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.
As King Kung Fuwas to Wichita, The Milpitas Monster is to the city of Milpitas, California (once a rural hub, now essentially a Silicon Valley suburb): a micro-budget, locally-made monster movie that acts as both an affectionate parody and time capsule, which is probably why it seems to still get played in theatres there on a yearly basis. It’s also a production that sometimes makes King Kung Fu look lavish by comparison—not surprising given that this was a project initiated by students and a photography teacher at Samuel Ayer High School (leading to the “Samuel Golden Ayer Productions” gag at the beginning of the movie), although the fact that it received some kind of national distribution is maybe a bit more surprising (it was even blessed with one of those VHS-only title changes, sometimes being called “The Mutant Beast.”) Needless to say, one does not watch a movie like The Milpitas Monster expecting a professionally-made object, but an odd piece of local colour—employing almost every civil servant and local business in the city if the credits are anything to go by—that is anchored by a fantasy plot based on local waste management issues. In eco-horror terms, it’s a broad issue placed in a very specific context.
There’s been plenty of harping on this webzone about the importance of gateway media when it comes to monster stuff especially—few of us would ever think to be interested in this stuff if not for something else, likely with a broader reach, introducing us to it. Much of the time, that gateway comes from a writer or artist calling back to something that was important to them, sharing that love across the years to another generation, and making the younger and less familiar members of the audience curious about what those things are. That could be a more straightforward informative work, or a homage with more modern sensibilities, or an affectionate parody. Let’s talk about that third one.
Plenty of kids watched The Simpsons, and it became a part of us all by pitching plenty of jokes at our younger level while also throwing in many adult-oriented ones that we could look back on and appreciate later. That’s especially true for reference-based jokes—there’s a number of direct nods to movie and television especially, with full scenes from Citizen Kane and The Godfather recreated on a regular basis (and even more hardcore callbacks to things like William Friedkin’s Sorcerer), down to the shot composition and staging. There’s so many that fans would be able to stitch together those jokes to make passing facsimiles of the movies themselves. This is a perfect example of gateway media: many people were probably introduced to these things through The Simpsons, and sometimes don’t even know it until they decide to check out the source material themselves.
This is especially true for the show’s annual Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials, a staple since the second season in 1990, each consisting of a collection of short segments that are more often than not directly lifted from famous horror stories. The Treehouse specials are an important venue not just for the writers and animators to shove in even more parodies, but also to allow them to go outside the (relatively) grounded nature of the show and really up the wackiness, and especially up the bloodshed in a winkingly grotesque manner—I can imagine getting to reshape and slaughter this series’ beloved cast over and over again is really fun for the people behind the scenes. Of course, if they’re doing parodies of scary stories, that’s going to include a fair share of classic monster stories as well (while the Treehouse segments would include more contemporary references, a good chunk of them from the first ten or so years were based on decades-old standards)—so, basically, the same things I write about on here. I mean, the mascots of these episodes are Kang and Kodos, a pair of classic Bug-Eyed Monsters that are a perfect Simpsons distillation of pulp Sci-Fi from the forties and fifties, so it’s clear that monster stuff is close to the hearts of the crew. For this post, I’ve singled out three segments from three different Treehouse of Horror episodes, all of which demonstrate how well-observed and inventive The Simpsons‘ comedy recreations of monster media could be.
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