Kokusai Movie International Eiga-Sha Corp. 1

Movie International Corporation theme song CD

It’s hard to say when I first encountered Kokusai Eiga-sha, or Movie International Co., Ltd.  It might have been a Sunday afternoon cartoon in a non-peak time slot on a niche cable network. Or it might have been a super robot toy incongruously racked in a tacky mall gift shop.  As an anime studio, Kokusai Eiga-sha (or “MIC") produced a lot of mid-level stuff and a few cult favorites, never getting that big breakout hit but never descending to the level of, say, a Knack Studio.  With something like sixteen different anime TV series produced in the midst of the “anime boom”, MIC impacted both the Japanese anime scene and the nascent American anime fandom – maybe in an indirect, roundabout way, but their shows still resonate with fans.

Movie International letterhead courtesy Anime Nikansya

Like many things, you could blame America’s initial MIC exposure on evangelist and 700 Club host Pat Robertson. His CBN Cable network broadcast several anime series in the early 1980s, among them a weirdly-dubbed version of MIC’s HONEY HONEY. On the other hand, and at the complete opposite end of the moral spectrum, perhaps my first MIC glimpse was this GINGA REPPU BAXINGER toy purchased at the local Spencer’s Gifts with precious allowance money and a desperate hunger to learn more of the culture that brought us SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO and BATTLE OF THE PLANETS.

thank you, toy buyer for Spencer's Gifts

But what was this Movie International Corporation, this Kokusai Eiga-Sha?  MIC was an animation production house formed in 1979 by former Nikkatsu exec Shigeo Tsubota. MIC’s business strategy was to handle production and planning, license anime titles, outsource the actual animation production to other studios and subcontractors, and reap the benefits of providing content to an anime-starved Japanese and international public.   Their rise and fall coincided almost exactly with the fortunes of the anime industry as a whole, buoyed by the “anime boom” of the late 1970s and then laid low by that same boom’s subsequent bust.

some kind of drug metaphor I think

MIC’s first TV series were coproductions with Ashi Production (later Production Reed). KUJIRA NO JOSEPHINA, or “Josephina the Whale”, was a 1979 version of the children’s story by Jose Maria Sanchez Silva about a young boy who uses his imagination to bring his toy whale to life and help him be less insecure. Works as well as a blanket, I guess. This was followed in 1980 by their goofy comedy version of Don Quixote, ZUKKOKE KNIGHT DON DE LA MANCHA, followed by an anime version of the popular MONCHICHI toys, the comedy robot-kid MECHAKKO DOTAKON,  and SPACE WARRIOR BALDIOS, a very 1980 ecological disaster co-produced super robot series. MIC also produced their own version of LITTLE WOMEN, calling theirs FOUR SISTERS OF YOUNG GRASS. 

watching this won't get you out of having to write that book report

In 1981 MIC would serve up their own special take on the super robot genre with a distinctive show that became their first fan favorite. GINGA SENPU BRYGER (aka Galaxy Cyclone Braiger, Cosmo Whirlwind Brygar, Cosmo Ranger J-9, etc) wasn’t your little brother’s space robot anime series – it starred desperate outlaws, living by their own code in a corrupt solar system full of crime and vice. Creator Yu Yamamoto combined the antihero aesthetic of Peckinpah’s WILD BUNCH with the brand name of the top-of-the-line Sony VCR (J-9), got K. Kazuo to design our heroes, gave it an amazing OP sequence animated by Yoshinori “You” Kanada, and set it all to a driving rock beat by Masayuki Yamamoto. 

Equal parts Western, SF space opera, and biker movie, BRYGER is set in the year 2111 where a colonized Solar System and a weak central government are paralyzed by criminal Mafias known as “Connections. In the J-west section of the Asteroid Belt, Issac “the Razor” Godonov has used both his immense wealth and his amazing scientific knowledge to create a secret asteroid base for his J9 Cosmo Rangers team of mercenaries – Kido “Blaster Kid” Jotaro, Steve “Speedy” Bowie, and Machiko “Angel Omachi” Valencia. For a price they’ll solve any problem you might have, and if it requires the use of their combining spaceship-car-super robot Bryger, so much the better!

BRYGER easily found a small but devoted audience. The lack of kid sidekicks, funny animals, or most of the other super robot tropes left plenty of room for BRYGER’s cast to act like adults; drinking, smoking, gambling, fistfighting, enjoying casual sex, and generally not giving a rat’s ass about most of the societal pressures that would plague the younger, less experienced heroes in its robot anime contemporaries like, say, GUNDAM or GOD MARS.

the Cosmo Rangers

But here’s the thing with BRYGER and other MIC series. Once the episode starts, you realize that as great as the opening credits look and as kick-ass as the theme song is, the show itself fails to live up to the promise, that BRYGER’s animation reach exceeds its animation grasp. And that’s OK, Kanada has to sleep sometime, but the show’s stiff animation and simplistic mechanical design make it feel like a holdover from the 70s, like the J-9 team invaded a much cheaper show. However, by the time BRYGER’s climax rolls around and Khamen Khamen’s evil plan to blow up Jupiter has been dealt with, you’ve become acclimated to poorly-animated thugs on space scooters and the goofy, dashed-off look of the Connection robots Bryger casually destroys.  You’re left with fond memories of the J-9 team and that “Khamen Khamen” song echoing throughout the ruins of the Solar System.

the charming Honey Honey

The show spawned a decent amount of toyage from sponsor Takatoku Toys, and on the whole was successful enough for MIC to get right to work on their next J-9 series.  But first they’d take a shoujo manga detour with THE WONDERFUL ADVENTURES OF HONEY HONEY (Honey Honey no Suteki na Bouken). This 29 episode series followed the adventures of orphan Honey Honey and her cat Lily as they are chased through Europe and around the world by Princess Flora of Austria and her four suitors while the mysterious thief Phoenix plots and plans. Set in the early part of the 20^th century, HONEY HONEY is based on the 60s shoujo manga by Hideko “Fire” Mizuno, former resident of Tezuka’s “Tokiwa” apartment house and pioneering manga artist. Broadcast on CBN cable a few years later, HONEY HONEY caught the eye of many an American anime fan, and its foreign broadcasts put the “International” in MIC at last.  

that is one scared kitty

Based on a 60s manga, the show has a definite 60s feel, particularly in the early episodes, and the clunky MIC-farmed animation doesn’t help things. Episode 22 (“Snowbound Castle”) is memorable with its slicked-up frame rates and fleshed out character designs, but it’s the exception, not the rule.  Luckily, HONEY HONEY’s charm gets us past the stiff animation. It’s hard to nitpick a show that has characters rescued by UFOs, drops Honey Honey into feudal Japan via flying carpet, and ends with a King Kong riff complete with World Trade Center. 

MIC would return to the super robot well in 1982 with MAKYOUDENSETSU ACROBUNCH, or “Legend Of Hidden Places Acrobunch”, another well-designed, offbeat SF robot drama that sold a few toys, got a few fans, failed to get past 24 episodes. The story? It was explained to me back in the day as “In the future, Indiana Jones has a family and a giant robot, and they travel the world seeking archeological treasure and battling monsters”, which as a synopsis works as well as anything I guess. 

  

The Rando family versus Emperor Delos

Tatsuya Rando, millionaire sea farmer and archeologist, retires to spend the rest of his life seeking the hidden treasure of “Quashica”, the fantastic legacy of an ancient super civilization that existed on Earth millions of years ago. To this end he’s built the Acrobunch, a mobile complete living environment with sleeping quarters, medical facilities, and all the comforts of home that happens to transform into a super combination fighting robot.  Unwilling to take over the family business, his children Hiro (the cool one), Ryu (the boring one), Jun (the kid), and the twin girls Miki (girly-girl) and Reika (tomboy) come along for the ride.  Trouble is, the underground Goblin empire wants Quashica too. Can Acrobunch find the treasure and save the world?

Reika and Hiro, the two stars of this show. No I don't care what anybody else says

With a great theme song sung by Yukio Yamagata and a typically terrific Kanada-animated OP full of Stonehenge, Nasca, and other Von Daniken ancient astronaut kook-science landmarks, ACROBUNCH promises great things. This time the show lives up to the hype and delivers zippy, action-packed episodes as dreamy megane-otoko Hiro’s doomed romance with Goblin princess Shiira colors their showdown with Delos, the Goblin King, whose beard and devil horns and shepherd’s crook make him disturbingly close to various medieval horned depictions of Moses. Kanada protégé Mutsumi “Leda Fantastic Adventure Of Yohko” Inomata keeps things zippy right up until the series climax, which defies description. No, seriously.

 

MIC would take a different mythological tack with LITTLE POLLON (Ochamegami Monogatari Korokoro Poron), the charming tale of the daughter of Sun God Apollo and her wacky adventures among the Greek pantheon. The original manga, “Pollon Of Olympus,” ran in PRINCESS and was one of many by Hideo Azuma, who’s known for being the, uh, “father of lolicon”. 

little Pollon and friend

 His manga career ranges from gag detective (“Eito Bito”) to quintuplet comedy (“Futari Go Nin”) to sex comedy (“Scrap Student”, “Night Angel”) to autobiographical manga about abandoning his punishing workload for alcoholism, homelessness, and employment as a gas pipe fitter (“Disappearance Diary”), but POLLON’s cutesy fun belies her creator’s darker side. From May of ’82 until March of ’83, 46 episodes of goofy god adventures – Apollo is a lazy drunk, Eros is an ugly kid, Poseidon can’t swim – were a hit on Fuji-TV in Japan and in foreign markets also, particularly Italy.  The simple, cute style was clearly a success for MIC and their followup was another Azuma manga, NANAKO SOS.

it's Supergirl, I mean Nanako! I'll tell you what's super-crazy, is Yotsuya's hair

Nanako was a normal high school girl until an experiment by fellow high school student and part-time mad scientist Yotsuya gives her super powers.  Unfortunately it also gives her amnesia!  Never one to pass up a profitable opportunity, Yotsuya makes a deal with Nanako – if she’ll help him with his detective agency, he’ll use all his scientific knowledge to bring her memory back!  Aided by assistant Iidabashi and robots Convenience Angel 7 and Convenience Angel 11, Yotsuya gets Nanako involved in one crazy scheme after another. However, through it all, Nanako retains her sunny personality and can-do attitude. NANAKO SOS lasted a respectable 39 episodes from April to December of 1983.

Next: the return of J-9, a Mission: Outer Space, and more!

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let's visit Toei

It’s been quiet here at Let’s Anime World HQ. Actually that’s a lie. It’s been really busy, which is why there haven’t been any new Let’s Anime columns for a bit. What have we been up to?  Well, we went to Tokyo last month, and that’ll take up a bit of your column-writing time right there.

What did we do?  We went to Asakusa, to Ekoda to see a band belt out the theme to “Battle Fever J” and “Spiderman”, to Nakano Broadway, to Akihabara, to funky Shimokitazawa and theme-park consumerist Odaiba. We also went to Oizumi Gakuen, home of Toei Animation and their Toei Gallery. 

How you get there: take the train to Oizumi Gakuen, hang a right out of the station, and head up the street past the Galaxy Express lampposts.  After a few blocks and a lot of sweating (it’s summer) turn left onto Toei Street.  When you see the big studios on your left, look to your right and there it is.

Get your pass from the guard at the booth and you’re in!

The Toei Gallery is not a studio tour; if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of how Japanese cartoons are produced you might be better off visiting the Suginami Animation Museum. However, if you’re interested in the hundreds and hundreds of characters and properties Toei has brought to life via animation, then the Gallery is where you ought to be. 

UFO'S ARE REAL!

There’s a large room filled with chronologically-arranged displays of all of Toei’s films and television series, from KEN THE WOLF BOY right through to their 70s UFO ‘documentary’ to GALAXY EXPRESS, FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, SAINT SEIYA, SAILOR MOON and PRETTY CURE. Also there’s a huge Danguard Ace statue. 

Above you, cutouts of super robots and super robot pilots are watching. 

Television sets screen an endless loop of TV opening credits, giant PRETTY CURE cutouts enchant the little girl patrons, and there's a general overwhelming sense of truly being in the belly of the Toei beast. One case displays maquettes of anime characters, built to assist the artists with a 3D model. It’s fascinating to see the proportions and stylistic exaggerations of 1960s anime brought to three-dimensional life. 

Another room features merchandise based on Toei characters.  Arale from Dr. Slump is encased in a glass pillar, Captain Harlock’s Cosmo-Gun rests on a shelf, and hundreds of thousands of yen worth of DVD box sets are trapped behind glass.

HI YO YO LEMME OUTTA HERE

Garage-kit renditions of popular and obscure Toei characters inhabit one exhibit, from the heavy hitters right on down to monsters from 30,000 MILES BENEATH THE SEA and the evil doll from the final episode of the 1968 CYBORG 009 series. 

On your way out of the building, peek through the door into the office and you can see even more Toei-branded merchandise, including this CANDY CANDY poster. 

Is it worth the hike?  It definitely is for anyone who grew up watching Toei’s animation on television as a child, as I did. Not only do you get to see your childhood TV heroes brought to gigantic life, but to see them in pop-culture context next to the fifty other super robot shows and the Manga Matsuri festival screenings and the theatrical feature films is a revelatory experience. Also, some of the exhibits are charmingly translated. 

And when you get back to the station, enjoy a soft drink from the vending machine painted to resemble the friendly conductor from GALAXY EXPRESS 999!

-Dave Merrill

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five years of let's anime

Wow, has it really been five years since I started this blog? I guess it has. How time flies.

 note #1's cover, it's the first and last time I'd draw many of those characters.

Let's Anime started off as a print zine in 1991 - we'd just inaugurated the latest incarnation of our local anime club and it needed a fanzine because it was the 90s and fanzines were "in". I cobbled together a package of leftover fan art from previous anime newsletters and articles from anywhere I could find them, tied it all together with a completely bogus synopsis of Nadia Secret Of Blue Water, and before I knew it, there I was, back in Kinkos again. 

#3 had a great Mazinger Z article, #4 had that swell Prince Planet cover

The fanzine lasted 12 issues right through the 90s, from magazine-size to folded half-page size, from cut and paste with scissors to PageMaker and Photoshop. As the new millennium dawned, both my personal exhaustion and the advent of new digital networks of anime-news-delivery-systems combined to render Let's Anime more trouble than it was worth. I enjoyed producing it at the time, but there are many things about the fanzine days I do not miss, like selling the things from behind tables at anime cons, copy-editing submissions delivered in teeny tiny handwriting on blue-lined notebook paper, the physical production of the zines themselves made even more difficult by the lack of anything resembling a budget. I don't miss any of those things.

Let's Anime wasn't always "classic" - Tekkaman Blade was new when Steve Harrison wrote about it. Kinda new, anyway. #6 was a big Matsumoto issue!

A few years later, there it was again, that old "let's write about Japanese cartoons" itch.  Mike Toole's Anime Jump site, which had been the outlet for most of my anime writing for most of the 00s, was in hibernation. I'd retired from chairing Anime Weekend Atlanta and had a bit more free time. And of course I still had the impulse that all fans share to some degree, the desire to share this crazy cool stuff with the rest of the world. Good writing about the classic Japanese animation -you know, the stuff from the 60s to the 80s that inspired fans to start anime fandom in the first place - was thin on the ground. In fact it may very well still be thin on the ground. My writing isn't so good sometimes. But anyway, that was my angle and I'm stickin' with it. 

#7 might be my favorite cover. #8 flirts with modernity via Dragonball and Sailor Moon!

So here we are now, five years since that first, tentative blog post in July of 2007. I don't know about you guys, but for me it's been a definite learning experience.  Learning all the basic blog things like uploading photos, linking, templates, hosting sites, sidebars, and then learning it all over again every time somebody updates their software, that's a given. But the immediacy of blogging to an audience of untold thousands has been, uh, stimulating in ways I never expected. Quick on the trigger my audience is, ready with corrections if I ever get a name or a release date wrong or fudge the title of a publisher. And as annoying as it can be, the scrutiny has taught dumb ol' me to do the basic research, to double check my work, to make sure it's right before it is sent off into the wider world.  

Naturally, issue 9 featured a big Cyborg 009 article.

It might be a cliche to say "the more you learn, the more you realize how much more there is to learn", but it's true - the smarty-pants know-it-all assurance I had earlier has been replaced by the awe, if not the naked fear, of the vast universe of knowledge still lying untouched by me, even in a field as narrow and seemingly inconsequential as thirty-year old cartoons from Japan.  There is so much I don't know, so many people out there with more data and better language skills and cooler toys (and more free time). It's humbling.

#10 was our first half-size issue, with a grab-bag of articles and a weird Devilman collage on the back.

However, as unworthy or irked as I sometimes feel, I'm still constantly impressed at the reach a simple blog can get, at how much more powerful a tool this is. A single issue of the print Let's Anime never had a press run of more than a couple hundred, but thousands and thousands of people around the world have read this blog, and in the future will continue to be sent this way via search engines and links. A piece I wrote on, say, Honey Honey or Devilman will be read and enjoyed years after the fact, instead of lying in a box in the closet waiting for the inevitable rendezvous with the recycle bin.

Forward into the past with #11's look at 1960s anime and #12's focus on Space Giants and more than a year between issues. Ugh.

Writing this blog has put me in touch with a whole circle of anime fans that otherwise I'd never have met - you can see some of them in the links on the side there - and it's also put me back in touch with friends from years ago. The community we have now is bigger, stronger, and faster than anything we had back in the 90s, with the exception of two or three days there when we were all trapped in the same hotel in Dallas during a power outage.  The print days sometimes felt like isolated wilderness outposts swapping smoke signals - today's anime community is almost the opposite, a noisy neighborhood full of all kinds of characters, all expressing themselves, sometimes loudly. If I can add to the din every once in a while, that's all I ask. 

We're off for a little vacation for the next couple of weeks, but Let's Anime will return! Stay tuned!

youth culture killed my dog(s)

  

Shrieking and honking its way out of the cough-syrup nightmares of a nation of feverish preadolescents, HELLHOUND LINER 0011 TRANSFORM! (Maken Liner-0011 Henshin Seyo!) is, barring my ignorance of an entire genre of movies about evil space amoeba-squids sending monster robot bugs to smash an Earth defended by children in giant space helmets and rocket-firing submachine guns aided by talking cybernetic pet dogs who occasionally transform into spaceship-combining super dog robots, a unique film experience.

                             

Americans of a certain age will remember our 70s cartoons; suffocated by emasculated parent-approved blandness, full of funny dogs and singing teenagers solving mysteries, interrupted with public service announcements by has-been actors eager to work off their drunk driving charges. This was a reaction to the acid rock psychedelic-biker-Manson Family grindhouse insanity that was creeping into our culture courtesy The Hippies, to be fought at every turn by the Silent Majority and their henchmen at Action for Children's Television. Japan had their own anti-cartoon crusaders, legions of kendo moms and PTAs agitating against Go Nagai's Shameless School and other national disgraces. 

But while American producers knuckled under and wimped out, Japan doubled down on the wild, filling their 1970s kidvid with outlandish action-adventure quivering with barely repressed raw power. That's where HELLHOUND LINER 0011 comes in, and keep in mind this isn't some kind of weird desperate failure produced by some forgettable fly-by-night outfit. It's from Toei, the Walt Disney of the Orient, the industry leader in fantastical fantasy films for children, hosts of their popular Manga Matsuri summertime children's film festival, which in July of ’72 gave Japan's kids this story of friendly transforming robot dogs and their orphaned master seeking vengeance upon an entire race of deformed space devils. 

HELLHOUND LINER 0011 TRANSFORM!, or as Toei would like you to know it, “Go Get Them 0011”, has a solid anime pedigree with direction by Takeshi (Captain Harlock, Great Mazinger, Grendizer) Tamiya and a script by Tsuji Masaki and Toei legend Yugo "Little Prince And The 8-Headed Dragon" Serikawa. However, it's Hiroshi Sasagawa whose imagination powers HELLHOUND LINER - the film is based on his 1963 Shonen King serial "Hellhound Goro", and Sasagawa would go on to a long and fruitful career at Tatsunoko, where he'd give TIME BOKAN its sexy Doronjo-sama and let CASSHAN's transforming robot-dog-jetplane Frenda out of the robot-dog-jetplane kennel.

               

Sasagawa's original Maken Goro manga

The theater lights dim, the Manga Matsuri kids dial the popcorn-throwing back a notch. HELLHOUND LINER 0011 starts, and immediately you're assaulted by the soundtrack, deeply painful atonal free-form jazz, like Miles Davis, an irritable Miles who won't quit stepping on the goose that somehow got into his studio. There's all sorts of tinkly percussion, echoey beatnik scat vocals, reverb'd keyboards and a beefy sax that is simply drilling a hole into your skull. As the background for a children's cartoon, this is nothing less than a sneak attack. One imagines parents enduring twenty or thirty seconds of this before simply walking out of the theater and abandoning little Saburo to the mercy of whatever creepy deviant is stalking children in Tokyo this week.    

Parents, this is pretty much your cue to get out. Just get out.

As the credits roll we're treated to amazingly detailed cutaway diagrams of the inner workings of the various horrifying monsters that will soon be smashing civilization as we know it. "Civilization" for this picture is represented by Mid-Century Modern dome-parabola architecture, shining white concrete, enormous roads full of pointy space cars, and moving sidewalks to get our Citizens Of The Future from school to home and back again. Our hero Tsutomu Hayashi is a normal latchkey kid whose dad is a scientist with a little moustache and whose mom isn't around and may never have existed. Neighborhood kids make fun of Tsutomu because his dad predicts Earth is threatened by space aliens. And I don't blame them, that's pretty crazy. But it's OK because Tsutomu doesn't need human friends, his pals are four stray dogs. Don't you wish you had dogs this great? Three dogs like the puppies Ace, Jack, and Joker, and their mother Queen, who would stand by you no matter what? Sure you do.

                   

As it happens Tsutomu will have the last laugh on the skeptics. Earth is, in fact, invaded by space aliens from the Planet Devil. They have a complicated multi-faceted approach to maximizing their Earth-invasion effectiveness while thinking outside the box in synergizing their impactful expectation-managing, involving creepy tentacle monsters, giant electro-mechanical insect demons, and legions of what appear to be cat-faced amoeba bugs, all led by bulb-headed freak Golgoth. 

The first step in any Earth invasion? Kill all the scientists, as shown in a pre-title sequence where hapless weathermen are tentacle-violated. Professor Hayashi, noted anti-alien speaker, is the next target. The aliens "plant" a bomb disguised as a cactus (in a tasteful modernist crystal plant pot) inside the Hayashi home, in the hope that home decor accouterments will go unnoticed in a woman-free household. However, our intrepid dog-mom Queen somehow knows the difference between an alien bomb and real plants, and, along with her three puppies, snatches the cactus grenade in her jaws and escapes to the woods just in time to be vaporized in a giant explosion. A heartbroken Tsutomu has lost his only friends. Or has he? 

Soon it's Tsutomu's birthday and Junior is shocked. Queen and progeny are safe and sound! Absent Dad explains via videophone; even though their bodies were destroyed in the explosion, he was able to save their canine brains and implant them successfully into some dog-robot bodies, each with its own super dog-robot-body super power. Tsutomu gets a giant space helmet able to translate barks into human speech. Happy birthday!  

It's during this magical videophone birthday present moment that the aliens attack Dad in his research center, and Tsutomu and his dog friends must embody the film's title and transform into Hellhound Liner 0011!

                      

sure, why not

As hideous monsters emerge to destroy humanity, HELLHOUND LINER 0011 shifts into high gear. Tsutomu helmets up and his canine cyborg commandos transform into a super jet to invade the secret Devil sanctuary inside an erupting Mt. Fuji and destroy Stage One of the Devil plan. Earth's cities are engulfed in a horrifying nightmare as giant praying mantis monster Mandaras destroys bullet trains with his Super Sonic Knife and jet planes are sliced in half with his Rainbow Ray. And if that wasn't bad enough, Mandaras' swollen forearms burst open and birth thousands of disgusting metal-destroying ticks, which devour the Tokyo Tower.

                

hideous monsters and their hollow hideous monster planet

Golgoroth helpfully informs Earth of their declaration of war via an experimental psychedelic short film containing one word, the kanji for "death", dripping with blood (subtle!). As the Devil Planet rains neutron bombs down on Earth, they prepare their ultimate plan - to use their Moon Bomb to shatter Luna and smash its remnants into our planet, killing everybody and ruining Earth for centuries. How will this benefit the Devil Planet? Who knows? They're devils! And as our world faces a desperate crisis Prof. Hayashi succumbs to his injuries, leaving Tsutomu alone with only cyborg dogs for company.

                 

Though the Earth is set to launch their space fleet in a massive military assault, Tsutomu and Liner attack first and invade Planet Devil itself, unleashing an orgy of robot-dog ray-gun destruction on the space monsters. Ace uses his eye beam, Jack his fire breath, and Joker transforms into whatever comedy relief is necessary, while Tsutomu uses his father's final gift, an automatic ray gun that also fires rockets. They're opposed by legions of Devilians and the monsters Mandaras and Escargon, a giant acid-spitting snail with way more mouths than is necessary or tasteful. But together Tsutomu and the dog-cyborgs overcome all the monsters and stop Golgoth's Moon Bomb with less than one second to spare.

                  

HELLHOUND LINER 0011 comes out of a thriving field of science-fictional juvenile adventure - it shares a lot of thematic DNA with Toei's 1970 Manga Matsuri flick 30,000 MILES UNDER THE SEA, which also features a young boy and his fairly implausible pet fighting giant monsters. 0011, however, raises the stakes at every opportunity. You’ll see a super mechanical fighting beetle shoot its head off and destroy a highway overpass, a talking dog with the voice of CYBORG 009's 007 (Machiko Soga!!) turn into a sexy centaur and wink at a 10 year old boy, the same boy who later dons a space suit to shoot rockets at a giant slug whose abdomen is lined with fanged jaws and whose eye-stalks shoot dripping acid, all accompanied by the piercing soundtrack by Takeo Yamashita, who wrote the score for the game show “I Crush The Perfect Crime Detective.”

                   

Remember these are ordinary dog brains. This is what dogs think about, apparently

Of course they can’t spend a lot of time on subtle nuance in a fifty minute film designed for a theater full of short-attention-span kids out on summer break and stuffed with candy. Like Toei's later Manga Matsuri shorts starring Mazinger Z, Devilman, Getta Robo, Grandizer, Great Mazinger, and various combinations thereof, the film throws us into the deep end and lets us drown in the sea of Macrodons and Mandarases. However, unlike a movie starring Mazinger Z or Kamen Rider, we have no idea who Hellhound Liner 0011 is, and we'll never see those characters again. 0011 is a one-off, a instantly dated snapshot of what Toei thought would entertain children for fifty minutes in between shorts starring Barom-1 and Chappy The Witch. No consideration was given to marketing, no focus group testing, no corporate long-term plans hampered the journey of this film from the subconscious to the movie screen.

                                  

original Manga Matsuri posters for '72

As such, perhaps it gives us a unique look inside the surging, turbulent, media-assaulted psyche of the Japanese youth of 1972. Frightened of giant monsters and aliens and absent parents, wishing for friends and pets and birthdays, fascinated by rockets and space travel, desperately wanting a rocket-firing ray-gun of their very own. Which begs the question, do we want these things because we see them in these sorts of movies, or are things like this put in movies because they know what kids want to see? Maybe a little of both is at play here. I only know one thing for sure; one of those rocket-guns would. be. SWEET. 

Special thanks and a tip of the Let’s Anime hat to Bluefixer for making this available!

-Dave Merrill

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fake bacon and electronic music hotline 2012

Remember when you were a kid and all you wanted was some Star Wars toys, and then Christmas came around and what Santa brought wasn't official Star Wars stuff, but some kind of off-brand something that vaguely resembled Star Wars only not closely enough for legal action? Or when you wanted that Beatles record and what you got was "The Beetle Beat" by studio musicians pretending to be Merseyside club rockers? 

The disappointment of youth becomes the fascination of adulthood as we look back on these knockoffs with amusement and fondness. The West wasn't the only arbitrary geographic region to have its merchandising afflicted with items vaguely similar to other, more popular properties. Japan itself had a wonderful time selling almost-Kamen Riders and quasi-Ultramen and not-quite-Mazinger Zs to kids who didn't know any better and adults that didn't care one way or another, here's your thing, now shut up for five minutes. Let's take a look at two of 'em! 

I bought this children's rice bowl at a Japanese grocery store, entranced by its perfection of shape, its lustrous sheen, and its fake Transformers robot characters. It's seen lots of use mixing watercolors, acrylics, and ink washes in my enthusiastic if not quite professional artistic career; if it had been used as originally intended it would undoubtedly have been accidentally smashed on a kitchen floor long before now. 

The best part - well, apart from the legend "Batul V"-  is this illustration of the human characters, which seems to be a snapshot taken when Random Anime Hero met a girl cosplaying as Amu Fanneria from HEAVY METAL L.GAIM. On the other hand that guy may very well be a badly drawn, not-legally-actionable Daba Myroad. Sure, why not. 

As a huge hit prominently featuring a public-domain historical object, SPACE BATTLESHIP YAMATO inspired a wide variety of really blatant knockoffs, many of which are highlighted at the Starblazers.com website. Our subject here was purchased under the mistaken impression that it was official Yamato merchandise, a misapprehension no doubt shared by countless Japanese parents, to the chagrin of their kit-building, obsessive- compulsive-disorder suffering progeny. 

Part of the "Space Animation Series No. 1" collection from Tokyo Marui, the box art for this model kit promises to take you on a hundred-thousand light year journey to battle evil from beyond the stars, along with your vaguely Matsumoto-esque heroes. Other kits in the series include the Cosmo Shark, the Battle Tiger, and the Tiger Zero. 

Upon opening the box you're greeted with thirty-year old rubber bands and an ancient tube of model glue, protected by the visage of the no doubt evil Emperor Debiru, or as we like to call him, "Little Debiru". 

Basically the Comet Empire's Zordar with a copyright-defying beard, Emperor Devil here comes with his own little stand so you can prop him up like a paper doll in front of your completed Cosmo Warp kit. Tokyo Marui is now a world-reknowned manufacturer of airsoft guns, so you can now have the pleasure of shooting one Tokyo Marui product with another Tokyo Marui product. And so, the great circle of knockoff merchandising life continues.