oct
Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure finally gets a TV anime adaptation
12-Oct
Psycho-Pass cyberpunk anime franchise begins
20-Oct
Space Sherriff Gavan the Movie revives the Metal Hero brand
15-Nov
Jeremy Robinson’s Project Nemesis kicks off a series of “kaiju thriller” novels and comics
17-Nov
Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo released to mixed response
15-Dec
Humanoid Monster Bem movie released
12-Jan
Neo Ultra Q debuts on TV
18-Jan
Machi Action suit acting movie released
5-Apr
Garo: Yami o Terasu Mono debuts on TV
7-Apr
Attack on Titan anime debuts on TV, sparking a phenomenon
13-Apr
HK: The Forbidden Superhero movie released
26-Apr
Jellyfish Eyes released
1-Jun
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s movie Real released
4-Jul
Seven Cube manga begins publication
4-Jul
Earth Defense Force 2025 game released
7-Jul
Kamen Teacher drama debuts on TV
9-Jul
Atlantic Rim mockbuster released
10-Jul
Ultraman Ginga kicks off the current era of Ultraman shows
11-Jul
first Yo-kai Watch game released, leading to a franchise that would popularize yokai worldwide
12-Jul
Pacific Rim released, cancelling the apocalypse
12-Jul
Gatchaman Crowds debuts on TV
18-Jul
Attack of the Friday Monsters game released
13-Aug
Ultra Q finally gets a US release for the first time
23-Aug
Wonderful 101 game released
24-Aug
Gatchaman live-action movie released
7-Sep
009-1 live-action movie released
26-Sep
Mega Monster Rush Ultra Frontier shorts debut
4-Oct
Shougeki Gouraigan debuts on TV
4-Oct
Kill La Kill debuts on TV. The series takes much inspiration from Sukeban Deka, the works of Go Nagai, and more.
5-Oct
Kaiki Daisakusen Mystery File debuts on TV
6-Oct
Kamen Rider Gaim debuts on TV
10-Oct
Samurai Flamenco debuts on TV
13-Oct
Ando Lloyd debuts on TV
9-Nov
Tiger Mask live-action movie released
25-Jan
Nuigulumar Z released
28-Jan
Mega Shark vs Mecha Shark released
8-Feb
Earth Defense Widow released
16-Feb
Ressha Sentai ToQger debuts on TV
8-Mar
Zero: Black Blood debuts on TV
14-Mar
Kaiju Sakaba opens
29-Mar
Heisei Rider vs Showa Rider: Kamen Rider Wars movie released
1-Apr
Booska+ manga begins publication
2-Apr
Marvel Disk Wars debuts on TV
4-Apr
Garo: Makai no Hana debuts on TV
5-Apr
The Next Generation Patlabor series debuts
7-Apr
Kanpai Senshi After V debuts on TV
1-May
Tatsuya Shihira’s manga Q begins publication
16-May
Godzilla kicks off the MonsterVerse
24-May
Kikaider Reboot released
6-Jun
Edge of Tomorrow (based on All You Need is Kill) released
7-Jun
Jossy’s released
5-Jul
Ao Oni movie released
7-Jul
My Hero Academia manga begins publication. It will go on to become the highest-circulated superhero comic in the world.
10-Jul
Big Comic Original Godzilla special published
12-Jul
Day of the Kaiju short debuts at G-Fest
12-Jul
Zella: Monster Martial Law released
15-Jul
Ultraman Ginga S debuts on TV
19-Jul
Blue Blazes drama debuts on TV
11-Aug
Colossal Kaiju Combat: Kaijuland Battles game is released
6-Sep
In The Hero suit-acting movie released
27-Sep
Shusuke Kaneko’s Danger Dolls released
3-Oct
Garo: The Carved Seal of Flames debuts on TV, the first anime based on the franchise
5-Oct
Kamen Rider Drive debuts on TV
5-Oct
Cross Ange anime debuts on TV
7-Oct
Robosan debuts on TV
7-Nov
Japan Animator Expo shorts begin online streaming, including shorts for Ultraman, Gridman, Patlabor, and some other kaiju content
29-Nov
First live-action Parasyte movie released
1-Dec
Atom the Beginning manga begins publication
18-Dec
Godzilla PS4 game released
11-Jan
Yatterman Night debuts on TV
17-Feb
Zyuranger marks first ever US release of an uncut Super Sentai series
22-Feb
Shuriken Sentai Ninninger debuts on TV
18-Mar
Kaijumax comic begins circulation
21-Mar
First live-action Assassination Classroom movie released
28-Mar
Garo: Gold Storm movie released, followed by TV series
1-Apr
Ultra Kaiju Humanization Project manga begins publication
24-Apr
Shinjuku Gracery rebrands as a Godzilla-themed hotel
25-Apr
Second live-action Parasyte movie released
30-Apr
Chroma Squad game released, forced to claim inspiration from Power Rangers
18-May
First volume of Tokusatsu Hihou magazine published
20-Jun
Ninja War Torakage released
20-Jun
Yakuza Apocalypse released
27-Jun
Love & Peace released
3-Jul
Ushio & Tora yokai anime debuts on TV
5-Jul
Live-action Death Note series debuts on TV
6-Jul
Mysterious Ultraman n/a short debuts online
7-Jul
Mega Shark vs Kolossus released, channeling Attack on Titan
11-Jul
The Boy and the Beast anime movie released
14-Jul
Ultraman X becomes the first Ultraman show to get international simulcast
1-Aug
First live-action Attack on Titan movie released
19-Sep
Attack on Titan: End of the World released
20-Sep
Daimajin Adventure novel published
2-Oct
Kagewani monster anime debuts on TV
3-Oct
Live-action Bakuman movie (about aspiring mangaka) released
4-Oct
Kamen Rider Ghost debuts on TV
4-Oct
Concrete Revolutio debuts on TV
9-Oct
Gamera proof-of-concept short released
9-Oct
Garo: Crimson Moon debuts on TV
31-Oct
Infini-T Force manga begins publication, reviving old Tatsunoko heroes
4-Nov
Platinum End manga begins publication
7-Nov
An Evangelion-themed bullet train begins running
11-Nov
Cyborg 009 vs Devilman debuts
14-Nov
Japan Local Hero Wars released
21-Nov
Digimon Adventure Tri series debuts
5-Dec
Outerman released
31-Dec
Funimation Channel rebrands as Toku
13-Feb
Lychee Light Club live-action movie released
5-Mar
Chimagure Sukeban Chainsaw released
19-Mar
Moribito live-action movie released
1-Apr
Kamen Rider Amazons debuts on Prime
8-Apr
Garo: Makai Retsuden debuts on TV
23-Apr
I Am A Hero movie released
29-Apr
Live-action Terra Formars movie released
14-May
HK: Abnormal Crisis released
10-Jun
Voltron: Legendary Defender debuts on Netflix
18-Jun
Sadako vs. Kayako released
7-Jul
Ultraman F novel published, future winner of the Seiun Award for fiction
8-Jul
Thunderbolt Fantasy debuts on TV
9-Jul
Ultraman Orb debuts on TV
16-Jul
Kaiju Mono released
22-Jul
Godzilla appears on Crayon Shin-chan
29-Jul
Shin Godzilla released, mania ensues
20-Sep
First volume of Ini Kai Suru Kotonaku, Juujitsu Shita Hibi published
27-Sep
Kaiju Girls anime debuts online
1-Oct
Cutie Honey Tears released
2-Oct
Kamen Rider Exaid debuts on TV
14-Oct
Gantz: O anime movie released
15-Oct
Higanjima: The Last 47 Days movie released
29-Oct
Death Note: Light up the New World released
5-Nov
LEDX released
8-Nov
Gemu released online
11-Nov
Mech-X4 debuts on TV
6-Jan
Zero: Dragon Blood debuts on TV
12-Feb
Uchuu Sentai Kyuuranger debuts on TV
18-Feb
The Dragon Dentist miniseries debuts on TV
10-Mar
Noboru Iguchi’s Slavemen released
10-Mar
Kong: Skull Island released
18-Mar
Napping Princess anime movie released
24-Mar
Power Rangers movie released
31-Mar
Ghost in the Shell live-action movie released
1-Apr
Ayakashi Banashi debuts on TV
2-Apr
Takashi Miike’s Idol × Warrior Miracle Tunes debuts on TV
7-Apr
Colossal released
14-Apr
Mystery Science Theater 3000 begins a short-lived revival, covering several giant monster movies
5-May
Tetsudon Kaiju Dream Match anthology released
13-May
live-action Hurricane Polymar movie released
4-Jun
Kaiju Club drama debuts on TV
8-Jul
Ultraman Geed debuts on TV
20-Jul
Netflix’s Death Note released
29-Jul
first live-action Tokyo Ghoul movie released
4-Aug
live-action Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable Part 1 movie released (subsequent parts not announced)
6-Aug
First Japan World Heroes convention held
19-Aug
Kodoku Meatball Machine released
30-Sep
live-action Ajin movie released
1-Oct
Dragon Force: So Long Ultraman movie includes unauthorized Ultraman appearance
6-Oct
Garo: Vanishing Line debuts on TV
19-Oct
The City Shrouded in Shadow video game released, featuring creatures from Godzilla, Gamera, Ultraman, Evangelion, and Patlabor
26-Oct
Love Fighter Shuravan manga debuts
28-Oct
Shusuke Kaneko’s Linking Love released
10-Nov
Bravestorm released, reviving classic Senkosha characters Red Baron and Silver Mask
17-Nov
Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters released
7-Dec
Earth Defense Force 5 game released
8-Dec
Gigant manga begins serialization
9-Dec
Destiny: Kamakura Story released
15-Dec
The Return of Izenborg documentary for Arabic television contains a new effects short
5-Jan
Devilman Crybaby released
13-Jan
Mazinger Z Infinity released
27-Jan
Rokuroku released
4-Feb
The Cloverfield Paradox hits Netflix out of nowhere
11-Feb
Lupinranger vs Patranger debuts on TV
18-Feb
Koujin TV movie released
27-Feb
Kaiju Girl Caramelise begins publication
3-Mar
Ghost Squad released
19-Mar
Ziga manga begins publication
23-Mar
Pacific Rim: Uprising released
29-Mar
Ready Player One movie released, with no Leopardon or Ultraman
1-Apr
6th Gegege no Kitaro anime debuts on TV
13-Apr
Rampage movie released
13-Apr
Dragon Pilot debuts on TV
18-Apr
Tsuburaya defeats UMC in United States district court for Ultraman rights
20-Apr
Inuyashiki live-action movie released
24-Apr
Ninja Batman released
18-May
Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle released
30-May
Matt Frank revives Redman in Redman: The Kaiju Hunter comic
23-Jun
One Cut of the Dead released (and becomes a cult sensation)
30-Jun
Punk Samurai Slashdown released
7-Jul
Ultraman R/B debuts on TV
20-Jul
Bleach live-action movie released
25-Jul
Illang: The Wolf Brigade, a remake of Jin-roh, released
3-Aug
My Hero Academia: The Two Heroes movie includes hero “Godzillo”
11-Aug
Shinkansen Henkei Robo Shinkalion has an episode with the Evangelion train, as a semi-crossover
2-Sep
Kamen Rider Zio debuts on TV
30-Sep
Double Decker anime debtus on TV
4-Oct
Jinga: Kami no Kiba debuts on TV
4-Oct
Zombie Land Saga anime debuts on TV
7-Oct
SSSS.Gridman debuts on TV
8-Oct
Hero-san and Former General-san manga begins publication
25-Oct
Do Your Best, Chibi Godzilla book published
9-Nov
Godzilla: The Planet Eater released
23-Nov
Hard Core released
15-Dec
The Great Buddha Arrival released
18-Dec
Amazing Spider-man #18 brings Toei’s Spider-man into the comics canon
28-Dec
Kaijuretto Shojotai web manga begins publication
18-Jan
Tokusatsu Gagaga drama debuts on TV
25-Jan
live-action School Live movie released
31-Jan
Alita: Battle Angel live-action movie finally, finally, finally released
2-Feb
First episode of Kaiju Ward Gallas released; second episode still not announced
8-Feb
City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes movie includes a Godzilla hotel scene
17-Mar
Kishiryu Sentai Ryusoulger debuts on TV
22-Mar
GEMSTONE Godzilla short film competition entries posted online. The winners went on to create Godziban.
1-Apr
ULTRAMAN anime debuts on Netflix
1-May
With the abdication of the Heisei emperor, the Reiwa era begins. Franchises like Godzilla and Kamen Rider quickly jump onto the new era for marketing purposes.
7-May
Deep Sea Monster Raiga vs Volcano Beast Ohga released
10-May
Detective Pikachu movie released
31-May
Godzilla vs Evangelion ride opens for the summer at Universal Studios
31-May
Godzilla : King of the Monsters released
1-Jun
The Asylum’s Monster Island mockbuster released
6-Jul
Ultraman Taiga debuts on TV
10-Jul
Mill Creek acquires rights to sizable part of the Ultraman library for US distribution
13-Jul
Attack of the Giant Teacher released at G-Fest
9-Aug
Godziban series debuts on YouTube
27-Aug
Juspion becomes first Metal Hero to get a US release
30-Aug
Astral Chain game released
1-Sep
Kamen Rider Zero One debuts on TV
29-Oct
Criterion releases complete Showa Godzilla set, bringing the first subtitled home video of King Kong vs Godzilla to market
18-Nov
Kaiju Step short anime debuts on TV
24-Nov
Howl from Beyond the Fog released
14-Dec
First TsubuCon held
27-Dec
Godzilla appears in Shinkalion movie
…and that brings us up to the present day! It’s been a heck of a decade, and it’ll be interesting to see where it stacks up in the years down the line. There’s plenty of cool new stuff on the horizon for the 2020s, so let’s look forward to covering them as they materialize in the future!
In the meantime, don’t hesitate to leave a comment if there’s some major title that deserves special mention. Think Eko Eko Azarak: The First Episode of Misa Kuroi should have been listed? Believe the Gintama movie was snubbed? Feel upset at the exclusion of Lust of the Dead? Let me know! This was a fairly quickly-put-together list and by no means comprehensive, and there was a lot of content over the years. Hopefully you’ll remember something that you’ve been meaning to get around to by going through the list, so I’d be keen to learn what I might be missing on this end as well.
This weekend was the first ever Tsuburaya Convention (TsubuCon), attached to Wonder Festival. As an inaugural outing, there were a number of fantastic announcements and reveals, including:
The first look at Shin Ultraman has been unveiled. A lot of folks are disappointed by how vanilla it looks, but honestly, I think the back-to-basics approach is what the “Shin” calling card has been about from the get-go. Shin Godzilla was inspired by concept art for the 1954 movie, so it makes sense that Shin Ultraman goes back to Tohl Narita’s concept…no color timer, no eye holes, no back fin.
It’s wild that they’re being this upfront about a movie that’s not getting released until 2021, isn’t it? Usually we don’t hear about stuff like this until it’s a few months out.
A new anime titled SSSS.Dynazenon is coming as part of the “Gridman Universe”. All the key talent who worked on SSSS.Gridman are involved, so it should be great, but that show is a tough act to follow.
A trailer for the Ultraman Taiga movie, featuring the whole New Generation.
Netflix’s ULTRAMAN is airing on TV starting in April. A lot of folks are reporting this as the second season, but it looks like it’s only what’s on Netflix now, just broadcast on TV. However, it is getting a live-action short, which is pretty cool.
Kaiju Decode got a promo image, along with the reveal that Sei Nakashima (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor) is doing the designs. The promo looks like it could be another monster girl thing.
For the most obsessive SSSS.Gridman fans, Figurex is making life-size figures of Akane and Rikka, for about $15,000 each.
The Kaiju no Sumika (“Monster Habitat”) VR exhibit that’s currently on display at Tokyo Dome City (due to close in January) will be opening in other locations starting in March… including a show in Los Angeles!
Non-TsubuCon stuff this week:
As if TsubuCon wasn’t enough, there’s also a Gamera DNA exhibit going on. No info on a new movie, but there was a new figure announced, finally doing the 1995 Gamera in Bandai’s Movie Monsters Series:
Two seconds of Godzilla vs. Kong footage got leaked. Presumably Shaggy and Scooby’s reaction isn’t part of the film, but we can dream.
John LeMay released an updated version of his Lost Films book, and it’s easily twice the size of the previous edition. Thus, it’s worth picking up, even if you have the earlier version.
No More Heroes 3 has a new extended trailer that’s basically a short film. There was a little controversy since there’s a little bit of effect animation at the end that appears to have been plagiarized, though that comes from a public data set that the animators used, rather than being taken directly.
Viz has added Zipman to its lineup of Shonen Jump titles getting digital distribution in English. The first chapter has a very King Joe-looking giant robot.
Sym-bionic Titan just got added to Netflix! I imagine it got added to some rights package, but hey, until a physical media release is cleared up, I’m glad it’s available for streaming at least.
A trailer for My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising, continuing the trend of using the “rise” word in superhero franchise movie titles:
Coffee mugs based on the Toei Spider-man have started popping up at Disney stores. With such a glut of merchandise, I wonder if the show itself will get added to Disney+?
The new stage play Cutie Honey Emotional seems to be mixing up the formula for the classic magical girl by making her part of a magical girl team rather than just having her transform into multiple identities: Sweets Honey, Lovely Honey, Jumper Honey, Cyber Honey, and Black Honey are also present. I don’t know how to feel about that development, but the new costume is neat.
A red-band trailer for the reboot of The Grudge:
That’s a wrap for the news for this week, but expect another post before the end of the year.
It’s been a wild few weeks with Thanksgiving and year-end festivities, but this previous weekend I made it out to Anime NYC, where I learned that:
The English-dubbed episode of Godziban was very difficult for its Japanese voice actors, suggesting that future dubbed ones are unlikely, but the producers did seem happy that someone in the West is watching the show.
Strega is getting an English dub, which Garage Hero will eventually distribute. That whole panel was great.
Megalobox is going to be getting a sequel.
But, what else has been going on? Well, we can find out in this news recap:
First of all, Godzilla vs Kong was delayed until November 20. No surprise there, since it never really seemed right that another huge expensive Hollywood Godzilla flick would hit less than a year after the previous one, and we haven’t gotten so much as a poster yet.
While the delay was a little bit of a bummer, we can’t get too down, since the same day we got more information about the Godzilla collaboration in the Symphogear XD mobile game. As I’ve said many times, Symphogear is a superb, sublime, phenomenal, action-packed magical girl anime, and after the SSSS.Gridman collaboration that they did for the mobile game, a Godzilla one is quite exciting. Oh, and that game is getting an English-language release soon!
I love the character combinations here. Godzilla is paired with the scrappy, aggressive Kanade, rather than defaulting to the main character Hibiki. Hibiki, being the strongest character and gold in color, is paired with Ghidorah. The silver-armored Maria originally had a copy of Kanade’s armor, so Kiryu is a good fit. Shirabe is reincarnated from a very powerful ancient character, so the reincarnation-prone Mothra is a reasonable match for her, and since Shirabe is frequently paired with the scythe-wielding loser Kirika, Kirika is of course Gigan. This leaves questions of who Tsubasa and Chris could be….maybe Rodan and Showa Mechagodzilla? Space Godzilla and Moguera? Ebirah and Zone Fighter?
Marvel has announced that they’ll be doing some Ultraman comics. It’s exciting to see what they’ll involve, though the approach has been strange. The announcement included no new artwork, but old DVD art by Alex Ross, who has said on his YouTube page back in September of 2018 that he was “looking to do new artwork featuring the character” not for the Asian market. The image’s filename even suggests that Ross was hired to work on the book, but it’s not actually part of the press release. At any rate, more exposure and a new take is definitely a net positive, and even a lousy Marvel book can be entertaining.
In twelve days, we’ll get more information on Toei and Tsuburaya’s upcoming animeKaiju Decode. Toei can be quite janky, especially on “sure things” (see Sailor Moon Crystal, Digimon Tri, the early parts of Dragon Ball Super), so hopefully they put good animators on this one.
TheRedman: The Kaiju Hunter comic just announced a new antagonist Bemdora, who’s totally based on the original Bemular (as in the original concept for Ultraman) design. Kudos to Matt Frank for reviving that deep cut, and in a way more organic than the ULTRAMAN manga’s doing!
Chris of the Kaiju Kingdom Podcast was at DesignerCon, and noticed that Mondo has a line of Pulgasari toys upcoming! I really wonder how licensing works for that batch.
A poster for the four-part “Daikaiju Gomera vs Kamen Yaiba” storyline in Detective Conan next month:
The Evangelion train may be gone in real life now, but at least it’s still showing up in the Shinkalion movie:
An ad for the Kamen Rider Zero One movie:
The Island of Giant Insects got a live-action promo:
Viz is releasing Junji Ito’s short story collection Venus in the Blind Spot in August. It’s a little concerning that they’re advertising it as including “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”, since that was already included in their release of Gyo, and I hope we don’t get too much redundancy among the collections that they put out.
As a no-brainer cross-promotion, Zombie Land Saga is being used to promote Zombieland: Double Tap in Japan.
Finally, a new ad for next year’s Sorcerous Stabber Orphen remake. I hope it does well enough to see some other “vintage” light novels get pulled out for revivals, too.
That’s a wrap for the moment; until later! I promise that the next post will probably not be as delayed as Godzilla vs. Kong.
Maser Patrol 
