Ambassador Magma (OVA Version)

Previously—as in almost five years ago—I wrote about the sixties tokusatsu adaptation of “God of Manga” Osamu Tezuka’s series Ambassador Magma, notable not only for its connection to a major cultural figure in Japan, but for being one of the early superhero-vs-kaiju television shows (premiering a week before Ultraman in 1966), and one that was also localized into English as The Space Giants. This is all to say that the Ambassador Magma namedoes hold some historical significance, which would explain why it received a second adaptation in 1993, four years after Tezuka’s death (conveniently, the dubbed versions of all thirteen episodes are available to view on the official Tezuka Youtube channel.) Released as a thirteen-episode OVA series by Bandai Visual and the Tezuka-founded Mushi Productions (among many credited animation studios) during the boom period for direct to video animation in Japan, the newer version of Magma adapts to its era and format much in the same way the previous adaptation did—I’m sure anyone who has sampled the kind of violent, genre-heavy serials aimed mostly at fans with disposable income will recognize the animation style and rhythms of this series as well. What’s interesting to me is seeing how Tezuka’s humanistic tendencies blend with that aesthetic—which in this case translates to a mix of the grotesque and the sentimental.

Project Metalbeast (1995)

Werewolf stories are one of those things that often thrive on having established mythology/rules—the fun for audiences become not just in seeing the specific execution of those rules (i.e. more and more elaborate transformation sequences), but also seeing that mythology used as a parallel or an allegory (i.e. adolescence), and sometimes in seeing those rules subverted. Project Metalbeast is an attempt at subversion, taking the supernatural angle of the werewolf story and messily grafting it to a Science Fiction-Horror concept, all in the name of creating a new kind of monster for the direct-to-video gorehounds of the mid-nineties. There is novelty in exchanging the typical curse plotlines and uncontrollable transformation with science-gone-wrong medical trauma and Alien style bases-under-siege and conspiracy backstories, but the question is whether the movie realizes that novelty or is simply okay putting out the bare minimum of horror schlock.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992)

This month sees the release of the oft-delayed Shin Ultraman, the movie re-imagining of the original series directed by Shin Godzilla effects director Shinji Higuchi (and produced by Shin Godzilla director Hideaki Anno.) That has inspired me to spend the month covering the most exciting of all topics: franchise extensions! Get ready to be synergized this May!

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue is not the prologue to Shin Kamen Rider, the movie directed by Anno scheduled for next year—in fact, it is technically a prologue to nothing. Produced in conjunction with the twentieth anniversary of the Kamen Rider franchise (although it didn’t release until early 1992, slightly after said anniversary), this is a direct-to-video reboot of the motorcycle-riding bug cyborg superhero created during one of the franchise’s quiet periods, the long stretch between new TV productions that also saw the release of the Ultraman vs. Kamen Rider special I wrote about. Being V-Cinema (although it apparently did get a theatrical run as well), the term for DTV stuff in Japan that has an interesting history of its own, and also being made in the early nineties obviously meant that this new Kamen Rider is very different from the ones that came before—taking on all the dark elements from Shotaro Ishinimori’s original concept (he seemed to be fascinated with the idea of people being transformed against their will) and making them the emphasis, changing its superhero tale into a full-on monster movie, a bloody and dour experience replete with body and psychological horror. This was apparently done to appeal to the now-adult Kamen Rider fans, although it’s difficult to say if it actually did—in any case, it’s a bizarre and fascinating exercise.

The Mighty Kong (1998)

Sometimes, even the logical explanation for something doesn’t seem enough—case in point, The Mighty Kong, an animated family musical film released direct to video in the late nineties, in the waning days of the VHS glut I wrote about in another post. I don’t remember ever seeing this video on store shelves around the time, but at some point during the Internet age I stumbled upon it and learned that it was the “cartoon version of King Kong that has a happy ending”, and that was about the tall and short of my knowledge. That description reminded me of the massively hacked up 1930 movie version of Moby Dick , where Ahab is a hero with a love interest and an evil brother, that a friend told me about.

Co-distributed by Warner Bros. (who, many years later, would distribute a bigger King Kong reboot, and will be providing us with the long-awaited new version of King Kong vs. Godzilla) and a company that went out of business a year after this released, the basic idea here would be to make a watered-down family-friendly version of the Kong story (a movie that was beloved by children for decades because it was not family-friendly), and because people are familiar with it, they’ll use it as an electric babysitter for their dumdum kids. On paper, that makes some kind of mercenary business sense—but the actual product raises even more questions. For starters, considering the obvious cash-in nature of this thing, which is an officially licensed version of the movie complete with all the proper character names and truncated but mostly accurate recreation of the original plot, why did they spend all the money necessary to not only get Dudley Moore on as a marquee voice, but also hired the Sherman Brothers (of Mary Poppins and a bunch of other classics) to write the songs? It’s almost as if they were serious about this project—but I can tell, after watching it, that they were most certainly not.

Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans (1995)

In this third of three extraterrestrial review subjects, we enter an entirely new realm: the glorified fan film, based on a popular Sci-Fi TV property. Wait, come back! There’s stuff to say here!

I’ve found myself in and out of the Doctor Who audience over the years: first discovering reruns of the Tom Baker episodes in high school, getting on board the revival when it began in 2005, jumping off board when I inevitably lose interest in watching a TV show on a regular basis, and then watching a few new ones here and there before stopping again. Last year, when Twitch was streaming episodes of the older series non-stop for a few months, I was tuning in regularly—there is still something deeply enjoyable about that run from the sixties to the eighties, even with its low budget nature and the weak stories that are peppered in throughout. What I think always appealed to me about the show is that it often had the feel of a classic Sci-Fi monster movie, combining aspects of the fifties stuff with the darker atmosphere of a Hammer movie—no show had a greater devotion to weird concepts and adorably ratty, but often imaginative!, creature costumes—with the serialization only adding to the charming old-fashionedness of it all. While the show’s time/space-hopping format meant it could be something completely different from week to week, Doctor Who still ended up becoming a motherlode for monster fans, and many of its alien menaces have since become iconic on their own.

Monster Multimedia: Serendipity

Lost childhood memories have a way of being dredged up in unexpected ways: in the book Abominable Science!, which is a skeptical analysis of cryptozoology that I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned a few times before, co-author Daniel Loxton has an aside in the section about the semi-legendary Canadian sea serpent Cadborosaurus where he mentions the children’s book Serendipity, which is about a pink sea serpent. He even contacted the author of that book and got a short quote from him. This reference was part of a larger point Loxton was making about how sea serpents, both fictional and “real”, are modelled after the horse-fish hybrids regularly depicted in Classical Greek art, but as soon as it was was mentioned, I was instead struck with familiarity, and thought to myself “Wow, someone else remembers that thing, too!” The wide world of monsters seemed a lot smaller in that moment.