Hello again, everyone.
I hadn’t expected installment two to come out quite this quickly either. Probably because the further forward we go, the more documentation, surviving film, and footage there is, and the easier it becomes to sort out the sources and material.
Last time we covered the period up to 1965, when Mushi Production ruled. Animation then was said to have set off an enormous boom,
but most of its subject matter was much the same. Heavily influenced by the drive to reach the moon and the US–Soviet space arms race, these series tended to specialize in SF fantasy. Sponsors’ direct influence also left many animators unable to spread their wings. TV animation still wore the label “television manga”; its unmistakable origins in television advertising continued to shape this newborn.
Fortunately, over the next five years, television animation began to open new paths,
offering people possibilities beyond white robots with split horns.
With the arrival of Kitarō, Star of the Giants, Sazae-san, and others,
all sorts of subjects, of wildly uneven quality, began appearing on television.
The influence of tokusatsu—live-action special-effects productions—along with films and novels became visibly greater.
This was an age when plot came second,
an age whose subjects were not particularly outstanding,
but an age when imagination was not bound by established constraints.
Feeling its way, one step at a time,
trying a little, stumbling a little,
TV animation finally began to totter into a wilderness where imagination could roam still further.
Major events:
1966: Sally the Witch, the original magical-girl animation and original animation for girls, begins broadcasting.
1967: Golden Bat marks the beginning of overseas subcontracting.
1968: Star of the Giants, the original spokon—“sports-and-guts”—animation, begins broadcasting.
1969: The World Masterpiece Theater lineage begins, its first work the familiar “hippopotamus,” Moomin. The national institution Sazae-san begins broadcasting and becomes synonymous with Sunday evenings. The girls’ spokon series Attack No. 1 begins broadcasting. Mushi Production releases Japan’s first animated feature for adults, A Thousand and One Nights.
1966
5 February: Osomatsu-kun airs, 56 episodes. The work that cemented Fujio Akatsuka’s standing as a popular gag-manga artist, inspired by the American film Cheaper by the Dozen, about the Bakers and their children.1 He originally wanted a full dozen, like the film, but twelve children were too hard to distinguish in the telling, so he halved the number.
23 April: Rainbow Sentai Robin airs, 48 episodes. Another culprit in the “W3 affair.” Despite a dream collaboration between Shōtarō Ishinomori, Fujiko Fujio A, and Fujiko F. Fujio, it ultimately runs into the Cyborg 009 wave and gradually fades from view, leaving the robot nurse as its legacy.
2 May: The Pirate Prince airs, 31 episodes. Toei’s first seafaring adventure animation. Its hero Kyd is also the first “King of the Pirates” in Japanese TV animation history. Drawing on elements of Peter Pan and the adventures of Sinbad, it gives Tōru Furuya his animation debut in a leading role—he is only twelve at the time.
5 May: Harris no Kaze (“Harris’s Whirlwind”) airs, 70 episodes. “Harris” comes from the sponsor, Harris, now Kanebo. It boasts “astonishing animation”: 5,000 cels per episode, surpassing the usual 3,000 of the day. With a school gang boss as its protagonist, it also leads an anti-SF vogue for violence. Even with complaints raining down on it, the animation earns respectable ratings.
3 June: Planet Mask (Yūsei Kamen) airs, 39 episodes. One of the few works of the time in which the hero uses an alias throughout and reveals his identity only at the end. The founding ancestor of the “just a passing-through Kamen Rider” catchphrase tradition associated with Wang Xiaoming.2 Being a villain isn’t easy these days: ask someone his name, and this “champion of justice” answers, “They call me Planet Mask.” Not an ounce of respect.
1 July: Know-It-All University: Tomorrow’s Calendar airs, 1,274 episodes. A successor to last time’s Instant History, likewise a bite-size educational series. This time an alcoholic-drinks company sponsors it, though it is not actually commercial animation in the conventional sense.
4 October: Robotan airs, 104 episodes. Not the same thing as the Metal Hero series B-Robo Kabutack, despite their shared Chinese name, “Little Armored Treasure”; “Luobotan”—“Radish Tan”—is another Chinese rendering. Robotan is Japanese TV animation’s first robot protagonist in a comedy. Unlike the SF characters of the time, he does not come from the future but is a defective product of the Meiji era. You can see a great deal of Doraemon and Kabutack in him, too.
5 October: New Jungle Emperor: Onward, Leo! airs, 26 episodes. The direct sequel to Jungle Emperor Leo.
6 October: Go! Marine Kid, 13 episodes. It takes up the mantle of Japan’s first color animation, Dolphin Prince, but once again fails to keep broadcasting. Only in 1969, under the name Marine Boy, does it finally complete its run.
14 November: Tobidase! Batchiri (“Go Get ’Em, Batchiri!”) airs, 132 episodes. Japan’s first animation starring a boy detective.
5 December: Sally the Witch airs, 109 episodes. A homage to the American television series Bewitched, Japan’s first magical-girl work and its first animation for girls—and yet its original creator is the Mitsuteru Yokoyama you all know so well. In the hands of a master, subject matter simply cannot constrain talent. Witchy Precure! is its fiftieth-anniversary homage.
…has a heroine who references Sally the Witch (1966, or Shōwa 41).
1967
7 January: Gokū’s Great Adventure (Gokū no Daibōken) airs, 39 episodes. Its basic premise comes from Journey to the West, but it gives Sun Wukong a companion named Tatsuko—“Dragon Girl,” what an awful name—with her hair in buns. One of the original culprits behind the stereotype that Chinese people wear their hair that way. It pioneers self-censorship for TV with the full version on DVD. The theme song makes a lasting impression on society: even in the new century, advertisements still “save themselves some work” by fitting new words to its tune.
1 April: Golden Bat airs, 52 episodes. Based on the popular picture-card street theater of the day (think Chinese peepshows).3 Golden Bat himself is probably Japan’s earliest visually depicted superhero, dating to the early Shōwa period. The first representative case of a Japanese producer getting screwed over by its Korean partner. Incidentally, it was also made into a live-action film, starring the familiar Sonny Chiba, our “Daddy Conqueror.”4
1 April: Thunder Boy Pikkari Bee airs, 53 episodes.
2 April: Princess Knight airs, 52 episodes. Its source, also known in Chinese as Prince Sapphire, is Osamu Tezuka’s creation and Japan’s first girls’ manga. Strongly influenced by the Takarazuka Revue, it pioneers such popular animation elements as the beautiful woman in men’s clothes, the fighting girl, the transforming girl, and the female swordsman.
2 April: Mach GoGoGo (Speed Racer) airs, 52 episodes. Tatsunoko’s second animation and a pioneer of racing anime. It becomes hugely popular on entering European and American markets; Volkswagen even hires its protagonist for a commercial.
2 April: Perman airs, 65 episodes. One of Fujiko Fujio’s signature works, and one of the few “superhero” stories with a transformation device used by five “people”—because one of them is a monkey. More popular in Japan even than Doraemon: a national institution.
4 April: Adventure on Gaboten Island airs, 39 episodes. A wilderness-survival animation, a rare thing indeed, inspired by Two Years’ Vacation, known in Chinese as Fifteen Boys Adrift. All right, I know some of you have gone straight to the gutter. No, it isn’t porn.
5 April: King Kong, 26 episodes.
5 April: Tom of T.H.U.M.B., 24 episodes.
I’m discussing these together because both are international coproductions Toei cooked up by getting cozy with the Americans, adapting the familiar King Kong and 007 into the animated form Japanese audiences know and love. Another attempt to find new subject matter for animation.
3 July: Pyunpyunmaru, 12 episodes. Probably the earliest canceled anime. Originally planned for twenty-six episodes, it is cut directly in half because of poor popularity and ratings. Only in 1969 does it return to air the remainder. Quite a troubled life.
7 September: Donkikko, 42 episodes. Though from the same creator as Harris no Kaze, mentioned earlier, and its replacement on the schedule, it is thoroughly obscure. As for its subject, even today you rarely see this sort of bratty-kids-fighting-over-turf story that looks suspiciously like business warfare.
18 September: Adventure Boy Shadar, 156 episodes. A thoroughly orthodox hot-blooded boys’ action series, born at the wrong time and meeting its Waterloo.
2 October: Little Monster Yadamon, 26 episodes. That old perv Go Nagai’s debut work—he only draws the manga. Its powers, once again, involve taking things out of a pocket, so it runs headfirst into the Robotan mentioned above, then gets a few kicks from a certain hugely popular blue fatty.5 A casualty of its age.
4 October: Skyers 5, 12 episodes. These heroes are detectives, but they like fighting with playing cards, using the suits as their code names. A direct influence on a whole series of combining-robot team works such as J.A.K.Q. Dengekitai and Combattler V.
7 October: Hey, I’m Guzura!, 104 episodes. Tatsunoko eyes the monster boom enviously and jumps on the bandwagon. Even the monster’s name, Guzura, is suspiciously close to the mighty Godzilla. Its basic story and premise are much like poor Yadamon’s above, but it has the good fortune to have the right daddy behind it. It even gets a nostalgic remake in 1987.
1968
3 January: GeGeGe no Kitarō airs, 65 episodes. A national institution of supernatural storytelling, Kitarō actually comes from the same place as Golden Bat: picture-card street theater, likened here to peepshows. Only with Shigeru Mizuki’s adaptation does it become a manga. As a classic of yōkai—supernatural beings—its elements continue to influence other works, such as “Yurusen,” companion to that life-burning Lord Boredom.6 It has been remade six times, the greatest number for any single animation. The sixth series is airing to great acclaim right now. Go watch it.
1 February: The Mischievous Detectives airs, 35 episodes. Adapted from Edogawa Ranpo’s Boy Detectives Club stories. Even the naming is mischievous: the team’s sole girl is called “Otoko”—“boy.”
I think I’m onto something.
30 March: Star of the Giants, 182 episodes. An unavoidable work in TV animation history: the founding ancestor of classic baseball anime, the wellspring of spokon, and a pioneer of the sadistic, domestically violent father. It follows the nation’s model father, whose daily routine consists of overturning tables, beating his son, and drinking. By pumping him full of motivational hype, abusing him, and using S&M contraptions, he trains Hyūma—a brat who looks like a born masochist—into a famous baseball player. It also creates an endless supply of comedy material: pointing at the stars, feeding each other chicken-soup-for-the-soul platitudes, then clutching each other and sobbing.
A quick word here about spokon, or “sports-and-guts.” These works usually insist that you may have talent, but you still need to make extraordinary efforts: greatness at any cost, even your health and your sporting career. No price is too high if it wins the match. That ethic later carries over into mainstream hot-blooded action stories, gradually becoming Cosmo, chakra, SEED mode, “oil angels,” “AAAAH, MY POWER OF KINGS!” and so on and on.7
1 April: Animal 1 airs, 27 episodes. Another spokon work, this time about wrestling, just in time for that year’s Mexico Olympics. Even now, most sports stories use some unexpected accident to demonstrate the hero’s extraordinary qualities. But at most that means baseballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, rackets, “Lancer the dog,” that sort of thing.8 This is probably the only realistic animation bold enough to send two wild bulls rampaging into the hero’s school in episode one.
5 April: Cyborg 009, 26 episodes. One of the true signature works of Shōtarō Ishinomori, father of Kamen Rider. It still makes its presence felt in different fields today: the protagonist’s design in Concrete Revolutio, for instance, pays homage to 009. Yet this first series does not convey the manga’s atmosphere of tragic heroism. Like the old Devilman animation, whose reputation has already been thoroughly mangled, it is an upbeat work that toes the ideological line. Compared with the well-remembered 1979 version, this first one has not left a particularly deep impression.
Let me slip in a personal favorite here: the 1979 Cyborg 009 opening, “For Whose Sake” (“Taga tame ni”).
Its grief-stricken melody and lyrics that keep questioning the heart make it particularly right for 009, indeed for all the old master Ishinomori’s work. Only this song is worthy of the atmosphere of the 1979 series and the original manga: a theme song in the truest sense. Almost all the translations online put it in the third person. I think it is the cyborg warriors questioning themselves.
6 April: Akane-chan airs, 26 episodes. The same plot as countless Korean and Chinese dramas you’ve watched to death: the heroine is abandoned as a child but comes from a distinguished family, grows up all alone, then returns to her birth family and becomes a proper young lady, winning over the chairman’s grandson and a handsome boy with her kindness and wild spirit. Fuck. A Mary Sue.
6 April: Fight, Pyūta!! airs, 26 episodes. In the city where the boy-genius inventor Pyūta lives, an evil scientist, Walther VII, threatens everyone’s happy lives. At the moment of crisis, who appears but our hero, Pyūta Konno—
21 April: Kaibutsu-kun (“Little Monster”) airs, 49 episodes. Not much to say about it, really: an import that was never terribly popular in China. Yet in 2010 it gets a live-action movie with Satoshi Ohno and Arashi. Baffling. The hero and his best buddy visit each other through a refrigerator door. Possible Kamen Rider Build homage spotted; unconfirmed.
3 September: Sasuke airs, 29 episodes. Not the one called Uchiha: the Sarutobi of fiction. In stark contrast to the little hero’s cute appearance, the series is full of bloody violence: people blasted into tiny pieces by explosives, enemies buried alive—including a cute girl—and opponents slit open with a kunai, followed by “Just as I thought, there’s nothing inside.” The stuff of childhood trauma for many children back then.
30 September: Sunset Gang Boss airs, 156 episodes. A leading light of Japan’s late-sixties school-gang-boss craze. But later, influenced by Yukio Mishima’s suicide, the author leaves it with a painful ending in which the protagonist’s best buddy jumps off a building. (He doesn’t die, of course.)
2 October: Dokachin airs, 26 episodes. Another Tatsunoko comedy: a scientist from the future invents a time machine that brings a prehistoric family to the sixties, and all sorts of comic adventures follow. Apparently it once aired in Hong Kong.
3 October: Sabu and Ichi’s Case Files airs, 52 episodes. A rare animation of the time with the flavor of period drama and sword-fighting films, another major work by Shōtarō Ishinomori. Its richly ink-wash look is its outstanding artistic feature.
5 October: Vampire airs, 26 episodes. Yes, despite the title, it is not about vampires but their mortal enemies, werewolves. A mixture of live action and animation in which Osamu Tezuka plays himself. Strictly speaking, it should count as tokusatsu, but with last time’s PiPi the Alien as a precedent, I’m including it as animation too.
7 October: Yōkai Ningen Bem (“Bem the Humanoid Monster”) airs, 26 episodes.
1969
6 January: The Secrets of Akko-chan airs, 94 episodes. A magical-girl work, the second in Toei’s little-witch series after Sally the Witch. It mainly follows the heroine using a magic mirror’s power to deal with the problems she encounters. It has been animated three times. Incidentally, there was a live-action movie too, with none other than Teruyuki Kagawa playing the mirror spirit…
13 January: Marine Boy airs, 78 episodes. At long last. This is actually the Dolphin Prince and Go! Marine Kid mentioned above; even by this third incarnation, it remains one of the few underwater-themed works. A correction to the last installment: I thought Marine Boy and Dolphin Prince were separate works. That was a mistake.
31 March: Freckled Pucchi airs, 162 episodes. Probably the earliest young champion of justice to beat people up with a yo-yo. Obscure in the extreme—so obscure that I can only find its opening…
1 April: Prince of the Plum Star airs, 52 episodes. The Plum Star explodes, and its royal family flees to Japan for refuge. They want to restore their home planet’s glory but are tormented to death by housing prices and bratty children. With technology far beyond Earth’s, they can only freeload off a household and play busybody Auntie Ma… Huh. Give them frog heads and they’d look even more familiar.
2 April: Kurenai Sanshirō (Judo Boy), 26 episodes, also known in China as Brave Sanshirō. A karate revenge story with a rigid formula: the hero reaches a new place—spots a one-eyed man and thinks he has found his father’s killer—beats him up and rescues a girl—discovers it isn’t the right man and leaves. Repeat. Don’t assume karate makes it realistic. I still cannot understand why leaping into the air midway through a fight and putting his red karate uniform back on sends his combat power up several levels. Perhaps Tatsunoko was preparing its transforming-hero series then and just did it out of habit.
Incidentally, its opening song made Mitsuko Horie’s name in anisong—the anime-song world.
4 April: Moretsu Atarō (“Atarō the Furious”) airs, 90 episodes. A light, everyday comedy in the Osomatsu-kun vein, with no real overarching plot.
6 April: Ninpū Kamui Gaiden (“Tales of the Ninja Kamui”) airs, 26 episodes. Another work by Sanpei Shirato, creator of A Little Ninja, Fujimaru and Sasuke, mentioned earlier. Not particularly popular: its content isn’t all that upbeat, and its visuals are steeped in B-movie cult aesthetics. And when it ends, its slot goes to the national phenomenon Sazae-san, making it even less likely to be remembered. It has also had a live-action movie, even featuring Ekin Cheng, but the crew’s poverty and limited abilities make it unbearable to get through. Literally.
6 April: Dororo airs, 26 episodes. The most “healing” of Osamu Tezuka’s works. It could have caught the yōkai wave Kitarō set off but arrives late for reasons best left to the grown-ups. All those scenes with ketchup spraying everywhere so infuriate the sponsor that the color animation is turned into black-and-white—rather like the modern joke of blood becoming oil all over the floor. Another animated adaptation has just been announced. I wonder how much of its cult-movie flavor progress will let us see.
28 April: Roppō Yabure-kun airs, 110 episodes. Educational animation using the form to explain Japan’s six legal codes: the Constitution, Civil Code, Commercial Code, Penal Code, Code of Civil Procedure, and Code of Criminal Procedure. Almost no footage remains; only stills for us to pay our respects to.
6 September, special broadcast: Star of the Giants vs. Astro Boy airs. The earliest crossover—in short, a free-for-all. Of course, they couldn’t actually pit Hyūma against Astro Boy in a fight, or Hyūma really would have nothing left to do but cling to his dad and cry. Apparently the staff includes someone credited as 富野喜幸. Oh, perhaps you know the later written form of that name—
富野由悠季. Yoshiyuki Tomino.9
29 September: Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daishō (“A Lone Man, Boss of the Brats”) airs, 156 episodes, ten minutes each. The source manga is one of Jump’s founding pillars, another school-gang-boss work carrying on the mantle of Harris no Kaze.
29 September: Pinch and Punch airs, 156 episodes. An animation I can find no information on. All I know is that the leads are twin brothers. That’s it…
2 October: Tiger Mask airs, 105 episodes. The consummate spokon work, and the least conspicuous of the merry trio.10 A classic tale of a villainous lead turning good. Its final ending is pretty formulaic too: thoroughly redeemed, the hero saves a child about to be hit by a car and gets transported to Japari Park. (Wrong show.) There’s a 2016 remake, Tiger Mask W, which I heartily recommend.
5 October: The Great Sneezing Genie airs, 104 episodes. Based on Aladdin’s lamp, it creates an unreliable “genie” who puts the protagonist through hell. A comedy with a sad ending.
5 October: Sazae-san. No total episode count: it is still airing. Holder of the Guinness record for “longest-running animated TV series,” a genuine national institution. Its story is everyday sitcom life with no particular main plot—the secret of its forty-nine-year longevity. By now, Sazae-san is probably part of the Japanese national routine.
5 October: Moomin airs, 65 episodes. The Moomins are a race of fairy creatures created by Finnish novelist Tove Jansson. They look very much like hippos but aren’t. This is a World Masterpiece Theater work, in the same lineage as Heidi, Girl of the Alps, 3000 Leagues in Search of Mother, and so on.
7 December: Attack No. 1 airs, 104 episodes. Don’t get confused: this is not an animated version of Moero Attack, known in China as Women’s Volleyball or Flames of Youth. It predates that show: the true founding work of girls’ spokon. It is also Kumiko Ōsugi’s anisong debut.
By 1969, Japanese TV animation had stumbled through eleven years, producing eighty-five works. Looking back, genuinely narrative animation was still rare. Most had yet to escape the original mold of “television-manga advertising,” and some quite openly underwent a complete makeover under pressure from capital.
Yet this age left later generations a wealth of subjects and room to work, and let many masters make their names and exercise their talents. As the student movement intensified and the Red Army’s shadow loomed, postwar Japan’s economy kept soaring, but the country still lacked a soul to guide it. Animation might not be able to provide one, but it was at least an expression of the spirit, a firefly’s glimmer that could wake a few people.
Out in the wilderness, primitive people carrying fire kept planting markers of exploration, waiting for the seventies, for that cannon shot to bring the great awakening.