and now back to our long distance dedication

Hello, this is Casey Kasem, back from the beyond to count down the 10 biggest classic-anime hits in the 50 states. And now for our long distance dedication. Here's one we can all understand, whether we have kids or pets or neither. It's the top ten Western pop music songs that were either written about anime characters, or are covers of anime theme songs, or in some way became connected to classic anime. Does that make any sense, that Japanese cartoons were enough of a part of the pop culture landscape to inspire musicians for decades? It does to me. Is Don on the phone? And I also want to know what happened to the pictures I was supposed to see this week! I want someone to use his freaking brain to not come out of a gosh-darned record that is, uh, that is up-tempo and I gotta talk about a... um... uh... and now, on with the countdown. Here's number ten.

Modern power pop troubadour Matthew Sweet spent time in Athens GA playing in a band that also featured Michael Stipe's sister before recording his debut solo LP, which failed to impact the music scene. Its followup also fizzled. It took a rock retooling, an embrace of his inner fanboy, and a couple of eye-catching videos to put Sweet on the charts, and one of the hits from his third album 'Girlfriend' was this tune, "I've Been Waiting". The song was paired to visuals from the first Urusei Yatsura film "Only You" to create a unique music video experience, even among the outlandish landscape of music videos.

As The Buggles, new wave bad boys Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes inadvertently turned the world on its ear when the Russell Mulcahy-directed music video for their song "Video Killed The Radio Star" gained fame as the first ever video broadcast on the nascent cable channel MTV. They'd later be picked to form a short lived iteration of prog rock legends Yes, which in the early 80s would doom The Buggles as a creative entity. Horn would go on to produce ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and The Art Of Noise, while Downes would leave Yes to form prog-rock supergroup Asia with members of ELP and King Crimson. However we can look back fondly at The Buggles' first album, which featured sharp, tightly produced nervous New Wave hits like this song, "Astro Boy (And The Proles On Parade)" Does it have anything to do with the cartoon Astro Boy? You decide.

Moving on to number 8 in our countdown, SoCal punkers The Dickies gave the hardcore scene a swift, humorous kick in the pants with their speedy, goofy, un-serious brand of aggressive punk rock. This led to The Dickies being featured as the first punk band to make an appearance on American network television (on C.P.O. Sharkey) and the first punk band to have a top ten single that was a cover of the theme song to a TV show starring people in giant dog outfits (with their cover of "Tra-la-la The Banana Splits Song").  Here The Dickies regale us with their excellent cover version of the theme to everybody's favorite show about the young boy and the super robot whose power is in his hands, Gigantor.

Here at number seven, we have the odd yet strangely fitting combination of a 1972 hit single from an Irish singer-songwriter and a single episode of a 1986 anime series. What interesting alignment of cosmic forces placed the Gilbert O'Sullivan single "Alone Again (Naturally)" as the opening credits song for episode 24 of Maison Ikkoku? Was the new theme song - "Suki sa" by Anzen Chitai - simply not ready yet? Or was there a slip-up or a prankster at master control? O'Sullivan's song would spend six weeks at the top of the charts in 1972 but in '86 it would flash past our TV screens in ninety seconds, and would never make it onto American releases of the the Maison Ikkoku TV series, for obvious copyright reasons.

Coming in at number six we have the three or four nice girls who make up the self-styled "dyke rock" combo Two Nice Girls, bridging the gap between radical lesbian feminism and sarcastic punk rock, delivering an Austin-style twang to their cover of the theme song to everybody's favorite cartoon about the Greatest Race Car Driver In The World, young Speed Racer. Keep an ear out for the new lyrics!

At the other end of the musical Speed Racer spectrum, here at number five we have Alpha Team's techno-dance track "Speed Racer", which is pretty much the early 1990s condensed into one four minute headache full of drum machines and samples, promoted by what may be the worst music video ever made.

Meanwhile back in the 1980s, LA new wavers the Gleaming Spires ask the musical question, "Are You Ready For The Sex Girls?"  Almost members of Sparks, the Gleaming Spires would have a KROQ hit with this tune. "Sex Girls" would wind up in Hollywood films and as music in one of Pinesalad Productions' parody dubs of television episodes of seminal 80s action anime Dirty Pair, bringing the Gleaming Spires to an audience far beyond the reach of Rodney Bingenheimer. Also, the Spire's music video for this song is an all-time classic.

"We never had a manager. We never had a booking agent. We never had a lawyer. We never took an advance from a record company. We booked our own tours, paid our own bills, made our own mistakes and never had anybody shield us from either the truth or the consequences. The results of that methodology speak for themselves: Nobody ever told us what to do, and nobody took any of our money." Steve Albini; Nirvana engineer, outspoken rock industry gadfly, techno-brutalist noise innovator, and all around tough as nails music legend, brings us to number three on our countdown as he and his band Big Black deliver a 1984 tune about the coolest character to ever walk through a 1960s Japanese cartoon about auto racing. I'm talking about Racer X, of course. Find out where he keeps his speed!

From the industrial punk of Big Black to the orchestral glam of Queen, we come to Queen guitarist Brian May and HIS mid-80s EP flirtation with Japanese pop culture, Star Fleet Project. Enchanted by the sci-fi adventures then enthralling his young son, May found himself fascinated by the show Star Fleet, the English version of the Japanese puppet adventure X-Bomber. This 1978 series starred puppet characters designed by manga legend Go Nagai and a space-opera aesthetic that lay somewhere between Leiji Matsumoto star-romance and George Lucas pyrotechnic adventure. What could be more natural than to recruit some accomplices, including Van Halen guitarist Eddie Van Halen, into the studio for some outer space puppet robot space cover-song action?  Nothing, that's what, and the result takes the number two slot our countdown- Brian May and the Star Fleet Project with "Star Fleet".

Of course, if you want to be like top animation director Hideaki Anno and sing along to the original Japanese X-Bomber theme song by BOWWOW, you're in good company.

And now we're down to the number one song in the United States, if the United States was one guy making an arbitrary list. The Number One song is... yes! It's Matthew Sweet back on the countdown with the title track from his 1991 album, Girlfriend. This driving, top-10 single brought Sweet to the
attention of the music industry, rock fans, and anime nerds alike with its brilliant production and clear power-pop alternative rock sound, which still plays as fresh as it did on college radio back in '91. Was the still-infant anime industry in North America boosted by seeing Space Adventure Cobra on MTV sixteen times a day, intriguing audiences with its mix of sexy ladies and Psycho Guns? I like to think so.

I'm Casey Kasem from Hollywood, and you've been listening to Classic Anime Top Ten. Join us each week at this same time as we count down the biggest hits in the classic anime world. Until next time, keep your feet on the ground, and keep reaching for the stars!

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ALWAYS DARING AND COURAGEOUS

(This article has been modified to include late-breaking STAR FLEET information.)

As an 80s teenager naturally I watched way too much MTV, wading through video after video, back when music videos were three-minute dramas with special effects, insane plots, action, adventure, girls in skimpy outfits, and explosions. Nowadays rock acts are too full of themselves to make videos where they turn into post-nuclear barbarians and/or fight zombies. Or maybe they realized that the budget for such nonsense comes right out of their pockets. At any rate, you turn on MTV in the early 80s and you don't know WHAT you're gonna see. Which is how I got to see STAR FLEET!

STAR FLEET is the English version of a Japanese live-action science fiction TV series from 1980 called X-BOMBER. This of course means it's a hodgepodge of concepts and visuals lifted from STAR WARS, SPACE CRUISER YAMATO, MESSAGE FROM SPACE, super robot cartoons, and other artistic triumphs. However, X-BOMBER breaks out of the lookalike pack with one simple method - it's a puppet show. The entire cast is THUNDERBIRDS-style puppets. This is not a Gerry Anderson show, so there's no effort to painstakingly mimic real life in 1/4th scale. This IS, however, a Go Nagai show, at least a show Go Nagai worked on, and therefore is vastly superior in every way, in that it has scary deformed villains, features crazy, nonsensical plot elements, and devotes a large part of its running time to a combination giant robot destroying things with fist and ray-gun.

The story, such as it is, involves the evil Imperial Master, the giant leader of a race of space-bugs and surgically-altered freaks. Imperial Master and his Imperial Alliance are looking for something called the F-Zero-One. He's decided the Earth has it, and sends Commander Makara out in a super space battleship to blow up Pluto in a friendly gesture. The Earth Defense Force, having never heard of the F-Zero-One, is not pleased by the destruction of Pluto, and in response sends out the X-Bomber to find out what the heck is going on. The X-Bomber is an experimental space cruiser with a crew of Scientist, Hero, Fat Guy, Mean Guy, and Funny Robot, later joined by Space Princess and Hairy Alien. When danger threatens, our heroes climb into three smaller spaceships that combine to form the super robot Dai-X!

As it turns out F-Zero-One has something to do with our beautiful space princess, who turns out to be from a destroyed planet, who may or may not have awesome cosmic powers, and has a mysterious connection to mysterious outer-space clipper ship called "The Skull", which shows up to save the X-Bomber whenever things look bleak. The 24 episodes of the series are filled with mighty struggles between fleets of model space warships, space mantises, Death Balls, the brainwashing of our heroes' old mentor, planets of evil trees and space hippies, and of course the final battle between the Imperial Master, played by a guy in an Imperial Master costume, and F-Zero-One, a 12-inch puppet.

It's easy to laugh at the idea of a dramatic science-fiction puppet series, but STAR FLEET winds up being a pretty entertaining show. The puppets all have a great anime-character look, the mecha design is great, the model work is excellent, and the Go Nagai influence means that the bad guys have wonderfully demented appearances. Commander Makara, striking a blow for Feminist Evil Space Commanders, not only dares to expose part of her cybernetic brain, but sports an eyepatch that is actually a little face that talks on occasion.

Puppets argue, wear camo in space, reveal cleavage, scream, die, and never take off their helmets, even in bed. There are lots of lasers, spaceships, explosions, exploding spaceship models, and models of spaceships that explode. The Dai-X is a guy in a giant robot suit, all distressed metal and flaking, battle-worn paint, who stomps around destroying bug tanks and smashing fighters with his giant metal fists. It's a really well designed robot that makes most of the Toei sentai robots look weak. In the climax of the series, they fly the Dai-X right into Makara's space battleship and start busting the whole place up in an orgy of destruction not seen since the final episode of GRANDIZER, and if that's not entertaining children's television I don't know what is.

Two years after its Japanese premiere, X-BOMBER found itself on ITV in England with English dubbing and a new title. STAR FLEET would also air in America on the Showtime cable channel, in two compilation films, "Thalian Space Wars" and "Space Quest For F-Zero-1". For years afterwards the show existed only in reruns and an 8-volume set of American VHS tapes.

The MTV connection? Well, Brian May, the talented QUEEN guitarist, has a son, and his son watched the hell out of STAR FLEET and soon Brian was too. Brian was struck by STAR FLEET's English theme song which was penned by Paul Bliss from the MOODY BLUES. Over a weekend with nothing much else going on, May called up some pals (including VAN HALEN's Eddie Van Halen) and they recorded their own bluesy rock version of the theme song. This was in turn released on an EP, which was this half-assed 1980s cross between a 45 single and a full LP album, usually used for extended dance remixes or stuff the label didn't know what else to do with but was contractually obligated to release. But anyway, Brian May took some footage from STAR FLEET and his own floating head and made a video, and it showed up on MTV, and it blew our minds! And now here I am writing about it years later.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the show, mostly because there's a really comprehensive site about STAR FLEET / X-BOMBER here. The show was produced in literally a big warehouse in Tokyo by Cosmo Productions, which apparently existed only to produce X-BOMBER, and it seems to have been a forgotten casualty of the SF boom of the 70s and 80s, drowned in the tide of media aimed at a science-fiction hungry world. Too anime-style for the Supermarionation fans, too puppety for the anime fans, it carved out its own genre and remains in a class all its own.

Interested in seeing the show for yourself? You no longer have to haunt YouTube or the stacks of VHS cluttering up your local thrift store, or suffer the indignity of purchasing region-free DVD sets of Star Fleet from foreigners on the other side of the planet. Discotek Media just announced that they're going to be releasing STAR FLEET on DVD here in North America! Slated for sometime late 2016 or early 2017, this set will have the English version, with other details to be announced. Check back with Discotek for more information as it occurs, and in the meantime, keep watching the skies for the evil Commander Makara and the mysterious F-Zero-One!

-Dave Merrill

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