Genocider
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Jonathan Clements delves into classic Japanese 'Tokusatsu' TV, from rubber monsters to musical monkeys...
Is it a bird... ? Is it a plane? No, it was the super-powered man from Krypton, star of the live-action series Adventures of Superman. George Reeves' monochrome outing as the Man of Steel was such a big hit in Japan that its peak rating was a massive 74.2%. Few TV shows have managed to match it, but that didn't stop the Japanese trying. They came up with Moonlight Mask (Gekko Kamen), a home-grown motorcycle-riding superhero. Other imitators soon followed, and before long, Japanese networks were fighting to snag the talent and the airtime for their own local heroes. One factor united all the shows. Every one of them tried to impress its viewers by using special effects - tokusatsu. The name for the effects soon became the name of a genre, and the rubber monsters and transforming heroes of tokusatsu TV would eventually become known all around the world.
UNBALANCED MINDS
TV ownership in Japan sky-rocketed during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. When the athletics were over, the next biggest rating was an American import, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. It was so highly regarded by the new TV audiences that the TBS network even gazumped rival channel NTV for the broadcasting rights, stealing the US show after one season. TBS also experimented with it's own knock-off, for which it approached Godzilla special effects technician Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya was greatly relieved, since he had recently bought an expensive optical printer which was all-but useless for anything except special-effects work. When his previous development deal with Fuji TV fell through, he welcomed the chance to put his kit to use for TBS, but he would need plenty of excuses for effects.
First he had to deal with the network. The concept initially laboured under the title of Frightening Theatre Unbalance Zone, in which a team of investigating youths (plus token girl) would meet up each week in the Unbalance coffee shop in Tokyo's Ginza district (that's Mayfair on a Japanese Monopoly board) and delve into paranormal mysteries. Under the steady hand of Tsuburaya, the idea was transformed by 1966 into Ultra Q, the adventures of a Japanese airline pilot and part-time science fiction author, who moonlights as a paranormal investigator in order to get ideas for his stories.
The episodes featuring the flying author and his cohorts still aired until the Ultra Q umbrella, Tsuburaya and his people had much more fun playing to their strengths - and if you're sitting on an optical printer and an army of model-makers, there's only one way to go. In the wake of Godzilla, they knew that the thing they were best at was monster-men and miniature work. In one story, the Ultra Q investigators walked around a model cityscape inspired by Land of the Giants, and inevitably, returned to the same set in a later episode to stomp it flat while dressed as dinosaurs.
THREE MILLION LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
The final episode of Ultra Q, which was to have been a Doctor Who-influenced story about a train that could travel in time, was pulled from the airwaves in order to make way for an experimental episode of something else. The producers kept part of the name and the logo to slip it past unsuspecting audiences, and hit upon the name Ultraman.
Ultraman combined the paranormal investigation of The Twilight Zone with the legendary success of the old Superman series. But Ultraman also retained elements of Ultra Q, since the alien space hero that travels three million light years to help the Earth gets off to a bad start when he collides with a plane. Dying from an unexpected fatal reaction to Earth's atmosphere, Ultraman combines his life force with the mortally-injured pilot Hayata (Susumu Kurobe).
Hayata survives, but as an alien symbiote, with the secret ability to transform into Ultraman when his powers are required. And since Hayata's day-job finds him working for the Science Special Investigation Team, most episodes feature him needing to transform at least once: into basic Ultraman form, or into a suitably giant variant allowing him to fight invading monsters on equal terms. This latter condition, however, has a time limit, ostensibly because of his power source, but really because programme makers wanted to keep the special effects work down to a manageable number of minutes per episode.
SPIES LIKE US
Ultraman is one of the most important Japanese TV series of all time, widely seen all over the world (but not, bizarrely in many English-speaking countries) and with an influence that extends all the way to the present day. Anime, in particular, are packed with homages, from the dual life form of Birdy The Mighty, to the power-related time-limits of Neon Genesis Evangelion. But the Science Special Investigation Team wasn't the only group to have a show on Japanese TV.
The similarly named Science Research Institute formed the leads in Operation Mystery, a group of suited men in a bubble-car, whocse scientific sleuthing pitted them against adversaries that included killer moths and time-travelling archaeologists 'stealing' cultural artefacts for the benefit of future museums. Kids with psychic powers joined a secret society in the Tomorrow People-influenced Infrared Music, or fought supernatural crime with CB radios in Emergency 10:4 10:10. The forgotten Unbalance Zone concept was dusted off and given an airing as just plain Unbalance, while Eiji Tsuburaya was enticed back by his former employees at Fuji TV to make Mighty Jack.
Tsuburaya's love for the shows of Gerry Anderson was so great that he once blagged his way onto the Stingray set to watch the filming. Inspired in equal terms by Thunderbirds, 007's Japanese outing in You Only Live Twice and the Japanese success of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Tsuburaya came up with a team of heroes for Mighty Jack, fighting to save the world from terrorist organisation Q. Whenever Q's cat-stroking leader plotted a new attack, the team would launch in their titular flying battleship, handily assembling the kit they needed en route using the vessel's onboard factory.
But the early 1970's weren't only the era of the spy thriller; they were also the zenith of monkey mania as the Planet of the Apes movie spawned several sequels and an American TV serial. Not to be outdone, Tsuburaya made Army of the Apes (a.k.a Time Of The Apes), in which an earthquake at a scientific research facility causes three youngsters to seek refuge in the cryogenics chamber. They are defrosted years later to discover that Earth has been overrun by talking monkeys, although the masks worn by the actors were not good enough to permit dialogue, so the apes' voices were added later by anime voice-actors.
THE RISE OF THE ANTI-HEROES
While Eiji Tsuburaya's take on sci fi remained resolutely positive and heroic, some of his rivals took a much more downbeat view. Shotaro Ishinomori invented Cyborg 009, an enemy agent who turns to the side of good, and whose dark adventures were limited to manga and anime during the 1960s. But with the early 1970s oil crisis and increased American involvement in Vietnam, TV was ripe for something similar, and Ishinomori recycled his story for NET (later renamed Tv Asahi). With a dash of Ultraman and a pinch of Moonlight Mask, he created Masked Rider - science student Takeshi Hongo (Hiroshi Fujioka), injured in a motorcycle accident, only to be resurrected as a cyborg by the Shocker crime organisation. Resisting his brainwashing, Takeshi Hongo fights his former masters as the Masked Rider, into which he transforms by hitting a certain speed on his motorcycle.
Masked Rider's success spawned two obvious imitators. One, the anime Casshern, sank without a trace for 25 years before its rebirth as the recent live-action move. The other, the tokusatsu show Kikaida, lasted barely two years, but survived in reruns for an entire generation. Created by Masked Rider's Shotaro Ishinomori (thereby ensuring that if it looked too much like a rip-off, he'd have to sue himself), Kikaida is another cyborg warrior created by an evil organisation. However, he manages to escape before his programming is complete and fights his former masters in a series that achieved unprecedented succes in American cable reruns, and eventually returned 20 years later in anime form.
GO GO POWER RANGERS!
In 1975, TV Asahi had tired of the anti-heroes and their spy-inspired forerunners, and plumped for a new twist to the superhero format. Gerry Anderson was an indirect influence once more, but not in terms of special effects. Instead, the channel and thir financial partners, the Bandai toy company, observed how convenient it was to have five-colour-coded heroes, thereby allowing for five vehicles, five actors forced to share the limelight, and five opportunities for merchandise spin-offs. Shotaro Ishinomori was called in again, and pitched a fighting a team of five 'rangers'. The result was Himitsu (Secret) Sentai (Fighting Team) Go (Five) Ranger, five young warriors who helped defend the Earth from the invading Black Crucifix organisation.
Ishinomori's ranger concept was recycled over the following decade with minor changes. In 1977, it was Jaqk, five heroes themed around playing cards. In 1979, it was Battlefever J, with an international task-force who fought with the power of dance, martial-arts-themed Denziman (the first to introduce masks to make stunt-work easier to film), animal-themed Sunvulcan, and so on. But the most successful of all these "Super Sentai" shows was 1991's Zyuranger. Capitalising on the hype surrounding Jurassic Park, Zyuranger built it's five-person team around dinosaurs, and somehow managed to make its way to America.
The Power Rangers craze briefly brought a number of other tokusatsu shows to the attention of the English-speaking world. Gridman was retooled as Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, Spielban and Metaldar were combined to form VR Troopers, and Bee Fighter somehow became Beetleborgs. Meanwhile, Power Rangers itself motored along and has yet to stop.
There are other elements that are common to most of these later sentai series. The colour-coded set-up and predictable episode pattern were defined initially by the restrictions of the shooting schedule, but also by the demands of a very young audience. Just as the Telly Tubbies will always say "eh-oh!", the Power Rangers will always suit up and transform, in a plot progression that seems predictable to older viewers, but cosily comforting to the under-fives.
A distinctive element, also found in many anime, is the prospect of redemption for the bad guys or, if not them, their henchmen. On more than one occasion, the Power Rangers have enlisted the aid of one of their enemies, only to keep them around for the next season. Another element, common from the days when an injury forced the original Masked Rider to blow out mid-season, is that the leading characters are interchangeable.
Not all actors can be so easily discarded, however, as US distributors Saban Entertainment discovered to their cost when they killed off the Green Ranger. Protests were so high from anguished parents, forced to deal with sulking children, that Green Ranger actor Jason Frank was later brought back as the White Ranger in the next season, and the Red Ranger in the one after that. Public opinion was not the only factor that kept Frank in the show, as a martial artist, he was better suited to the punishing schedule that even the American cast had to deal with. Watch the Power Rangers movie, and you'll see that his moves are sometimes slowed down, while those of Blue Ranger David Yost (a mere thespian) are speeded up to match.
Although the Power Rangers don't enjoy their early 1990s craze attention, they are still a regular acceptance of children's television, currently enjoying their 14th year fighting alien invaders.
FAN SERVICE
Modern-day tokusatsu television builds upon 40 years of development. Ultraman soldiers on in a darker, grittier version informed by the very Evangelion show that once paid tribute to it. Meanwhile, other shows hoped to capitalise on the fact that the original tokusatsu fans are now parents themselves.
Contemporary seasons of Masked Rider have become renowned for pretty-boy heroes designed to appeal more to lonely mums than their offspring, while several of the more recent productions from the Tsuburaya studios have migrated from the morning kiddy slots to the late-night schedules. There, they are free to entertain adult tokusatsu fans, such as viewers of Bunny Knights, whose pretty heroines had an animated transformation sequence to catch the otaku audience.
There is also the notable case of Cyber Girls Thelomea, a trio of super-powered ladies in skin-tight latex, who work for a genetic engineering project to create a master race, and also battle monsters on the side, with much ripping of clothing. It might not be a 'special effect', but it certainly holds the attention of the late-night audience, while the descendants of the early sentai shows continue to battle monsters in the mornings.
Japan, and the world, are safe from monsters for as long as the tokusatsu heroes are here to protect us.
Neo
Is it a bird... ? Is it a plane? No, it was the super-powered man from Krypton, star of the live-action series Adventures of Superman. George Reeves' monochrome outing as the Man of Steel was such a big hit in Japan that its peak rating was a massive 74.2%. Few TV shows have managed to match it, but that didn't stop the Japanese trying. They came up with Moonlight Mask (Gekko Kamen), a home-grown motorcycle-riding superhero. Other imitators soon followed, and before long, Japanese networks were fighting to snag the talent and the airtime for their own local heroes. One factor united all the shows. Every one of them tried to impress its viewers by using special effects - tokusatsu. The name for the effects soon became the name of a genre, and the rubber monsters and transforming heroes of tokusatsu TV would eventually become known all around the world.
UNBALANCED MINDS
TV ownership in Japan sky-rocketed during the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. When the athletics were over, the next biggest rating was an American import, Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. It was so highly regarded by the new TV audiences that the TBS network even gazumped rival channel NTV for the broadcasting rights, stealing the US show after one season. TBS also experimented with it's own knock-off, for which it approached Godzilla special effects technician Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya was greatly relieved, since he had recently bought an expensive optical printer which was all-but useless for anything except special-effects work. When his previous development deal with Fuji TV fell through, he welcomed the chance to put his kit to use for TBS, but he would need plenty of excuses for effects.
First he had to deal with the network. The concept initially laboured under the title of Frightening Theatre Unbalance Zone, in which a team of investigating youths (plus token girl) would meet up each week in the Unbalance coffee shop in Tokyo's Ginza district (that's Mayfair on a Japanese Monopoly board) and delve into paranormal mysteries. Under the steady hand of Tsuburaya, the idea was transformed by 1966 into Ultra Q, the adventures of a Japanese airline pilot and part-time science fiction author, who moonlights as a paranormal investigator in order to get ideas for his stories.
The episodes featuring the flying author and his cohorts still aired until the Ultra Q umbrella, Tsuburaya and his people had much more fun playing to their strengths - and if you're sitting on an optical printer and an army of model-makers, there's only one way to go. In the wake of Godzilla, they knew that the thing they were best at was monster-men and miniature work. In one story, the Ultra Q investigators walked around a model cityscape inspired by Land of the Giants, and inevitably, returned to the same set in a later episode to stomp it flat while dressed as dinosaurs.
THREE MILLION LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME
The final episode of Ultra Q, which was to have been a Doctor Who-influenced story about a train that could travel in time, was pulled from the airwaves in order to make way for an experimental episode of something else. The producers kept part of the name and the logo to slip it past unsuspecting audiences, and hit upon the name Ultraman.
Ultraman combined the paranormal investigation of The Twilight Zone with the legendary success of the old Superman series. But Ultraman also retained elements of Ultra Q, since the alien space hero that travels three million light years to help the Earth gets off to a bad start when he collides with a plane. Dying from an unexpected fatal reaction to Earth's atmosphere, Ultraman combines his life force with the mortally-injured pilot Hayata (Susumu Kurobe).
Hayata survives, but as an alien symbiote, with the secret ability to transform into Ultraman when his powers are required. And since Hayata's day-job finds him working for the Science Special Investigation Team, most episodes feature him needing to transform at least once: into basic Ultraman form, or into a suitably giant variant allowing him to fight invading monsters on equal terms. This latter condition, however, has a time limit, ostensibly because of his power source, but really because programme makers wanted to keep the special effects work down to a manageable number of minutes per episode.
SPIES LIKE US
Ultraman is one of the most important Japanese TV series of all time, widely seen all over the world (but not, bizarrely in many English-speaking countries) and with an influence that extends all the way to the present day. Anime, in particular, are packed with homages, from the dual life form of Birdy The Mighty, to the power-related time-limits of Neon Genesis Evangelion. But the Science Special Investigation Team wasn't the only group to have a show on Japanese TV.
The similarly named Science Research Institute formed the leads in Operation Mystery, a group of suited men in a bubble-car, whocse scientific sleuthing pitted them against adversaries that included killer moths and time-travelling archaeologists 'stealing' cultural artefacts for the benefit of future museums. Kids with psychic powers joined a secret society in the Tomorrow People-influenced Infrared Music, or fought supernatural crime with CB radios in Emergency 10:4 10:10. The forgotten Unbalance Zone concept was dusted off and given an airing as just plain Unbalance, while Eiji Tsuburaya was enticed back by his former employees at Fuji TV to make Mighty Jack.
Tsuburaya's love for the shows of Gerry Anderson was so great that he once blagged his way onto the Stingray set to watch the filming. Inspired in equal terms by Thunderbirds, 007's Japanese outing in You Only Live Twice and the Japanese success of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Tsuburaya came up with a team of heroes for Mighty Jack, fighting to save the world from terrorist organisation Q. Whenever Q's cat-stroking leader plotted a new attack, the team would launch in their titular flying battleship, handily assembling the kit they needed en route using the vessel's onboard factory.
But the early 1970's weren't only the era of the spy thriller; they were also the zenith of monkey mania as the Planet of the Apes movie spawned several sequels and an American TV serial. Not to be outdone, Tsuburaya made Army of the Apes (a.k.a Time Of The Apes), in which an earthquake at a scientific research facility causes three youngsters to seek refuge in the cryogenics chamber. They are defrosted years later to discover that Earth has been overrun by talking monkeys, although the masks worn by the actors were not good enough to permit dialogue, so the apes' voices were added later by anime voice-actors.
THE RISE OF THE ANTI-HEROES
While Eiji Tsuburaya's take on sci fi remained resolutely positive and heroic, some of his rivals took a much more downbeat view. Shotaro Ishinomori invented Cyborg 009, an enemy agent who turns to the side of good, and whose dark adventures were limited to manga and anime during the 1960s. But with the early 1970s oil crisis and increased American involvement in Vietnam, TV was ripe for something similar, and Ishinomori recycled his story for NET (later renamed Tv Asahi). With a dash of Ultraman and a pinch of Moonlight Mask, he created Masked Rider - science student Takeshi Hongo (Hiroshi Fujioka), injured in a motorcycle accident, only to be resurrected as a cyborg by the Shocker crime organisation. Resisting his brainwashing, Takeshi Hongo fights his former masters as the Masked Rider, into which he transforms by hitting a certain speed on his motorcycle.
Masked Rider's success spawned two obvious imitators. One, the anime Casshern, sank without a trace for 25 years before its rebirth as the recent live-action move. The other, the tokusatsu show Kikaida, lasted barely two years, but survived in reruns for an entire generation. Created by Masked Rider's Shotaro Ishinomori (thereby ensuring that if it looked too much like a rip-off, he'd have to sue himself), Kikaida is another cyborg warrior created by an evil organisation. However, he manages to escape before his programming is complete and fights his former masters in a series that achieved unprecedented succes in American cable reruns, and eventually returned 20 years later in anime form.
GO GO POWER RANGERS!
In 1975, TV Asahi had tired of the anti-heroes and their spy-inspired forerunners, and plumped for a new twist to the superhero format. Gerry Anderson was an indirect influence once more, but not in terms of special effects. Instead, the channel and thir financial partners, the Bandai toy company, observed how convenient it was to have five-colour-coded heroes, thereby allowing for five vehicles, five actors forced to share the limelight, and five opportunities for merchandise spin-offs. Shotaro Ishinomori was called in again, and pitched a fighting a team of five 'rangers'. The result was Himitsu (Secret) Sentai (Fighting Team) Go (Five) Ranger, five young warriors who helped defend the Earth from the invading Black Crucifix organisation.
Ishinomori's ranger concept was recycled over the following decade with minor changes. In 1977, it was Jaqk, five heroes themed around playing cards. In 1979, it was Battlefever J, with an international task-force who fought with the power of dance, martial-arts-themed Denziman (the first to introduce masks to make stunt-work easier to film), animal-themed Sunvulcan, and so on. But the most successful of all these "Super Sentai" shows was 1991's Zyuranger. Capitalising on the hype surrounding Jurassic Park, Zyuranger built it's five-person team around dinosaurs, and somehow managed to make its way to America.
The Power Rangers craze briefly brought a number of other tokusatsu shows to the attention of the English-speaking world. Gridman was retooled as Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, Spielban and Metaldar were combined to form VR Troopers, and Bee Fighter somehow became Beetleborgs. Meanwhile, Power Rangers itself motored along and has yet to stop.
There are other elements that are common to most of these later sentai series. The colour-coded set-up and predictable episode pattern were defined initially by the restrictions of the shooting schedule, but also by the demands of a very young audience. Just as the Telly Tubbies will always say "eh-oh!", the Power Rangers will always suit up and transform, in a plot progression that seems predictable to older viewers, but cosily comforting to the under-fives.
A distinctive element, also found in many anime, is the prospect of redemption for the bad guys or, if not them, their henchmen. On more than one occasion, the Power Rangers have enlisted the aid of one of their enemies, only to keep them around for the next season. Another element, common from the days when an injury forced the original Masked Rider to blow out mid-season, is that the leading characters are interchangeable.
Not all actors can be so easily discarded, however, as US distributors Saban Entertainment discovered to their cost when they killed off the Green Ranger. Protests were so high from anguished parents, forced to deal with sulking children, that Green Ranger actor Jason Frank was later brought back as the White Ranger in the next season, and the Red Ranger in the one after that. Public opinion was not the only factor that kept Frank in the show, as a martial artist, he was better suited to the punishing schedule that even the American cast had to deal with. Watch the Power Rangers movie, and you'll see that his moves are sometimes slowed down, while those of Blue Ranger David Yost (a mere thespian) are speeded up to match.
Although the Power Rangers don't enjoy their early 1990s craze attention, they are still a regular acceptance of children's television, currently enjoying their 14th year fighting alien invaders.
FAN SERVICE
Modern-day tokusatsu television builds upon 40 years of development. Ultraman soldiers on in a darker, grittier version informed by the very Evangelion show that once paid tribute to it. Meanwhile, other shows hoped to capitalise on the fact that the original tokusatsu fans are now parents themselves.
Contemporary seasons of Masked Rider have become renowned for pretty-boy heroes designed to appeal more to lonely mums than their offspring, while several of the more recent productions from the Tsuburaya studios have migrated from the morning kiddy slots to the late-night schedules. There, they are free to entertain adult tokusatsu fans, such as viewers of Bunny Knights, whose pretty heroines had an animated transformation sequence to catch the otaku audience.
There is also the notable case of Cyber Girls Thelomea, a trio of super-powered ladies in skin-tight latex, who work for a genetic engineering project to create a master race, and also battle monsters on the side, with much ripping of clothing. It might not be a 'special effect', but it certainly holds the attention of the late-night audience, while the descendants of the early sentai shows continue to battle monsters in the mornings.
Japan, and the world, are safe from monsters for as long as the tokusatsu heroes are here to protect us.
Neo
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