Six Combinations, Three Robots, One Blu-Ray

Lightspeed Electroid Albegas aired from March 30 1983 until February 8 1984 on TV Tokyo Wednesdays at the oddly specific time of 5:55pm. This Toei robot anime show filled the time slot formerly occupied by Toei’s Dairugger XV, aka “the Voltron with the cars”. Both Dairugger and Golion, aka the “Voltron with the lions”, were sort of experiments for Toei, trying to move past the now-standard super robot, science center, alien invaders, youths burning with the fires of justice cliches. And Albegas… features super robots piloted from a science center by justice-seeking teens battling alien invaders. Maybe Toei’s experiment didn’t work out? TV Tokyo would replace Albegas with Wako’s fox anime “Cry Of The Wild” and next season the slot would, for some reason, feature reruns of Knack’s Manga Sarutobi Sasuke, aka Ninja The Wonder Boy. Much of the staff from Albegas would carry over into Toei’s next robot anime Laserion, a TBS show.

But let’s get dimension, already. Lightspeed Electroid Albegas stars hero boy Daisaku Enjoji, moody loner Tetsuya Jin and teen miss Hotaru Mizuki, three top robotics students at the elite Aoba Academy private high school, where the students learn robotics along with literature and math. All three win the school robot olympics with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots, just in time for Earth to be attacked by the Dellinger Corps. Led by the Great Deran, the Dellinger are an advanced race from beyond the stars, against whose mechanical monsters Earth’s military is powerless. Even the Aoba Academy champs can’t stop the invasion. That’s why the three break into the Robot Center research facility run by Hotaru’s father Professor Mizuki and try to upgrade their robots with the Center’s advanced technology.
 

As it turns out Dr. Mizuki was conveniently working on a plan for three super robots that would be able to utilize extradimensional power and combine into six different configurations, and when our three heroes shout “Get Dimension!” they find themselves piloting Albegas.

Combining Daisaku’s black Alpha robot, Tetsuya’s blue Beta robot, and Hotaru’s red Gamma robot - Al(pha), Be(ta), Ga(mma), get it? - Albegas can become the Denjin Dimension, Magma Dimension, Marine Dimension, Space Dimension, Sky Dimension, Rescue or Guard Dimension depending on which robot is where when the transformation sequence starts. Since the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma already look pretty similar, it takes a sharp eyed viewer to really distinguish between the six different possible combinations. I guess this saved the toy designers some headaches, but it doesn’t make for visually engaging mecha.

various Dellingers

The evil Dellinger Empire - referencing 70s rock icon Rick Derringer, maybe - is led by the Great Deran, perhaps named after folk rock icon Bob Dylan. After all, both are immensely powerful mysterious beings whose true motives are unknown. Sadly the rest of Dellinger’s hordes of space mutants are armored lumps with non-musical names like General Duston, Catastra Commander, the wise staff chief Dime, the female-coded Mirror Zero, and midshow replacements like New Generalissimo Bios and the crab-armor General Dali. Most Dellinger are characterized by hoods or masks or some other face covering that saves animators the trouble of animating mouth movements, and this includes their “Reploid” masked goons, who carry out vital tokusatsu-sentai show masked goon villainy every episode. Of course their inevitable defeat requires Dellinger to unleash that week’s giant Mecha Fighter, in the hopes that this Mecha Fighter, unlike all the previous Mecha Fighters, will finally defeat Albegas. Dream on, losers.

Mecha Fighter Jazz Hands

Albegas leader Daisaku Enjoji could be any one of dozens of robot anime heroes, a regular teen who loves justice and is great with robots and computers but hates studying and schoolwork, which is why he gets a harsh after-school tutor who turns out to be a Dellinger spy. Daisaku is athletic and popular with the girls, but he’s also required to deliver goofs, blunders, and juvenile lechery, when he isn’t being hassled by his kid brother Jiro and little sister Natsuko, or being disciplined by his blue-collar dad. Of course since Daisaku is the hero, he delivers every episode’s finishing blow with his Denjin Sanbei Sword.

Daisaku and Miss Danko

Tetsuya Jin holds down the “moody loner” position on the team, moody for many reasons, but mostly because because he gets accused of ransacking the school (a Dellinger plot), because he’s an orphan whose only relative is a doctor on a far away island where a local girl gets promised to Tetsuya in marriage (also a Dellinger plot), and also because the girl he actually has feelings for turns out to be the daughter of a Dellinger general as part of yet another Dellinger plot.

Voiced by Hiromi Tsuru (Jodie Foster’s voice in the Japanese version of “Bugsy Malone”), tomboy Hotaru Mizuki is the daughter of the professor responsible for our super robots. She’s the idol of the Aoba School, athletic, brainy, and attractive, but not smart enough to spot Dellinger plots, like for instance when they impersonate her long-dead mother. Aside from defending the Earth, Hotaru’s biggest problem is dealing with the unwanted attentions of classmate Goro, when she isn’t encouraging her dad’s relationship with his assistant Saeko.

Professor Mizuki and Saeko

Goro and his Gori-Robo

Goro Kumai is this show’s Big Moose, a giant goof so jealous of Albegas that he builds his own super robot out of scrap, and so smitten with Hotaru that sometimes viewers will find themselves wondering if they should file a restraining order. Reminded of “Boss” from Mazinger Z? You sure are. Goro’s gorilla-esque Gori-Robo lumbers out to get its robotic ass smacked down by Mecha-Fighter after Mecha-Fighter, episode after episode, but Goro never gives up. Extra comedy relief comes courtesy their homeroom teacher Miss Danko, whose size and demeanor gives Albegas scripters a chance to use up all the fatphobic, misogynist cringe they had left over from the 1970s.

If the “Tetsuya falls in love with an alien girl” plotline feels Acrobunch-adjacent, well, don’t be surprised, Albegas character designer Shigenori Kageyama worked on both shows. Albegas also had mechanical design by Koichi (MD Geist) Ohata, and screenwriter Shozo Uehara worked on hundreds of tokusatsu and sentai series episodes, which might explain the “monster of the week” pattern Albegas adopts early on. Every week some Dellinger infiltrates in disguise, every week their heinous plot is uncovered, every week the Dellinger unleash a giant, havoc-wreaking mechanical beast, which every week is defeated by Lightspeed Electroid Albegas, after another replay of any one or two or six of six different transformation sequences.

Albegas walks a line between super robot drama and high school comedy, and it’s when the show gives in and lets itself be funny that Albegas really entertains. There’s a New Year’s party episode where the heroes and villains relax and enjoy themselves while also conniving to sabotage each other, and the results are surprisingly fun. There’s a story arc involving General Dali and how his daughter Julia sneaks off to Earth to enjoy regular teen life that ends in tragedy and remains an important story point for the rest of the show, including a convoluted yet touching episode where Daisaku’s confused little sister decides she’s really an adopted Dellinger and that General Dali is her real father. At times the series is extremely culturally Japanese, with episodes involving Japanese holidays, traditional Japanese theater, and one built around the folk horror legend of the murdering innkeepers, who are, of course, Dellinger aliens in disguise.

our hero

Albegas was originally planned to be syndicated on American television as part of World Events Productions’ Voltron series, which, as we all know, was built out of King Of Beasts Golion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The story is that WEP saw the positive audience reaction to their Lion Voltron segments and instead of dubbing Albegas, they simply subcontracted for more episodes starring the Voltron Force. However, after watching Albegas, I’m unsure as to how well the series would have fit into the Voltron aesthetic. After two shows full of cosmic adventure, the largely Earth-bound high school hijinks of Albegas would be a definite tonal shift, and handling the cultural Japanese elements would be challenging. I don’t know how WEP would have localized the show for ‘80s TV, but I’m sure the results would have been amusing.

On the whole it’s not hard to see why WEP took a pass on Albegas. The show is dank, the color palette is muted, there are a lot of greys and dull greens and browns, and the animation is utilitarian at best. A lot of anime from this period will have an episode or a sequence that really stands out, where somebody like Yoshinori Kanada would be unleashed for three or four minutes to really show off and blow our minds, but that’s not happening in Albegas. This show’s animation is all subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, the sort of clumsy, outsourced, by the numbers, get it done already look shared with dozens of contemporaneous productions. By no means is this an artistic achievement to be lauded, but… if you were an American anime fan in this period and you’d been seeking out anime on cable and UHF and in the kiddie section of the local video rental, you’d recognize this sort of budget-type dollar-store generic animation instantly, having seen it everywhere from episodes of GI Joe and Transformers to whatever super robots were hiding on discount public-domain VHS. This animation is as 80s as any Pac-Man video game or Duran Duran LP or Members Only jacket. Maybe we shouldn’t be nostalgic for a bad rack zoom or an inept walk cycle, but we are. Deal with it.

things get more animated in the last episode

Just to change things up, Albegas’s final episode features some fun, nicely animated first-person sequences as our heroes zoom through extradimensional space to confront the Great Deran. Yes, the evil aliens and their plot to take over the Earth is defeated, in case you were wondering. These climactic sequences bring to mind 80s first-person shooter video games. Well, by a strange coincidence, Albegas was in fact the basis for a Sega laserdisc video game, titled “Albegas” in Japan and “Cybernaut” in the United States, if it ever made it to the United States, that is. Details are sketchy.

Albegas did appear in the US as “Voltron II The Deluxe Gladiator Set” from Matchbox, which seems to be a repack of Popy’s GC-04 DX Albegas, a toy I wish I’d bought when it was on clearance at K-Mart. With my employee discount it probably would have set me back a whole eight dollars. The DX combination process gives us an Albegas with three sets of arms, an altogether more interesting look than what we got on the TV.

Early in the Albegas series our heroes each have personal commuter-type jet planes that are used to dock with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots. Episode 14 delivers an extremely toyetic upgrade in the form of the New Jet Alpha, Beta and Gamma, each transformable into vaguely robotic forms, and that can combine into the Super Abega and become a Godaikin toy for sale at better toy stores everywhere in the 1980s.

For my part, I first saw Albegas on the shelves as a “Voltron II” in that K-Mart toy department. It would be a few years before I’d first see animated Albegas as one of dozens of anime openings on a tape of anime opening credits, courtesy some fan somewhere with two VCRs, a slew of TV episodes from different shows, and a desire to build a mixtape of OP and ED sequences. That’s where Albegas first hit my eyeballs, Mojo and Korogi ‘73 belting out the catchy theme song that starts off chanting “Gan-gan-gan” before asking us to “get dimension” and “scramble go,” one more colorful high-energy anime OP in among forty or fifty other colorful high-energy robot anime OPs. It’s easy to see where Albegas would be overlooked in a Japanese TV schedule that included Urusei Yatsura, Dr Slump, Tokemeki Tonight, Sasuraiger, Votoms, Dunbine, Orguss, Prowres Sanshiro, Cat’s Eye, and Kinnikuman. American anime fandom in the mid 1980s was too busy drawing Dirty Pair fan artwork and writing extensive Zeta Gundam episode guides to worry about combination robots from two or three seasons ago. But speaking for myself, decades later I’d be throwing down cold hard cash for a Blu-Ray of Albegas, purely on the strength of that opening credit sequence.

Yes, Discotek Media continues their crusade to release the unexpected and brought Albegas to North American home video in a standard-def Blu-Ray disc containing all 45 episodes with English subtitles. You might wonder about video quality with so many episodes stuffed onto one disc, but the show looks fine. In fact higher resolution might not do this show any favors; the show isn’t visually striking or particularly well animated, and seeing it in UHD 4K would only highlight those imperfections. Personally, I’m kind of jazzed that we’re finally getting the full 80s anime experience; not just expensive films and beloved TV series, but also the kind of forgettable programmers that filled time slots and toy store shelves, that caught and held the attention of viewers just long enough to be replaced with next year’s new show. Maybe there’s some version of the world where American kids watched a renamed Daisaku, Tetsuya and Hotaru battle whatever WEP would call the Dellinger in however many episodes survived the standards and practices cuts and were retitled “Gladiator Force Voltron.” But the get dimension we got, where we can enjoy the original and think about what might have been, well, that’s OK too. Now tell Goro to get lost, there’s scramble go lightspeed electroids to combine!

-Dave Merrill

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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! 

Robotech II: The Sentinels?

 

When the anime series Robotech came to the rescue of syndicated American TV in the mid 80s, its success created an audience eager for more, and producers Harmony Gold were ready to capitalize on that desire. The trouble with continuing that story was, well, Robotech was originally three different Japanese television shows, all with their own writers, artists, production teams, schedules and budgets, all completed before “Robotech” was even a trademark. Harmony Gold’s role in rewriting, editing, and repackaging the material, while not insignificant, was still less work than coming up with an entirely new series from scratch. Which is probably why HG’s first Robotech sequel took the easy way out. Robotech The Movie was a dubbed and rewritten Megazone 23, amended with some Southern Cross footage and some dialogue intended to fit the whole business in with the Robotech storyline. The result, immediately suppressed after test screenings, was an incoherent mess.

However, Harmony Gold’s next shot at a Robotech franchise opportunity took a completely different approach. New characters and mecha were designed, new storylines were composed, the production team constructed a galaxy-spanning epic that would reveal the mysteries behind the foundation of the entire Robotech saga. And the final result was… also an incoherent mess.

 

pre-production trade advertisement for Robotech II

But in 1988, all we fans knew was that show that had brought a lot of us into Japanese animation now had a sequel titled “Robotech II: The Sentinels,” and that this sequel had finally been released on home video, and that we were about to watch it at our local anime club meeting. Then we watched all 74 minutes of that video and we finally knew the truth, which is that Robotech II: The Sentinels is terrible.

Rather than being assembled, rewritten and recut from disparate elements, The Sentinels was conceived and commissioned from the ground up by Harmony Gold. Yet, due to production problems and various financing crises, The Sentinels we eventually wound up with was, ironically enough, also assembled, rewritten and recut. Production on Sentinels began even as the original TV series was airing. However, HG’s 65 episode plan ran into problems when on September 22, 1985 the Plaza Accord was signed, which among other things revalued the Japanese yen against the US dollar. What had at one time been cheaply produced Japanese animation was now significantly more expensive to produce. As a result, the price tag on The Sentinels ballooned and sponsor Matchbox pulled out, leaving Harmony Gold with a mere three episodes of usable footage. This, along with material from the original Robotech television series, is the Sentinels video release we were given. 

 

either too much hair, or not enough hair

Robotech II should have been an easy slam dunk, even with the show’s self-imposed goal of showing what happens to the Macross Saga characters after the events of that series arc while also providing connective material to the Robotech Masters (Southern Cross) series and laying the groundwork for the New Generation (Mospeada) batch of episodes. Had it been planned from the start as a direct-to-video special, it might have worked. Fans loved these characters and were ready to see more of their adventures. That is not what we got. 

 

 
What Robotech II delivers instead are once beloved characters redesigned to avoid copyright issues, because Macross copyright partners Studio Nue and Big West had not and would never sign off on any Robotech sequels starring their Macross IP. This results in scenes of the new-look Rick Hunter and retooled Lisa Hayes preparing for their wedding alongside their friends Slightly Off Lynn Minmay and Is That Claudia Grant, I Guess It Is. Yes, this wedding is taking place ten years after the end of the Macross Saga, because good space station caterers are hard to find, maybe. 

 

 

Comedy relief is provided by the hilarious little-kid antics of Little Dana Sterling and Little Bowie Grant, who apparently are the only ten year olds left alive on Earth. These domestic scenes are intercut with events across the galaxy on the planet Tirol, the homeworld of the Robotech Masters, who at this point in the story are on their way to Earth to make the Robotech Masters TV series a thing, and who have left their planet in the hands of an elderly man with an amazing beard. 

 

some of the amazing beards of Robotech II

 

A disturbing proportion of Robotech II: The Sentinels is devoted to middle-aged bores lecturing everybody in various contrived accents while sporting a startling variety of facial hair choices, epitomized by Tirol’s chief scientist Kabel as he wrinkles his elderly brow in confusion as their planet is invaded by the robot panthers and humanoid, phallus-dangling mechanoid destroyers of the Invid. You might recall the Invid as the Earth-invading baddies from Robotech The New Generation. 

 

Can this marriage be saved?

Here the foundation is laid for their future Earth attack as the bickering husband-and-wife team of Regent the tadpole-faced slug man and Regis the human-faced slug lady argue and whine their way through scenes which will have audiences thinking about couples counseling or divorce lawyers. Occasionally the slug man talks to a giant brain in a tank, merely one of many Robotech II scenes where dialog is spoken by people without mouths, or people wearing masks, or people with things obscuring their mouths, or people with their backs to the camera, so as to avoid the trouble of animating lip movements.

I watched and enjoyed the original Robotech TV series, and I can assure you that this show was not a success because of giant slugs talking to giant brains. Robotech was a success because it featured transforming robot fighter planes, well-animated action scenes, and cute girl singers. Robotech II: The Sentinels has none of this. All the returning characters are uglier and have stupider hair, and the new characters are also ugly and also have stupid hair. Popular Robotech singing star Minmay gets one song, which she’s forced to share with a brand new character that Robotech II never gets around to introducing. Other familiar Robotech characters are reduced to standing around asking plot-furthering questions, arguing their way through board meetings or sporting what appear to be gimp fetish masks, as we see Zentraedi commander Breetai wearing as he walks Lisa Hayes down the matrimonial aisle.

 

There’s very little Robotech mecha in Robotech II, which might have influenced Matchbox’s decision to yank the plug. The only transforming mecha we see in Robotech II are training flights flown by Alpha fighters, and all the other various Invid destructo-bots and mecha-dogs aren’t what we’d call toyetic. The Sentinels' mechanical design was by Tatsunoko’s in-house mecha design team Ammonite, previously seen mecha-designing shows like Starzan S and Southern Cross. Ammonite would create a slew of original mecha for Robotech II, and several designs would be repurposed for future projects like Red Photon Zillion, an ecological solution that proves every dark cloud has a silver lining.  After 74 minutes of confusing edits, flashbacks to Robotech episodes, a scene where some anonymous captain is profoundly and court-martially  insubordinate to Major General Rick Hunter, ponderous arguments between different sets of boring old guys, and Tirol’s beardo wizard staring into computer screens as robot dogs destroy his planet, viewers may cheer any hope of redemption. 

 

 
Of course, Harmony Gold would wring every bit of profit they could from the remains of this abortive series. Robotech II first got a home video release from Palladium, the Robotech RPG people, choosing for their cover art one of the Invid’s swinging-dick robo-marauders. Is there a better way to sell a Robotech sequel than  images of a scary dong robot? Later Streamline Pictures would offer a Robotech II VHS with distribution from Orion Pictures. A slightly altered version would appear on A&E’s Robotech The Complete Set DVD box, along with other sequel projects like Robotech The Shadow Chronicles and the Robotech version of the Mospeada OVA “Love Live Alive.”
 

yup, that robot has a wang

Robotech II: The Sentinels achieved its greatest success in other media. Del Rey would roll out the entire Sentinels story through five novels, while three different comic book companies released Sentinels-based comics and Palladium released a Sentinels RPG. Perhaps one of these ancillary media iterations dares to tell the audience exactly who the Robotech Sentinels are. This video never does. 

 

Robotech is a franchise that spawned novels, comic books, games, a large toy line, and a fandom that continues to this day.  What it hasn't spawned is a satisfying sequel, in spite of the efforts of Harmony Gold and a myriad of creative hopefuls, and in defiance of all the 80s nostalgia, remake obsession, and reboot mania that Hollywood can muster. Currently Sony Pictures is churning through the third attempt at making a live-action Robotech film. All we can say to this is good luck, go easy on the beards, and don’t put Breetai in a gimp mask.

-D. Merrill

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Revenge Of The Kickstarter Of The Dagger Of Kamui

It was the 1980s. There was no way this movie wasn't going to be treated like exploitation trash, have half an hour hacked out of it and wind up in video stores with a dopey new title. This is how the world worked back then, Asia was a sweatshop cranking out cheap movies, cheap cars, cheap electronics, cheap cartoons, it was all fodder for the K-Marts, the Zayres, the Richways. They all needed discount junk for the ninja-obsessed kids and the developmentally-disabled adults who'd traded the sticky seats of the downtown grindhouse theater for the sticky buttons of their VCRs. After all, there were shipping deadlines to make and shelves to fill, everything was raw material for this machine, even big-budgeted Madhouse-animated Japanese films directed by Rintaro, which is what we're talking about today, the movie about the orphan with nothing but a sword and a secret and a destiny that would shake nations, we're talking about Dagger Of Kamui, a film that came and went and whose Blu-Ray revival is about to once again reveal its hidden treasures to a North America that might pay attention this time.

I've mentioned already how teenage me first saw this film, as a copy of a copy of a copy on a hotel TV during an Atlanta Fantasy Fair, sitting on the hard floor, ignoring the heat and whatever else I was missing at the convention, mesmerized in spite of the film’s punishing length and lack of English subtitles or dialogue. For those 132 minutes Dagger Of Kamui became our entire universe, our perception focused on the sweeping vistas of Bering Sea ice, mystical Hokkaido mountains, the American West, the neon slashes of ninja blades shattering the night with glowing crimson, and the surprising introduction of what we’d soon call Ninja Dog, all set to a pulsating rock soundtrack. When the film was over, returning to the beige suburban reality of the mid 1980s was hard.

Anime fandom wrote this film off in the 90s. Lumped in with other mid-list Just For Kids releases like Technopolice 21C and Dallos, Kamui wasn't lurid or extreme enough for the Ninja Scroll crowd, didn’t star outer space bikini teens or combination robots, was too long to fit on the tape-traders’ standard T-120, and even when AnimEigo released it on VHS (1993) and DVD (2003) the only reaction was to give Rintaro doubters something besides Harmagedon to poke unwarranted fun at.

Tetsu Yano's Kamui novels

How did Japan react to this boom-era epic from Haruki Kadokawa’s media-mix hit factory? Middling box office and a PC-88 game, that’s how. Kadokawa's third animated film after the groundbreaking Harmagedon and the mystifying atavism of Shonen Kenya, Dagger Of Kamui would come from author Tetsu Yano, whose path to fiction began by collecting garbage on US military bases. Intrigued by the lurid covers of discarded American SF pulps, Yano would go on to translate writers like Heinlein, Herbert, and Pohl into Japanese, as well as write SF himself, becoming the first Japanese SF author to visit the US. First novelized in 1970, Yano would continue Dagger of Kamui for Kadokawa Shoten in 1984 and 1985. The 80s editions of Yano's Kamui novels were illustrated by Moribi Murano, who would design characters for this Kamui film, and who also did character designs and manga for Toho's 1984 feature Lensman, bringing us full circle to the pulps.

Pulp is indeed what we're talking about here, mass-market historical pulp fiction. If Dagger Of Kamui was an American novel, it'd be 500 pages wedged into a drugstore rack, a bare-chested pioneer on the cover struggling for survival and glory while manhandling a busty wench against the backdrop of a savage frontier, a promise of sweeping melodrama built partly out of history and partly on the need to have something exciting happen every fifteen pages.

Of course, to fully enjoy historical fiction it helps to know the history, but where this film is concerned, well, they aren’t teaching the Meiji Restoration in American high schools, so pay attention. In the tail end of the Edo period, the Tokugawa Shogunate was losing its grasp on power. Desperation leads to extreme measures, which is why one day in the northwest Shimokita peninsula, way up there near Hokkaido, our hero Jiro returns home and finds his adoptive mother and sister dead in the darkness, mother fallen over a short sword wrapped in Ainu cloth, the same short sword and cloth that were found with infant Jiro 14 years before. Jiro unsheathes the flashing blade, the soundtrack kicks in with hypnotic drums, jangling guitar, and unearthly chants, and ladies and gentlemen, we have Dagger Of Kamui. Chased out of town during the opening credits, Jiro runs straight into the care of Tenkai, head monk of Tengen temple, and incidentally also the leader of the Shogun's secret shinobi squad, who takes Jiro and trains him in the ways of the shadow warriors, which this film is careful to never call “ninja.”

A hidden treasure, a secret warrior caste, an orphan destined for glory raised as a warrior, Japan itself at stake in a struggle that spans the Pacific, it doesn’t get pulpier than this. The story moves across what was then called Ezo and is now Hokkaido, as Jiro rescues an Ainu kid, reunites with his own Ainu mother, finds a treasure code in his father’s empty grave, realizes he’s a pawn in Tenkai’s game, and learns his own short sword is the titular Dagger, the Of Kamui one. Kamui in this case doesn’t mean the Sanpei Shirato manga, but the divine spirits of the Ainu, embodied in Hokkaido’s holy mountain Kamuinupuri, which we’ll see a few times in this film. The idea of a vast treasure connected with the Ainu should come as no surprise to viewers of what might be the Hokkaido indigenous people’s most comprehensive representation in anime, 2018’s Golden Kamuy, but in 1985 Dagger Of Kamui might have been one of the earliest, most realized representations of Ainu culture we’d see in the anime and manga field, apart from the Tetsuya Chiba manga (and Hayao Miyazaki TMS pilot) Yuki’s Sun and the Osamu Tezuka manga Brave Dan. Of course, later series like Samurai Champloo and Shaman King would feature characters of Ainu ancestry.

For Dagger’s Jiro, defying Tenkai means battling every one of Tenkai’s henchmen and henchwomen, from Shingo’s mind bending paralysis poison to the beautiful Oyuki and her duplication jutsu, their fight turning the Ezo hot springs landscape blood red in a flashing, possibly seizure-triggering hurricane of colors while cranking the soundtrack electric guitar up to eleven.

Samurai dropout Ando Shouzan shows Jiro a globe of the world and Japan's small place in it, and together they find the Dagger’s secret pointing to America and Santa Catalina Island, later famous as the shooting location for a bad Tommy Kirk beach movie. But before Jiro can embark on his own Catalina Caper, he must battle Tenkai's next killers, the Matsumae Trio, aptly named after a northern Japanese clan who ruled the northernmost approaches to Hokkaido and the Ainu. This trio of Toad Guy, Blowgun Hippy and Boomerang Samurai battle Jiro in a psychedelic nightmare showdown of eerie pastel fire accompanied by a soundtrack of ominous groaning and ethereal bells.

At a Kunashir Island port, Jiro saves the black American sailor Sam and defeats Oyuki in a struggle onboard Sam’s whaling ship and we’re halfway through the film. Jiro and Oyuki are on their way to America, until suddenly they’re ditched in Kamkatcha, to share backstories of being raised as assassins by Tenkai. In the snow they find both a puppy and maybe puppy love, but whoops, there's Tenkai who gives Oyuki a six-gun and tells her to get the job done. What Tenkai fails to realize is "the job" means "causing an avalanche that allows everyone to escape."

Smash cut to Nevada – yes, this is a film that handwaves 3500 miles of ocean - where a raggedy Jiro once again arrives to rescue a total stranger, saving the blue-eyed Indian maiden Chico from being assaulted by two outlaws. Reminiscent of Natalie Wood in The Searchers, Chico turns out to be not Navajo but actually French, orphaned and raised by the tribe, whose chief is, of course, Geronimo. In Carson City, Jiro inquires after Santa Catalina Island, has a Wild West high-noon shootout with the two outlaws, and gets directions from celebrated author Mark Twain, who tells him of the legend of Captain Kidd's gold.

Fun fact, the real Captain Kidd actually did leave a prize ship at a Santa Catalina Island in 1699, while he travelled to New York City and later London to defend himself unsuccessfully against charges of piracy. However, that ship didn't have any treasure on it, and Kidd's Santa Catalina was/is a completely different Santa Catalina Island, offshore from the Dominican Republic instead of Los Angeles.

If you want to put a message in your movie, maybe the best way to get it across is to have a world famous author deliver it. That’s what happens here when Mark Twain looks right at the camera and tells us all how he saw something wild and vital in Jiro, something that humanity might be in danger of losing in our fast-paced modern world of telegraphs, steam locomotives and ninja movies.

On California's Santa Catalina, Rintaro's cinematic skill reveals the treasure’s secret in a signature spectacle of light bursting out of darkness, a shining cross marking the crumbling cave in which there is only a throne and one solitary chest of coins - and Tenkai, sending Oyuki against Jiro in a final showdown interrupted by sudden betrayal and faithful Ninja Dog attack. Hidden behind a secret wall, the full treasure hoard is inadvertently revealed by Tenkai’s corpse – if it IS Tenkai’s corpse, because in true pulp fiction fashion it turns out secret shinobi bosses always have two or three body doubles, just in case.

Chico And The Man

Meanwhile in Japan, the real Tenkai's master the Tokugawa Shogunate is challenged by the Satsuma-Chōshū army, in what will be known later as the Boshin War. As the film says, "the 300 year reign of the Tokugawa Shogunate is crashing down!" But Tenkai meets with Lord Sadonokami (a real person) and Lord Kozukenosuke (another real person) and in spite of the Kidd treasure not working out for them, another plan is proposed, to mortgage Hokkaido to foreign powers in exchange for money to continue the war. Is their no end to their perfidy?

But Jiro, enriched by the treasure, hires his own band of Iga shinobi to carry on his own personal war with Tenkai. We see the down payment travel from woodblock-print Osaka to Nara, back to Iga, and into a ninja double cross that turns into a ninja triple cross! Soon Tenkai’s temple is in flames and he’s left to linger in defeat, just as in real life the Tokugawa government retreated to Hokkaido to set up the Republic Of Ezo with the military help of defecting French advisors. This was the first democratic government in Asia (well, okay, only samurai could vote) and it lasted almost a year before it fell in the Battle of Hakodate, the setting for Jiro’s final battle with Tenkai, set among artillery duels between the Imperial Navy and the star fortress of Goryōkaku.

Shellfire and explosions punctuate the percussive soundtrack as Tenkai, throughout the film thwarted by the infants he himself trained, defeated by his own intricate plans, halted even by the sacrifice of children and the elderly, is finally defeated both by Jiro and by historical forces no amount of ninjutsu can conquer. In the aftermath of the battle Jiro sees Tenkai for what he was, one more power-hungry monster in the service of any number of governments far removed from the people they supposedly govern.

And that’s Dagger Of Kamui, a movie where Jiro either saves or fights pretty much everyone he meets, sometimes both at the same time, in which randomly appearing characters turn out to be vital narrative anchors, a film that inserts real life famous personalities into the narrative to tell us how amazing the hero is, where we’re given not one but two body-double fakeouts and two - wait, three completely different sets of murdered relatives, and an intricate scheme that involves raising a ninja from birth and turning him loose to...let’s see, he’ll kill all your other ninja, how did that work out for you, Tenkai? In lesser hands, the bare-faced ridiculousness of Dagger’s melodrama would devolve into campy parody or get bogged down, like this review, in historical details.

But this is Rintaro we’re talking about here. He puts Madhouse and Project Team Argos to work delivering the shining sparks and neon traces of shuriken and kunai zipping through the darkness, animating bakufu armies and Old West steam locomotives and shifting Kuril ice floes, depicting shinobi bouncing across the landscape like Adieu 999 Mechanized Empire stormtroopers, artillery barrages and Ainu villages alike with consummate skill, all set against the beautiful landscapes of art director Mukuo Takamura, fresh from his location scouting trip to Hokkaido. Dagger screenwriter Masaki Mori and character designer Murano Moribi worked on the Madhouse adaptation of the similarly set late-Edo period Haguregumo together, and Murano also contributed to Madhouse's mid-80s animation domination with his work on child-frightener Unico In The Island Of Magic. Dagger Of Kamui’s visuals are by a top-tier list of talent, every minute driven forward by the amazing soundtrack largely the work of Ryudo Uzaki and his Ryudo Group, a whirling mix of traditional and modern, intense and propulsive, the perfect companion to the mind-bendingly hallucinatory visuals of shinobi vs shinobi combat that are the film’s highlights.

These animated psychedelic showdowns would have been lost had Kadokawa gone with their first choice and shot Dagger Of Kamui as a live-action film. Thankfully for anime fans, budget challenges dictated a move to animation. Sonny Chiba protege Hiroyuki “Burning Fire” Sanada, featured in Kadokawa's GI Samurai, Ninja Wars, and Legend Of The Eight Samurai, would voice the role of Jiro. Seen recently in the FX on Hulu remake of the historical miniseries Shogun, Sanada was no stranger to ninja danger, having done voice work in the anime series Igano Kabamaru, as well as starring in its live-action adaptation. You might recognize Tenkai’s voice actor Tarō Ishida as the voice of Count Cagliostro in Lupin III Castle Of Cagliostro – or he might have been your local Kyoto Buddhist priest, because he was one! Oyuki was voiced by Mami Oyama, whose career runs the gamut from Candy Candy’s Annie Brighton to X-Bomber’s Lamia to Arale in Dr. Slump. Mark Twain’s voice actor, Iemasa Kayumi, was the go-to actor for Frank Sinatra and Donald Sutherland’s Japanese voices, as well as the evil Lepka in Future Boy Conan. 

Distributed by Toei and released in March of 1985 on a double bill with the modern-day surfer romance Bobby’s In Deep, Dagger would make 210 million yen at the Japanese box office, a mediocre showing in a year when both The Burmese Harp and Be-Bop High School would break the one billion yen mark. Dagger Of Kamui merch would include a four volume film comic by Fujimi Shobo, a FM-7 cassette tape-loading PC-88 computer adventure game that required several minutes of load time with every move, and of course the motion picture soundtrack by Ryudo Uzaki and the Ryudo Group, featuring Noriko Watanabe singing the insert song "Kamui's Lullaby.”

Only a few years later the movie would find itself on VHS in North America, retitled “Revenge Of The Ninja Warrior,” cut to 96 minutes and released along with other anime titles in Celebrity Home Video’s “Just For Kids” package. Pioneering anime localizer AnimEigo would release an uncut, subtitled Dagger Of Kamui on VHS and Laserdisc in the 90s and later on DVD, the sleeve of which even highlights Rintaro's direction and namechecks his "Space Galaxy 999," whatever that is. North American anime fandom of the 90s and beyond sometimes dismissed Dagger as overlong, nonsensical, pompous and boring – and hey, I’ll give you those first three. For non-Japanese audiences the film definitely needs subtitles, and most of us wouldn’t be seeing it with English subs until that AnimEigo release, which failed to change the fortunes of a film that never really found an audience on either side of the Pacific. Who knows, perhaps the film was too historical for the ninja movie crowd and too weird for the historical fiction fans. Maybe the thing was twenty or twenty five minutes too long for moviegoers who had spent the past five years grinding through Be Forevers and Super Galaxys,  Cosmozones Of Love and other animated endurance contests.

However, don’t bury this treasure yet. In August of 2024 AnimEigo founder Robert Woodhead announced the Kickstarter for The Dagger of Kamui Treasure Trove Edition, a deluxe limited edition Blu-Ray featuring an HD transfer of the original film with English subtitles, art galleries, a digital archive of production materials from Kadokawa, and a new commentary track featuring Rintaro. The successful funding campaign is over, and discs should ship sometime around June 2025, but don't worry, you can still get one of these limited edition Blu-Rays for yourself.

It’s been a forty year journey of 7000 miles from Hokkaido to California and back, but if the gods of Kamuinupuri are with us and the Kamui wind is at our backs, maybe this time Dagger Of Kamui can finally find the audience it deserves, an audience of viewers able to enjoy both preposterous historical yarns and high-definition hallucinogenic hypno-shinobi, all in the same movie. I can’t be the only one!

-Dave Merrill

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