what I learned at the Super Happy Fun Sell

2025 was my last year managing the Super Happy Fun Sell.

Now you may be asking, what the heck is a "Super Happy Fun Sell" and what does it have to do with this blog, or with classic Japanese animation? Well, I'll explain, if you get your cotton-pickin' hands off me, you barbarian. The Super Happy Fun Sell, sometimes described as the “Super Happy Fun Sale,” or SHFS for short, is Anime Weekend Atlanta's garage sale, yard sale, flea market event strictly for fans to sell their previously loved anime and manga merchandise to other fans. By definition, the SHFS is full of older merchandise from older shows, and frequently is the only place at the convention to find out of print manga, old VHS tapes and DVDs, and the occasional LP, LD, Beta tape or animation cel.


The SHFS has been a Thursday fixture at AWA for so many years that honestly I can't remember when it started. But it happened this way. Like many anime conventions, AWA began as a Friday-Saturday-Sunday show, with a lot of setup happening Thursday night and a lot of attendees showing up Thursday to pick up their badges early and avoid the Friday lines. Naturally, the convention had thought about getting some events going Thursday afternoon and evening, not only to encourage that Thursday badge pickup and entertain the early bird fans, but also to help relieve the pressure on a weekend schedule that was filling up with programming. I’d been doing some Thursday evening panels already and was always on the lookout for new Thursday things.


 

Some of the other shows were already hosting swap-meet events. The idea was out there in the world, I know we weren't the first. It's my recollection that one of AWA’s founders, the inestimable Lloyd Carter, was the person that said “let’s make this happen here,” and I believe he also came up with the "Super Happy Fun Sell" name, which is a reference to the SNL fake toy commercial about Happy Fun Ball, Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.

 

My immediate reaction was, "this is a great idea, I wanna run it." So there I was, on a Thursday night in September of 2008 in the Kennesaw room of the Waverly, watching it transform into something that usually happens on suburban Saturday mornings - a yard sale. At least I think it was 2008. Details are sketchy. As a Thursday night event, it was difficult to squeeze the SHFS into a program book that was firmly and deeply committed to Friday-Saturday-Sunday scheduling. Years would pass before the event achieved full AWA print recognition, which only helped to secure SHFS’s reputation as some sort of clandestine in-crowd night-market rendezvous, and incidentally, helped to shield the event from criticism by vendors in the vendors hall, understandably wary of any competition for attendee dollars. Relax guys, everything sold at the SHFS you probably already sold at least once already.


 

the only known photo of the first SHFS

That first year, things were casual. First come first served, pay at the door and take whatever table you want, sell whatever you got, whatever. The event went like gangbusters, but immediately I realized that we were going to have to formalize things a little, if only to keep the event an actual used-goods event and not let it be over-run by arts and crafts, self-published fantasy novel authors, and wannabe vendors who missed out vending in AWA’s vendors hall. I spent a lot of time explaining the event over and over again to people wandering in the door thinking it was registration or the dealers room, or that they could just stand in a corner and hold things and sell them that way. Don’t do that.

Every year we learned from the previous year and we'd find something else we needed to make a rule for. We added rules against bootleg videotapes or DVDs, outlawing "mystery bags" and blind boxes, and preventing the sale of home-made candles, embroidery, and jewelry. The idea of “yard sale” seems pretty simple, but a lot of people seemed unfamiliar with the concept; we are providing the space for you to sell used items in, and that’s it. No, we can't make change, we don't have any carts or hand trucks, no, we can't provide wi-fi.

 

Super Happy Fun Sell, AWA 2011

After a few iterations of the SHFS and a move to a larger ballroom space in the Waverly, the event had evolved somewhat. AWA added an online registration system built into AWA's web page, we wrote a FAQ and a list of do’s and don’ts, and we found ourselves with a devoted audience of both sellers and buyers, ready and waiting for Thursday. Myself included! I love yard sales, thrift stores, antique malls, used bookstores, anywhere there's a random factor skewing retail choices towards the offbeat and unknown. I also love Japanese cartoons and Japanese cartoon-related merchandise. Creating an event where all these items come to me, rather than me having to hunt them down one by one, well, that’s not the main reason we have the SHFS, but it’s close.


 

some of my SHFS finds from over the years

Also, and this is the important part, the SHFS is an event people absolutely love. I’m talking “lines down the hall and around the corner waiting for the doors to open” love. People love the feeding-frenzy vibe, people love bargains, people love cleaning out their closets and making a little scratch, and that love is infectious. There’s something unique or fascinating or nostalgia-inducing on every table and everyone is happy to be there, smiling at even the possibility of finding treasure and taking it home. Putting smiles on faces is the best thing; in fact, that’s really why we started AWA in the first place, and who can deny we all couldn’t use a few more things that make people happy?


 

AWA 2016 SHFS

So, if I love it so much, why am I stepping away? Well, first off, the SHFS involves arranging and coordinating and organizing. Not an untenable amount of work, but it’s work that is easier and more convenient if done by people in the area, which I am not. In addition to advance promotion, table layout, and the answering of myriad questions, the SHFS has to be integrated with the convention and all that convention’s moving parts like schedules, locations, and staff. That integration happens when staffers get together and talk this stuff out. And me, well, I haven’t been to an AWA staff meeting in twenty six years. In fact they aren’t even called “staff meetings” any more.

promo slide for AWA 2021's SHFS

There’s even more to do when the event actually happens. The seller’s tables need to be set out properly, and if they aren’t, they need fixing. Someone has to work line control, or at least find someone to work line control. We have to find the event signage and that involves someone who knows where all that signage is stored, and that someone definitely isn’t me. Someone’s got to move all the tech equipment out of the room because there's usually tech equipment sitting around in the room waiting to be moved. Often a guest or a panelist or someone on staff or someone staff-related has been promised a SHFS table by somebody else on staff, and that information never gets to me until the day of the show, because, again, the not-being-in-Atlanta thing, just one more last minute curveball hurled on the Thursday of an anime con, a day already filled with curveballs.

The key to dealing with these last minute switcheroos is being flexible, that’s the key to everything about events like this. Like the old saying goes, no plan survives contact with the enemy. Treat your carefully crafted plans as if they were merely casual suggestions and adapt as needed. And let everyone else know your plans have changed, because it’s teamwork that makes the dream, or the anime con, work.

 

AWA 2017 SHFS

And that’s my advice to the AWA team that’s taking over the SHFS. To be honest, that’s my advice for the staffers who run any event like this – and to the sellers who are schlepping their merchandise through the maze of the convention center and setting up their tables. Be flexible and adjust to the situation, have your goals in mind and let those guide your actions, instead of the process. And get one or two of those collapsible wagons, or at least a hand truck!

So I’m no longer running the SHFS. But am I through with the SHFS? No sir. You will see me there next time, prowling the aisles, looking for offbeat old anime stuff, chatting with friends, and marveling at all the stuff.
 

AWA 2019 SHFS

AWA isn’t the only anime con to throw a swap meet or a yard sale, of course. Anime Boston’s swap meet is strictly barter. No money changes hands, it’s strictly for the free exchange of goods from one fan to another. Anime North’s Nominoichi fills an exhibit hall with tables piled high with merchandise and that event absolutely swarms with customers. I’m told Colossalcon holds Otaku Flea Markets twice a show, and last I heard Fanime was still holding swap meets. Even without conventions, fandom swap meets and flea markets are popping up all over the place. There’s one happening in Toronto this weekend! My advice is to keep your eyes open for a happy fun sale near you – and remember to show up early, carry along a few shopping bags, don't be afraid to bargain, and bring cash!

-Dave Merrill

 

Anime Weekend Atlanta 2025

It seems like just yesterday that a bunch of us anime nerds were sitting in some parents' basement somewhere in the Atlanta metro area, saying to ourselves, by golly, if we don't start an anime convention in Atlanta soon, then somebody else is going to, and that anime con we don't run will invariably suck. So we'd better get to work. It wasn't just yesterday, in fact it was more than three decades ago. Three decades where we went from VHS to DVD to Blu-Ray to streaming, three decades of moving from small hotel to larger hotel to larger hotel to small convention center to larger convention center to the largest convention center we could find, three decades of arranging flights and finding hotel rooms and programming panels, three decades of assembling audio and video equipment and wrangling vendors and cosplayers and entertainers and voice actors and cartoonists. 

Costume Contest at the first AWA

  

That convention, of course, was and is Anime Weekend Atlanta, the premier (not "premiere", thank you) Japanese animation festival in the Southeast of the United States. Since 1995 a crew of anime fans has been working hard to make this three and now four day gathering a unique and lively weekend celebrating Japanese cartoons, Asian culture, the art of animation, and all the accompanying cultural artifacts and practices that have grown up around the fandom. AWA has survived pandemics, 9/11s, staff changes, location challenges, date relocations, and has constantly dealt with the changing tastes of an ever-evolving pool of attendees, a rotating cast ranging in age from five to seventy-five, interested in everything from karate to Kinikuman, from Demon Slayers to Devilmen, and as always engaged in a bitter struggle over whether or not the abbreviated name of the convention is pronounced "ei-wah" or "ei-doubleyou-ei." 

This year AWA is happening December 18-21 at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta, and I will, as I have been for the past thirty years, be presenting a wide, wild variety of panels and entertainments for the attendees. Will you be one of them? I hope so, and if so please take a minute and say hello! So, what exactly am I up to?

Thursday afternoon at 4 we'll jam a room full of preloved anime and manga merchandise and let capitalism run rampant. This is your chance to peek inside the crawl spaces and attics and closets and storage units of some of the Atlanta area's most notorious nerd merch hoarders, desperate to make space for more stuff. Let the bargains commence! 

Friday at 11am, Neil "I Translated Chargeman Ken" Nadelman and myself will be taking a tour through the wacky world of Knack, the studio that Ninja'd our Wonder Boys and Sued our Cats while Astroing our Gangers. 

 Friday night at 8 Reverend Neil will be once again delivering his popular sermon on the topic of "Totally Lame Anime" and how it affects your daily life. Don't miss it!

Dave Merrill's Anime Hell returns Friday night at 10pm for a guaranteed almost two hours of cartoon madness, live-action kookery, commercial ineptitude, and the sort of amateur animation buffoonery that is neither sanctioned nor supported by any official organization.

Ryan Gavigan's Midnight Madness returns at exactly 12:02am to pummel you senseless with a barrage of anime parody dubs produced by anime fans just like you, only funnier and with more free time and some technical equipment you may or may not have access to. 

What was anime like exactly forty, fifty, and sixty years ago? What influences are still with us today and what has vanished in the mists of time? And why does everything have a robot in it? The answers to these and more questions will be fiercely debated in this event Saturday at 10:45am. 

Sunday at 10am, some of the surviving founders of Anime Weekend Atlanta will assemble to dredge up old memories, rekindle old feuds, and generally talk about what things were like before everybody had their damn phone in their damn face all the time. If you have memories of the first AWA, you should definitely attend this panel, and you should also schedule a colonoscopy. 

Sunday at 3:30, Neil and Dave will put on their radiation suits, take their iodine pills, and lead us all into the coming End Of The World as seen in various Japanese films from the 1960s and 1970s and 80s. Space vampires, earthquakes, deadly diseases and nuclear war all struggle to see who can kill us off first - and no matter who wins, we all lose! It's a great way to send everyone home from the 30th anniversary of Anime Weekend Atlanta. 

Around the South and across the world people are getting ready for AWA. I'm putting these panels together right now even as you read this! So, don't be left out, make your plans now to be in Atlanta for AWA 2025! 

-Dave M

Mecha-May and Mew-Bot and SPT Layzner

We live in an amazing age of technology, when computers and robots can accomplish the most outstanding feats. One such outstanding feat is available now for you to enjoy, as Mecha-May the robot anime fan and her long-suffering producer Mew-Bot Five Thousand explore the 1985 Nippon Sunrise mecha series SPT Layzner, thereby obviating the need for me to write about the series! Truly we live in an age of wonders. Now enjoy the video! 

1975: Anime Goes Around The World

 
A little while ago we looked at 1965 - now we're going to skip forward ten years and look back thirty years at a selection of 1975's outstanding achievements in the field of Japanese animation. And there's no better place to start than with a cartoon about a bee.
 

The 1970s were a decade in which Japanese animation cemented its international reputation as a reliable supplier of children's entertainment, and part of that was due to a series of high profile international coproductions, like this one, Maya The Bee. Raised to be a good bee, Maya's adventurous spirit leads her to defy her bee overlords and leave the hive to explore the world, meeting a wide variety of small creatures with which she learns important life lessons. Based on a German children's book from 1912, subsequent adaptations thankfully toned down the nationalist militarism of the original, and the 1975 Zuiyo Eizo / Nippon Animation series went so far as to introduce Willy, Maya's lazy bee boyfriend. This 52 episode series aired around the world in various languages, and in Saban's English dub on YTV and Nickelodeon. Since then Maya has appeared in several new animated adaptations, video games, stage plays, amusement parks, you name it, the world is buzzing for Maya.

 

Gamba no Bouken, or as we call it The Adventures Of Gamba, is one of those anime series that had a big impact in Japan but barely made a ripple in the English language market. Our hero Gamba is an adventurous mouse, and he and his friends defend the island of Yumemishima and defy the white ferret Noroi. The TMS series only ran for 26 episodes, but had enough staying power to inspire a 1984 theatrical release, another film in 1991, and a CG version in 2015 that was dubbed into English and given the mystifying title "Air Bound." The absolutely melodramatic 1975 adventure of Gamba was directed by the master of melodramatic adventure, Osamu Dezaki, and had a tremendous impact on Japanese kids, some of whom would grow up to become anime professionals. In 2006 a poll of Japanese celebrities selected their top 100 anime titles, and the winner, beating out One Piece, Naruto, Dragonball, Evangelion, and Fullmetal Alchemist, was Gamba.

Kum-Kum Wanpaku Omukashi, or "Naughty Ancient Kum Kum," is a show from the studio that would become Nippon Sunrise and is all about misbehaving prehistoric children romping through the dawn of prehistory. The series was created by Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, whom you know from Mobile Suit Gundam, and directed by Rintaro, whom you know from Captain Harlock and the Galaxy Express movies. Don't expect scientific accuracy from this show, which has has dinosaurs in it as supporting characters, but the series is a lot of charming fun and the English dub was from Paramount TV and aired on television around the world, including, as I'm reliably informed, Canada.
 

As we saw last time, Tatsunoko Animation started in 1965 with Space Ace and spent the next decade producing world wide hits like Mach Go Go Go and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. In 1975 the studio would score another SF hit with the comedy Time Bokan, a 61 episode Fuji-TV show which would go on to inspire nine subsequent companion series. The story? Top time scientist Dr. Kieta vanishes after building a time machine, and his lab assistant Tanpei and his granddaughter Junko set off through time and space to rescue him, followed closely by the evil Majo and her henchmen Grocky and Warusa, who were the inspiration for Pokémon's Team Rocket. Another tremendous Japanese hit that was successful everywhere except the US, two Time Bokan compilations were dubbed by Jim Terry (Timefighters In The Land Of Fantasy) and Harmony Gold (Time Patrol).

 

Timefighters In The Land Of Time Patrol

 

Speaking of science fiction and Tatsunoko, Space Knight Tekkaman blasted the muscular hero action of their Gatchaman, Casshan and Hurricane Polymar adventures right into outer space. In the 21st century, Professor Amachi creates the invulnerable "tekka" metal and with it, builds the robot "Pegas," equipped with the "Teksetter" system which transforms space pilot Joji Minami into the powerful Tekkaman to battle the Waldarian space invaders. With character designs by Yoshitaka Amano, Tekkaman would run twenty-six episodes and find a limited American audience via thirteen English-dubbed episodes that were briefly broadcast on UHF television and sold via home video cassette. The 1991 reboot/sequel Tekkaman Blade was a popular show that appeared on UPN as "Teknoman."

 

When Akira shouts "fade in," Raideen emerges to battle the evil Fossil Beasts for the fate of mankind! Nippon Sunrise/Tohokushinsha's super robot anime Brave Raideen was the first transforming giant robot anime TV show, and also the first transforming giant robot TV show to be broadcast on American television, helping to start North American anime fandom as we know it today. Created by a top notch team of anime talent that included Yoshiyuki Tomino, Tadao Nagahama, and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, Raideen ran for fifty episodes and has never had a proper English release.

これがUFOだ!空飛ぶ円盤 aka "It's A UFO! A Flying Saucer" aka "Get That Flying Saucer" is a real space oddity that could only have come from the 1970s. If you weren't there at the time, well, believe me when I tell you that the 70s were the high water mark for all kinds of far-out fantastic nonsense. Bigfoot, ancient astronauts, ESP, Atlantis, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFOs all appeared in pop culture presented as fiction, as fact, and as something in between. Japan was not immune to paranormal fever and perhaps the purest expression of Japan's singular UFO fascination is this film, a sixteen minute featurette screened in March of 1975 as a concentrated distillation of postwar flying saucer fever.

 

We see anime Kenneth Arnold spot UFOs from his Call Air model A-2, anime Captain Mantell's tragic encounter with an unidentified object, and Toei's versions of Barney and Betty Hill and their famous "missing time" close encounter on the lonely roads of Vermont. Before you ask, no, they don't cover the so-called "Roswell incident" because that was not really part of the mythos before the 80s turned it into a thing. After the testimonials, "It's A UFO" switches gears and ventures into theorizing what the inside of a UFO might look like and why these space aliens might be observing the Earth and what this means for the future of mankind. Heady stuff for a Manga Matsuri short! But it's all in the service of laying the groundwork for their next featurette.

 

Uchuu (space) Enban (saucer) Daisenso (large battle), or The Great Flying Saucer Battle, was included in Toei's July Manga Matsuri festival. Combining the UFO craze with the super robot fad, this film was a Dynamic Pro vehicle that served as a pilot film for October's UFO Robo Grendizer series, and while the characters and vehicles are different, you can see the Grendizer framework clearly, as outer space refugee Duke Fleed arrives on Earth incognito with his saucer-based Gattiger robot in tow, pursued by an evil alien repo-armada who is intent upon recovering said saucer-based Gattiger robot.

I mentioned earlier that the 1970s was the decade where Japanese animation cemented its place in worldwide entertainment. Well, UFO Robo Grendizer, the Go Nagai/Dynamic Pro super robot series from Toei that was given a trial run with Uchuu Enban Daisenso, began airing in 1975. Grendizer ran 74 episodes and was a massive hit in Italy and France and the French-speaking world, cementing Japanese animation as the go-to entertainment for Romance-language speaking children for years to come. The story of Grendizer is a mix of royal intrigue, UFO hysteria, and super robot mecha-violence that begins as the evil Vegans destroy the planet Fleed and all its people save the prince Duke Fleed, who escapes in the super robot flying saucer Grendizer. Arriving on Earth, he goes undercover as a simple farmhand, but when the Vegans threaten, he and Grendizer battle them alongside guest star Koji Kabuto from Mazinger Z.
 

By the end of the series Duke and Koji are joined by Fleed's sister Maria and local horse girl Hikaru who each pilot their own super mecha that combine to make Grendizer even more awesome. Grendizer aired in the US as part of the "Force Five" series, and the 2024 reimagining Grendizer U was partially financed by another nation full of Grendizer fans, Saudi Arabia.

The 1970s in general weren't a big time for anime feature films. Apart from festival shorts, The Little Mermaid was the only theatrical-length anime release in 1975. Toei's adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's fish-girl story is a widescreen film directed by Tomoharu Katsumata that arguably is closer to the original fairy tale than the later Disney version. This release was dubbed into English and made its way to American television and the home video market and was later released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Discotek Media, and also given a comedy commentary track by the former MST3K comedians of Rifftrax. The Little Mermaid remains a fairy tale, but Katsumata frames the film like a widescreen super robot epic, complete with giant monsters.

catch The Little Mermaid Sunday on the Superstation

Economic factors, market forces, changing demographics, flying saucer sightings; they all worked to shape Japanese animation in 1975. With hindsight it's easy to see how the field was shifting towards original properties and international licensing and how the potential for massive toy sales drove anime studios into the arms of various super robots. Speaking for myself, when I look at 1975 I see favorites I grew up watching like Grendizer, I see favorites that became hits among the next generation like Maya The Bee, and favorites that never took off in the West but remain vital cornerstones of anime in Japan, like Gamba and Raideen. The groundwork of 1965 was paying off ten years later, with Japanese animation solidly in place as global entertainment, even if the globe didn't quite realize it yet. Next: 1985!


-Dave Merrill

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!

Happy Halloween with Mecha-May

It's Halloween, and that means it's time to find out what classic  anime shows will scare the bolts out of a robot girl! Let Mecha-May and Mew-Bot 5000 take you on a tour of obscure spooky anime to watch this spooky season!  

America's First Manga: UFO Commander 7?

Like many amazing adventures, this one started in an antique mall. Always on the lookout for diecast Japanese robot toys, one day I found one I didn't recognize. And I don’t want to say I’m an expert or anything, but if there’s one thing that takes up too much of my brain, it’s diecast Japanese robot toys. So I bought the thing, this big-headed orange and green robot man, and found out it was “VALCAN-I” from the Shinsei Mini Power UFO Commander 7 Series, a collection of futuristic robots and vehicles sold in the mid 1970s. Shinsei was and maybe still is a toymaker, selling detailed toy replicas of cars, trucks, construction equipment and other items of interest to kids; the brand was acquired by an Indian corporation in 1985.  

The thing about diecast toys is they’re made of metal, and metal is strong. Dogs might chew on it, kids might bury it in the sandbox, they might get smacked around or thrown or dropped, they’ll lose accessories like fists or missiles, but that toy is going to last, a brightly colored artifact of somebody’s childhood that ends up with all the other childhood artifacts on a shelf with a price tag. Soon I was finding other UFO Commander 7 items in the display cases of other vintage toy stores and out of the way antique malls. That’s where I found my Jeek Tunnelins, which is not a rare skin condition, but another mecha-vehicle member of that UFO Commander armada. The Jeek Tunnelin is, as the name would suggest, a tunnelling vehicle. If your Jeek Tunnelin  works properly, pushing the vehicle forward on its caterpillar treads will engage a gear that turns the giant tunnel boring machine-style cutting head disc. It's pretty cool. 

Over the years I kept seeing various toys at various inflated price points in various antique malls, and then one day I saw something I hadn’t seen before in one of those antique mall display cabinets. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a square little View-Master sized paper pamphlet with the UFO Commander 7 logo and what appeared to be manga-style artwork of the series robots and vehicles. "That," I said, "is coming with me."

My guess was that this would be a little toy instruction sheet, how to fit the missiles into your VALCAN-I or how to operate your BRAIN-III or whatever. You've seen these sorts of pamphlets nestled in among the styrofoam tray inside the diecast toy box, if you're lucky enough to find one that still has the box. Anyway, that was my assumption. And my assumption was wrong.

What this was instead was the legend of UFO Commander 7, the entire saga behind the toy line, the explanation of the UFO "Blue Silver" and how it escaped the destruction of its home planet along with VALCAN-I and BRAIN-III. How the Earth was threatened by the Dragols from outer space, and how three Earth youngsters and a dolphin were selected to join the UFO Commander 7 crew. This isn't an instruction sheet, this is a science fiction epic!  But it's the next page that really stunned me.

This is manga, UFO Commander 7 manga. Japanese manga in English from the 1970s, starring Dr. Purron, our friendly talking, bespectacled dolphin Edison, and three Earth youngsters sporting Cyborg 009 cosplay. 

This is English-language manga, years before Viz and Area 88, years before I Saw It and Gen Of Hiroshima. This is manga in three languages all about the heroes of UFO Commander 7 teaming up to battle the Dragols, and also some VALCAN-I and BRAIN-III comedy relief robo-bickering. 

Writing about classic Japanese animation involves a bit of research. As new information comes to light on old series, we're constantly revising our ideas of "firsts." There always seems to be an older anime series or an earlier anime convention or fanzine. So I'm not going to be the guy who says what we're looking at right here is the first Japanese manga to be published in English (and French and German). But maybe it is.

For one thing, this is a toy pamphlet, not a magazine or a book - buying a UFO Commander 7 toy was the only way to read this. Not unheard of in the toy world, but certainly a difficult way to get the work out to a wider audience. 

But let's face it. These are Japanese comics, in English, being distributed in North America in the 1970s. This is a pretty rare thing for America at the time. If you aren't flipping out about this at least slightly, you probably quit reading this blog a while back.

According to Japanese Showa-era toy research blogger Bakadesubakadesu, there was a UFO Commander 7 manga serial in Terebi-Kun magazine that ran from 1976-77. It's unknown who created the manga, and I have no idea if what we're seeing here is repurposed images from that manga, or if this was drawn specifically for the toy line. What I do know is that I'm digging this artwork, this is perfect adventure manga artwork from this period, the human characters have those gigantic Star Of The Giants eyebrows and the mechanical stuff is sharp and tight, the kind of terrific detail we love to see in our mecha illustrations. 

I don't know how many super robot narratives end with one super robot throwing another super robot at the enemy super robots, but it definitely happens at least once! Maybe this needs a little notation reminding children to not throw their BRAIN-IIIs across the room, those things are heavy and could do some damage. 

Not to worry! The diecast metal from Planet Marvellous is strong, and BRAIN-III has survived the impact with only minor and easily repaired damage.

You can tell the robots are functioning normally because they're bickering with each other like always. Now let's get back to building that underground base, and you, children at home, be careful with your VALCAN-I's space razor!

The immense success of the 1970s Japanese entertainment industry, swelling to a tidal wave of comics, cartoons, films, toys, model kits, and uncounted other pieces of ancillary merchandise, couldn't help but surge past Japan's borders and into the rest of the world. And sure, it's easy to sell merchandise from a property that kids have seen on TV or in the movies. But it speaks to the genius of their toy designers that something like UFO Commander 7 can grab the interest and the allowance money of legions of North American kids without benefit of a TV cartoon. Great toys sell themselves. 

Now get out there, collect all the UFO Commander 7 toys, and help VALCAN-I save the Earth from the Dragols!

Well, maybe it IS spelled "VULCAN" after all. 

-Dave Merrill

Special thanks to Antiques On 11, Severn Ontario!

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!