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.

Spectreman

After all of these years of covering lesser-known tokusatsu series, we’ve finally come to Spectreman, which I’ve mentioned multiple times while discussing other topics—and in its way, it is rather important. This is another series by P Productions, the studio formed by former cartoonist Tomio Sagisu that brought us both The Space Giants/Ambassador Magma and Monster Prince, and managed the feat of sparking a second Japanese “Monster Boom” in 1971, a few years after the mid-to-late-sixties boom petered out. As pointed out in previous posts, it managed to beat both Return of Ultraman and Kamen Rider to the punch by only three months—P Productions was a smaller outfit than Tsuburaya Productions or Toei, but they showed themselves to be pretty on the ball when it came to televised kaiju delivery systems. Crucially for this series’ unexpected legacy, they also had something their bigger rivals did not: distribution outside of Japan.

Shin Kamen Rider (2023)

The third of the Shin series, this one written and directed by Hideaki Anno solo, follows the general trends of the previous two by returning to the first incarnation of a massive tokusatsu institution and sussing out the meaning inherent within it. As in the Anno-written Shin Ultraman, the type of examination at heart of this update of Shotaro Ishinomori’s insect-themed, monster-battling superhero is entirely compatible with an equal amount of superfan-pleasing callbacks and repurposed imagery–even though I’m not as familiar with Kamen Rider as I am with Ultraman, I can see still see that this is all coming from a place of respect for the originators of the series, even if it’s not always as direct as the previous movie (less outright use of the original soundtrack, for example, although older tracks are remixed for key moments.)  Even more than in Shin Ultraman, I think Shin Kamen Rider’s delirious narrative momentum comes from its own visual and conceptual idiosyncrasies.

(A reminder: Shin Kamen Rider is not the follow-up to previous subject Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue. That two completely unrelated movies called Shin Kamen Rider could be released decades apart is one way to know just how long running and arcane this franchise is–another way you know is because Shin Kamen Rider isn’t even the first time Toei has put out a cinematic reboot of the 1971 Kamen Rider.)

Shin Ultraman (2022)

Shin Godzilla proved to be a bit of an inflection point for tokusatsu cinema, and its success gave director Hideaki Anno and effects director Shinji Higuchi, both veterans of the field in one way or another (the latter having worked on the Shusuke Kaneko Gamera trilogy), the keys to some of the most influential franchises of the form. They’ve ended up using the “Shin” moniker to denote all their creations as one loosely connected meta-series, but just how connected would these subsequent reboots be? Shin Ultraman, the first of the follow-ups out of the gate, provides a surprisingly complicated answer. Directed by Higuchi and written by Anno, this new version of Tsuburaya Productions’ signature kaiju vehicle inherits some of Shin Godzilla‘s aesthetic preoccupations (and a few of the thematic ones), but is not really aiming for the same apocalyptic feeling—in keeping with the general tone of the material it’s based on, this is a lighter affair that is less focused on re-imagining its monster action to fit modern anxieties, but rather transplants much of the original vision of Ultraman into a modern setting and sees how it plays out. That allows them to be more openly fannish in the number of callbacks to the original series they include, some going so deep as to be based in the details of the series’ production, but the most surprising thing about that is just how invested they are in really examining the ideas present in the original.

The Amazing Screw-On Head

I don’t think I’ve ever written about Mike Mignola on here—rather unfortunate, as he’s a figure of some significance in the wider monster culture space, and one of the most unique artists in the mainstream/mainstream adjacent comics sphere of the last thirty-plus years. His major work is, of course, Hellboy and its various comics and multimedia offshoots, an entire universe likely worth exploring in depth at some point. In Hellboy, a milieu with some moderate superhero influence also becomes one big repository for every occult, paranormal, or folkloric concept Mignola and his collaborators see fit to include, everything from werewolves and vampires and black magic to man-made abominations, space aliens, and other-dimensional eldritch entities. It’s a classic Monster Mash series—maybe one of the classic Monster Mash series—a form pioneered by lifelong horror/monster fiction fans to encompass all their favourite creepy things (for other examples of this, there’s Castlevania, or if you want a more kid-friendly version, maybe even Hilda.) Even with all the obvious influences going into the work, though, Mignola manages to put his own stamp on it, especially with his stylized, shadow-lined artwork, which finds the appealing middle point between German Expressionism and Jack Kirby.

For someone looking for a bit of Mignola’s style in a form more succinct than the sprawling Hellboy and BPRD universe, there’s The Amazing Screw-On Head, a singular take on very similar material whose primary difference from Mignola’s main series is its more overt focus on comedy. Originally published as a one-off comic from Mignola’s regular collaborators at Dark Horse Comics (and since included in a book with several other short comics), it gained additional notoriety when it was adapted into a single pilot episode for a potential animated series on Sci-Fi Channel in 2006, a few years before the channel rebranded itself as the ever-perplexing SyFy. The pilot was one of those early forays into Internet focus testing, with Sci-Fi uploading the full thing on their website and using the feedback to determine if they should greenlight more episodes—which they did not, in fact, do. Watching it again after seventeen years, it feels like something very specific to its era of pop culture, and probably the single most faithful attempt to bring Mike Mignola’s art to a non-comics medium.

The Return of Swamp Thing (1989)

As previously reported, there was much ado about Swamp Thing between the 1982 release of Wes Craven’s film adaptation and its belated 1989 sequel—on the back of that original movie, DC relaunched the comic series, and a year or two into that run, it was given to Alan Moore, John Totleben, Stephen Bissette, Rick Veitch, et. al., who reinvented the character through their journeys into “Sophisticated Suspense.” The opening credits for The Return of Swamp Thing features a montage of comics covers from the entire series run, showcasing striking images by Totleben, Bissette, Richard Corben, and character co-creator Bernie Wrightson, among others—playing over that montage is, of course, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Born on the Bayou”, indicating that the tone of this movie is probably nothing like those comics. Nor is it anything like Wes Craven’s movie, which was sincere to a fault, while, for better or for worse, this doesn’t have a sincere bone in its swamp debris body.

The Herculoids

As I learned from Mark McCray’s book The Best Saturdays of Our Lives, 1966-1968 was the short-lived reign of superhero action cartoons on Saturday morning TV, building off the success of Filmation’s The New Adventures of Superman—over a dozen series in this genre from all the major cartoon producers premiered in the fall of 1967. This trend was short-lived because those shows became the target of parental groups and publications that criticized the violence (McCray contextualizes this by noting the atmosphere of the US in the midst of the Vietnam War, making some people much more sensitive to what their kids were being exposed to), and by the end of the decade they were replaced by musical comedies, while the “action” shows that came down the pike in the seventies were severely defanged. Anyone born in the last few decades would probably watch any of those sixties action shows and be flabbergasted that anyone would consider them too much of anything—that’s just a sign of how things change.

During that brief two-year superhero cartoon buzz, one of the big pushers of the genre was Hanna-Barbera, who seemingly had a hit with their series Space Ghost & Dino Boy in 1966, and so in 1967 managed to produce a half-dozen new shows in a similar vein (it makes more sense when you consider that they were making cartoons for all three of the big networks at the time, but it’s still a lot.) Almost none of them lasted for more than twenty episodes, although it’s hard to tell if it was because of that anti-violence backlash or just Hanna-Barbera’s typical cut-and-run style of production. As surprising as it may sound for a company not known for originality, H-B did try to find ways to differentiate all these shows from each other, leading to a decent variety of settings and concepts— from that we got our present subject, The Herculoids, whose distinguishing element was that the titular heroes were a team of monsters (with a human family guiding them) protecting their extraterrestrial home from various generic sci-fi threats. This series aired eighteen episodes (thirty-six ten-minute segments) and then halted, but it had enough of an impact that it was briefly revived in the early eighties, alongside Space Ghost, as part of the package series Space Stars. The characters of Herculoids have made cameos or been referenced in later Hanna-Barbera-related series, especially Adult Swim stuff like Harvey Birdman, Attorney At Law (coincidentally, the original Birdman series premiered at the same time as Herculoids), so I had some knowledge of the series through cultural osmosis, and its concept would obviously intrigue me—its combination of a “primitive” setting with science fiction, and its clear appeal to kids who were in the midst of a kaiju renaissance in the mid-sixties, is both completely of its time and also still fairly unique.

Swamp Thing (1982)

1982 turned out to be one of the most influential years in genre filmmaking, hosting movies that reverberated whether they were an initial box office success or not. In a time when ET, Blade Runner, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, and Poltergeist all premiered within weeks of each other, there was also John Carpenter’s The Thing, a critical and financial failure at the time that nonetheless ushered in a new wave of revisionist monster movies, taking the ideas from the classic creature features of the fifties and revitalizing them with dark humour and special effects that realized or exceeded people’s imaginations. Later that same year you also saw Q -The Winged Serpent, another movie in that vein, but the real kick-off for this trend was Wes Craven’s adaptation of Swamp Thing—and while just as indebted to the classic tropes of the old monster movies as The Thing (and was also a financial disappointment at release, leaving Craven in career doldrums until he started working on something called A Nightmare on Elm Street), it represents a very different sort of revisionist take. While The Thing took the paranoia and unknowable monstrosity of its fifties predecessor (and the short story it’s based on) to its utmost extreme, Swamp Thing is a movie about a tragic accident of science, as many of the classic monsters were, who then becomes a hero, playing into the sympathies of a whole generation who questioned why the Creature From the Black Lagoon and Frankenstein had to die before the movie ended.

Monster Multimedia: Zone Fighter

I’ve written about Japan’s original mid-sixties Monster Boom pretty regularly—that period, roughly 1966-1968, and its explosion of kaiju-based media casts a long shadow over monsterdom. Less discussed on here is the second Monster Boom in the early seventies, which revolved around a new wave of tokusatsu television shows beginning with P Productions’ Spectreman in early 1971 and then followed a few months later by Tsuburaya’s Return of Ultraman and Toei’s indomitable Kamen Rider. This run of tokusatsu was paralleled by the continual decline of kaiju movies, as the Gamera series ended later that year (following Daiei’s bankruptcy) and the Godzilla series limped on to diminishing returns. This was coupled with a slew of other historical events that worked in the favour of TV tokusatsu, including Toho closing its effects department after the death of pioneering effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and restructuring of the studio, and the 1973 Oil Crisis and related economic downturn affecting both production costs and theatre attendance as budget-minded Japanese audiences chose to stay home (all this context and more can be found in this SciFi Japan article.) The presence of kaiju on television since the sixties already gave viewers an alternative to monster movies, and so it really was only a matter of time before the former became the preeminent venue for monster-based entertainment in Japan—something even Toho realized.

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.