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.

Monster Multimedia: Ambassador Magma/The Space Giants

Ambassador Magma (dubbed The Space Giants in North America) is notable for two reasons: first, it was a show with a very similar premise to Ultraman (alien superhero fights giant monsters) that premiered six days before it, and as I learned from August Ragone’s Eiji Tsuburaya: Master of Monsters, the producers of Ultraman ended up airing a “live” special broadcast just to avoid having their thunder stolen; second, it was based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka—so yes, we’re back in Tezuka Town, albeit in a very different form than last time. The series, made by P Productions (who would go on to create the oddly influential Spectreman in the early seventies, which helped spark a second “monster boom”, as well as a series of tokusatsu shows about a lion man), received a respectable fifty-two episode run, and despite living in the shadow of Ultraman, had a decent following in Japan and even in its syndicated run in North America.

Bagi, The Monster of Mighty Nature (1984)

The one thing that I find invariably fascinating whenever I take in the work of Osamu “God of Manga” Tezuka (one of the most respected and influential cartoonists of all time, if you didn’t know) is that it always comes off as his work, no matter what the subject matter is. He was inspired by the style of Disney and other American cartoons, adapted it to his own ends (he literally wrote the book on making comics), and in his five-decade-long career jumped from genre to genre (inventing a few along the way) and audience to audience (making kids comics and comics for adults, back and forth)—but his creations still maintained all the very cartoony elements that he utilized in, say, Astro Boy in the fifties and sixties. Look at most of his “serious” comics or animation projects (which includes philosophical Sci-Fi and fantasy, historical fiction, psychological thrillers, and erotica), you’ll still find highly exaggerated or cute characters in major recurring roles, or comical sequences right out of a Twenties Mickey Mouse short—it completely boggles the tone, but at the same time I have to admire the commitment. Tezuka wants to make stories with very important or personal themes (and he succeeds at just as much as he fails, given his voluminous output), but he never wants them to not be cartoons at their heart.