Six Combinations, Three Robots, One Blu-Ray

Lightspeed Electroid Albegas aired from March 30 1983 until February 8 1984 on TV Tokyo Wednesdays at the oddly specific time of 5:55pm. This Toei robot anime show filled the time slot formerly occupied by Toei’s Dairugger XV, aka “the Voltron with the cars”. Both Dairugger and Golion, aka the “Voltron with the lions”, were sort of experiments for Toei, trying to move past the now-standard super robot, science center, alien invaders, youths burning with the fires of justice cliches. And Albegas… features super robots piloted from a science center by justice-seeking teens battling alien invaders. Maybe Toei’s experiment didn’t work out? TV Tokyo would replace Albegas with Wako’s fox anime “Cry Of The Wild” and next season the slot would, for some reason, feature reruns of Knack’s Manga Sarutobi Sasuke, aka Ninja The Wonder Boy. Much of the staff from Albegas would carry over into Toei’s next robot anime Laserion, a TBS show.

But let’s get dimension, already. Lightspeed Electroid Albegas stars hero boy Daisaku Enjoji, moody loner Tetsuya Jin and teen miss Hotaru Mizuki, three top robotics students at the elite Aoba Academy private high school, where the students learn robotics along with literature and math. All three win the school robot olympics with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots, just in time for Earth to be attacked by the Dellinger Corps. Led by the Great Deran, the Dellinger are an advanced race from beyond the stars, against whose mechanical monsters Earth’s military is powerless. Even the Aoba Academy champs can’t stop the invasion. That’s why the three break into the Robot Center research facility run by Hotaru’s father Professor Mizuki and try to upgrade their robots with the Center’s advanced technology.
 

As it turns out Dr. Mizuki was conveniently working on a plan for three super robots that would be able to utilize extradimensional power and combine into six different configurations, and when our three heroes shout “Get Dimension!” they find themselves piloting Albegas.

Combining Daisaku’s black Alpha robot, Tetsuya’s blue Beta robot, and Hotaru’s red Gamma robot - Al(pha), Be(ta), Ga(mma), get it? - Albegas can become the Denjin Dimension, Magma Dimension, Marine Dimension, Space Dimension, Sky Dimension, Rescue or Guard Dimension depending on which robot is where when the transformation sequence starts. Since the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma already look pretty similar, it takes a sharp eyed viewer to really distinguish between the six different possible combinations. I guess this saved the toy designers some headaches, but it doesn’t make for visually engaging mecha.

various Dellingers

The evil Dellinger Empire - referencing 70s rock icon Rick Derringer, maybe - is led by the Great Deran, perhaps named after folk rock icon Bob Dylan. After all, both are immensely powerful mysterious beings whose true motives are unknown. Sadly the rest of Dellinger’s hordes of space mutants are armored lumps with non-musical names like General Duston, Catastra Commander, the wise staff chief Dime, the female-coded Mirror Zero, and midshow replacements like New Generalissimo Bios and the crab-armor General Dali. Most Dellinger are characterized by hoods or masks or some other face covering that saves animators the trouble of animating mouth movements, and this includes their “Reploid” masked goons, who carry out vital tokusatsu-sentai show masked goon villainy every episode. Of course their inevitable defeat requires Dellinger to unleash that week’s giant Mecha Fighter, in the hopes that this Mecha Fighter, unlike all the previous Mecha Fighters, will finally defeat Albegas. Dream on, losers.

Mecha Fighter Jazz Hands

Albegas leader Daisaku Enjoji could be any one of dozens of robot anime heroes, a regular teen who loves justice and is great with robots and computers but hates studying and schoolwork, which is why he gets a harsh after-school tutor who turns out to be a Dellinger spy. Daisaku is athletic and popular with the girls, but he’s also required to deliver goofs, blunders, and juvenile lechery, when he isn’t being hassled by his kid brother Jiro and little sister Natsuko, or being disciplined by his blue-collar dad. Of course since Daisaku is the hero, he delivers every episode’s finishing blow with his Denjin Sanbei Sword.

Daisaku and Miss Danko

Tetsuya Jin holds down the “moody loner” position on the team, moody for many reasons, but mostly because because he gets accused of ransacking the school (a Dellinger plot), because he’s an orphan whose only relative is a doctor on a far away island where a local girl gets promised to Tetsuya in marriage (also a Dellinger plot), and also because the girl he actually has feelings for turns out to be the daughter of a Dellinger general as part of yet another Dellinger plot.

Voiced by Hiromi Tsuru (Jodie Foster’s voice in the Japanese version of “Bugsy Malone”), tomboy Hotaru Mizuki is the daughter of the professor responsible for our super robots. She’s the idol of the Aoba School, athletic, brainy, and attractive, but not smart enough to spot Dellinger plots, like for instance when they impersonate her long-dead mother. Aside from defending the Earth, Hotaru’s biggest problem is dealing with the unwanted attentions of classmate Goro, when she isn’t encouraging her dad’s relationship with his assistant Saeko.

Professor Mizuki and Saeko

Goro and his Gori-Robo

Goro Kumai is this show’s Big Moose, a giant goof so jealous of Albegas that he builds his own super robot out of scrap, and so smitten with Hotaru that sometimes viewers will find themselves wondering if they should file a restraining order. Reminded of “Boss” from Mazinger Z? You sure are. Goro’s gorilla-esque Gori-Robo lumbers out to get its robotic ass smacked down by Mecha-Fighter after Mecha-Fighter, episode after episode, but Goro never gives up. Extra comedy relief comes courtesy their homeroom teacher Miss Danko, whose size and demeanor gives Albegas scripters a chance to use up all the fatphobic, misogynist cringe they had left over from the 1970s.

If the “Tetsuya falls in love with an alien girl” plotline feels Acrobunch-adjacent, well, don’t be surprised, Albegas character designer Shigenori Kageyama worked on both shows. Albegas also had mechanical design by Koichi (MD Geist) Ohata, and screenwriter Shozo Uehara worked on hundreds of tokusatsu and sentai series episodes, which might explain the “monster of the week” pattern Albegas adopts early on. Every week some Dellinger infiltrates in disguise, every week their heinous plot is uncovered, every week the Dellinger unleash a giant, havoc-wreaking mechanical beast, which every week is defeated by Lightspeed Electroid Albegas, after another replay of any one or two or six of six different transformation sequences.

Albegas walks a line between super robot drama and high school comedy, and it’s when the show gives in and lets itself be funny that Albegas really entertains. There’s a New Year’s party episode where the heroes and villains relax and enjoy themselves while also conniving to sabotage each other, and the results are surprisingly fun. There’s a story arc involving General Dali and how his daughter Julia sneaks off to Earth to enjoy regular teen life that ends in tragedy and remains an important story point for the rest of the show, including a convoluted yet touching episode where Daisaku’s confused little sister decides she’s really an adopted Dellinger and that General Dali is her real father. At times the series is extremely culturally Japanese, with episodes involving Japanese holidays, traditional Japanese theater, and one built around the folk horror legend of the murdering innkeepers, who are, of course, Dellinger aliens in disguise.

our hero

Albegas was originally planned to be syndicated on American television as part of World Events Productions’ Voltron series, which, as we all know, was built out of King Of Beasts Golion and Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. The story is that WEP saw the positive audience reaction to their Lion Voltron segments and instead of dubbing Albegas, they simply subcontracted for more episodes starring the Voltron Force. However, after watching Albegas, I’m unsure as to how well the series would have fit into the Voltron aesthetic. After two shows full of cosmic adventure, the largely Earth-bound high school hijinks of Albegas would be a definite tonal shift, and handling the cultural Japanese elements would be challenging. I don’t know how WEP would have localized the show for ‘80s TV, but I’m sure the results would have been amusing.

On the whole it’s not hard to see why WEP took a pass on Albegas. The show is dank, the color palette is muted, there are a lot of greys and dull greens and browns, and the animation is utilitarian at best. A lot of anime from this period will have an episode or a sequence that really stands out, where somebody like Yoshinori Kanada would be unleashed for three or four minutes to really show off and blow our minds, but that’s not happening in Albegas. This show’s animation is all subcontractors and sub-subcontractors, the sort of clumsy, outsourced, by the numbers, get it done already look shared with dozens of contemporaneous productions. By no means is this an artistic achievement to be lauded, but… if you were an American anime fan in this period and you’d been seeking out anime on cable and UHF and in the kiddie section of the local video rental, you’d recognize this sort of budget-type dollar-store generic animation instantly, having seen it everywhere from episodes of GI Joe and Transformers to whatever super robots were hiding on discount public-domain VHS. This animation is as 80s as any Pac-Man video game or Duran Duran LP or Members Only jacket. Maybe we shouldn’t be nostalgic for a bad rack zoom or an inept walk cycle, but we are. Deal with it.

things get more animated in the last episode

Just to change things up, Albegas’s final episode features some fun, nicely animated first-person sequences as our heroes zoom through extradimensional space to confront the Great Deran. Yes, the evil aliens and their plot to take over the Earth is defeated, in case you were wondering. These climactic sequences bring to mind 80s first-person shooter video games. Well, by a strange coincidence, Albegas was in fact the basis for a Sega laserdisc video game, titled “Albegas” in Japan and “Cybernaut” in the United States, if it ever made it to the United States, that is. Details are sketchy.

Albegas did appear in the US as “Voltron II The Deluxe Gladiator Set” from Matchbox, which seems to be a repack of Popy’s GC-04 DX Albegas, a toy I wish I’d bought when it was on clearance at K-Mart. With my employee discount it probably would have set me back a whole eight dollars. The DX combination process gives us an Albegas with three sets of arms, an altogether more interesting look than what we got on the TV.

Early in the Albegas series our heroes each have personal commuter-type jet planes that are used to dock with their Alpha, Beta, and Gamma robots. Episode 14 delivers an extremely toyetic upgrade in the form of the New Jet Alpha, Beta and Gamma, each transformable into vaguely robotic forms, and that can combine into the Super Abega and become a Godaikin toy for sale at better toy stores everywhere in the 1980s.

For my part, I first saw Albegas on the shelves as a “Voltron II” in that K-Mart toy department. It would be a few years before I’d first see animated Albegas as one of dozens of anime openings on a tape of anime opening credits, courtesy some fan somewhere with two VCRs, a slew of TV episodes from different shows, and a desire to build a mixtape of OP and ED sequences. That’s where Albegas first hit my eyeballs, Mojo and Korogi ‘73 belting out the catchy theme song that starts off chanting “Gan-gan-gan” before asking us to “get dimension” and “scramble go,” one more colorful high-energy anime OP in among forty or fifty other colorful high-energy robot anime OPs. It’s easy to see where Albegas would be overlooked in a Japanese TV schedule that included Urusei Yatsura, Dr Slump, Tokemeki Tonight, Sasuraiger, Votoms, Dunbine, Orguss, Prowres Sanshiro, Cat’s Eye, and Kinnikuman. American anime fandom in the mid 1980s was too busy drawing Dirty Pair fan artwork and writing extensive Zeta Gundam episode guides to worry about combination robots from two or three seasons ago. But speaking for myself, decades later I’d be throwing down cold hard cash for a Blu-Ray of Albegas, purely on the strength of that opening credit sequence.

Yes, Discotek Media continues their crusade to release the unexpected and brought Albegas to North American home video in a standard-def Blu-Ray disc containing all 45 episodes with English subtitles. You might wonder about video quality with so many episodes stuffed onto one disc, but the show looks fine. In fact higher resolution might not do this show any favors; the show isn’t visually striking or particularly well animated, and seeing it in UHD 4K would only highlight those imperfections. Personally, I’m kind of jazzed that we’re finally getting the full 80s anime experience; not just expensive films and beloved TV series, but also the kind of forgettable programmers that filled time slots and toy store shelves, that caught and held the attention of viewers just long enough to be replaced with next year’s new show. Maybe there’s some version of the world where American kids watched a renamed Daisaku, Tetsuya and Hotaru battle whatever WEP would call the Dellinger in however many episodes survived the standards and practices cuts and were retitled “Gladiator Force Voltron.” But the get dimension we got, where we can enjoy the original and think about what might have been, well, that’s OK too. Now tell Goro to get lost, there’s scramble go lightspeed electroids to combine!

-Dave Merrill

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May The Force Five Be With You

Force Five! Not a wind strength measured with the Beaufort scale. Not the 1981 Robert Clouse action movie starring Hapkido master Bong Soo Han. Instead, five different Japanese animation science-fiction sockeroos entertaining us in the early 80's! If you were watching syndicated TV in those days, you might have caught any one of the five on your local UHF station, localized and packaged by Jim Terry's production company and released en masse to independent stations across North America.

Many times this show is identified as "Shogun Warriors", which is, let’s say, in the right ballpark, but the wrong seating section. Shogun Warriors is a Mattel toy line that repackaged Japanese toys for sale in the American market. This is how us 70's kids got die-cast Mazingers, Raideens, and Daimoses in our Lionel Playworlds and our Toys R Usses along with marketing tie-ins that included a Marvel comic. But there isn't a TV cartoon with the "Shogun Warriors" title, and the question is, why not? Why didn't some exec package the Mattel toys along with the Jim Terry cartoons? This isn't rocket-punch science here. Then again, this is the 70's we're talking about, who knows what kinds of handshake deals were going down in the hospitality suites at the big TV distribution conferences? Jim Terry knows, and he ain’t tellin’ why Force Five compilation films were indeed listed as "Shogun Warriors" in the TV Guides.

 

You can see the early Force Five marketing materials in industry trade magazines, an all-star lineup of UFO Robo Grendizer, Getter Robo G, Space Dragon Gaiking, Planet Robo Danguard Ace, and Great Mazinger. One of these shows would, for some reason probably involving Go Nagai's lawyers, not make the final Force Five team.

Unless you lived in a city with a Japanese-language UHF station, you might not have had a chance to watch the cartoons starring your favorite Shogun Warriors. In fact you might not even know these amazing toys had cartoon tie-ins at all. For a lot of us, the Force Five broadcast was the first time we’d be able to experience something we might have only seen glimpses of, and that something was the Japanese super robot cartoon, brought to us by Jim Terry Productions.

Jim Terry would spend the 80s retooling Japanese shows for the American market, producing several Toei titles for ZIV (Captain Harlock, Candy Candy) and packaging shows from all over the map for a wide variety of home video outfits – Timefighters (Time Bokan) from Tatsunoko, Ninja The Wonder Boy (Manga Sarutobi Sasuke) from Knack Studio, and the Russo-Japanese coproduction he'd retitle Scamper The Penguin. Terry's crew was also responsible for the infamous “Crushers” dub of the Nippon Sunrise film Crusher Joe. Most of the later works would feature musical accompaniment by Mark Mercury's “Bullets” but Force Five thankfully leaves the original music library in place, substituting instrumental versions for tracks with vocals, which work surprisingly well, a testament to composer Shunsuke Kikuchi’s talent.

The final Force Five package wound up being 26 episodes each of the Toei series Danguard Ace, Gaiking, Grandizer, Starvengers aka Getter Robo G, and SF Saiyuki Starzinger, under its new title Spaceketeers. You'll notice how Great Mazinger was mysteriously absent from the final lineup, and we can only speculate as to what kind of letter Dynamic Pro's lawyers sent to Toei's licensing division. How exactly these Force Five episodes aired was dependent on the whims of your home town TV station's program director. For example, Atlanta's Channel 46 aired an hour block of Force Five before a half-hour of Star Blazers on Saturdays for a year or so, making that Saturday morning must-see TV for what we'd later call "anime fans" and leading to any number of conflicts with other, less cartoon oriented Saturday activities. For example one Saturday I had to be at the church yard sale that morning, so I brought a portable B&W television and an extension cord from home, plugged that cord into the wall socket inside the fellowship hall, and ran it out to our garage sale space in the parking lot, just so I wouldn't miss an episode of Danguard Ace and Spaceketeers. Now there's a public display of nascent otakuhood if ever there was one.

As an early 80s Saturday morning TV experience, Force Five met all of our childhood needs by combining super robots, space princesses, evil overlords and wholesale destruction punctuating those Kikuchi soundtracks. Jim Terry's localization is remarkably hands-off, leaving a surprising amount of mayhem and destruction present. The English dubbing is goofy but serviceable, the low points being a few bad celebrity impersonations and some poor attempts at British accents. The least satisfying aspect of Force Five is the limited set of each series, all of which had longer Japanese runs. In practical terms this ensures we never find out if the Krell Corps is defeated or if the Cosmos Queen ever makes it to the galactic center. Of course, compilation versions edited from TV episodes of all five shows aired on cable TV and were released on VHS, so we were able to see a few series' respective climaxes.

Everyone has their Force Five Favorites, but in the interests of fairness we're going to discuss these shows in alphabetical order, and that means Danguard Ace is at bat first. I wasn't a fan of the show when it aired. I was settled into Grandizer and Starvengers and was annoyed at the replacement. Danguard Ace was developed by Leiji Matsumoto and behind the 70s super robot window dressing you can see bits of Space Battleship Yamato, Captain Harlock, and Submarine Super 99 trying to take over. The titular robot itself only appears on the last page of his manga (serialized in Akita Shoten's Boken Oh), and I don't blame him, I don't want to draw the thing either. Danguard is about the race to colonize the tenth planet Promete, one of those mysterious wandering planets Matsumoto would use to good effect later in Queen Millennia. Commissar Krell ("Doppler" in Japan) claims this new planet for his own evil purposes. To back this up he commands the evil Krell Corps from his secret Himalayan base, attacking with legions of mind-controlling-mask-wearing zombies and high-tech robot monsters. The only force defying Krell is the super-weapon Danguard Ace, a collection of clunky aerial vehicles combining into a clunky super robot. Danguard's chief pilot is the young Windstar (Ichimonji Takuma), raised in the shadow of his space pilot father, who vanished mysteriously after betraying his comrades on the first mission to Promete ten years earlier.

 

Turns out Dad was under the control of Krell all along. Eventually he manages to escape with his freedom, but without his memories, still wearing that Krell mind control mask. When Dad, now dubbed "Captain Mask," shows up at the Danguard base in a stolen Krell fighter, he's immediately put in charge of training pilots for the Danguard program, which he does with rigor and ruthlessness. All the while, father and son are oblivious to their familial bond. Oh, what pathos. Windstar learns to pilot the Danguard, Mask grapples with his missing memories, Commissar Krell sends robot monster after robot monster to destroy the Danguard base, and Danguard Ace the robot finally shows up in episode 11. Eventually the entire cast, which includes the comedy relief kid, the comedy relief robot, and the comedy relief monkey, blasts off for Promete.

Suddenly the show's aesthetic becomes more Space Battleship Yamato and less Mazinger Z, reflecting then-current trends in anime. Captain Mask regains his memories and (spoilers) dies a heroic death, mostly because the kids watching the show in Japan hated that character with a passion. Jim Terry's release didn't include the climax of the series, in which the secret of Promete is revealed and Shingo Araki's character designs depict mysterious space women as well as the charismatic and handsome Krell commander Harken, who tries manfully to bring a spark of drama to an otherwise tedious show.

Gaiking may seem like yet another super robot series starring the usual science-center robot team battling the usual alien plot to take over the Earth. What makes Gaiking special is instead of three or five robot pilots, a team of 68 crews the huge Space Dragon, out of which the Gaiking fighting robot is launched piecemeal. The Space Dragon is an impressive Asian-style mecha-dragon, and the feuding between the former baseball-star Gaiking pilot and the rival Dragon pilot leavens the mood as they struggle against Planet Zela's Emperor Darius and his Dark Horror Corps.

 

The sidekick characters get to pilot dinosaur-shaped sidekick fighting vehicles, most notably in the last story arc featuring a huge pitched battle on the slopes of Mt. Fuji (the American version reflects then-current events and labels the volcano as "Mt. St. Helens") that's fun and well-animated, as is an earlier subplot about a Zelan-built robot spy-child who turns against his programming and attacks his masters with his robot Pegasus.

Lots of these unique touches make Gaiking something more than standard super-robot fare, and I can't help but think staff like Akio Sugino and Yoshinori Kanada helped to bring a little spark to the show. I wish I'd paid a little more attention to it during the Force Five days, which as I learned later wasn’t the first time Gaiking had been dubbed into English. In the 70s Toei contracted Honolulu-based outfit M&M Communications to dub Mazinger Z and Gaiking. While the Mazinger Z episodes gained fame due to American cable TV broadcasts and the phonetically-sung Isao Sasaki theme song, the Gaiking dub remained obscure, at least to me, until fairly recently. Also obscured was the Go Nagai/Dynamic Pro origins of the Gaiking concept, which Nagai pitched to Toei in the early ‘70s. Toei later developed the series and credited Sugino, which purportedly came as a surprise to Go Nagai and led to some super robot legal battles.

Go Nagai was, however, fully credited for the next series on our list, UFO Robo Grendizer, or as Jim Terry spells it, Grandizer. It's about a guy named Duke Fleed (in America, "Orion Quest"), whose home planet was attacked by the evil Vegans, from the star Vega, not Las Vegas, tough guy. Fleed ditched his doomed planet in the top secret giant saucer-robot Grandizer, or Grendizer, whichever. Escaping to Earth, he was promptly adopted by the local scientific research institute's Professor Valconian and given a job at the ranch next door, run by Wild West fanboy/UFO enthusiast Panhandle and his daughter Brenda.

 

Johnny, Lance, and the Panhandle clan

Soon enough the Vegans show up to conquer the Earth, while the science center gets a visit from former Mazinger Z star Koji Kabuto, or Lance Hyatt as he's known here. In Grandizer, Koji coasts as a supporting character, flying his homemade UFO against the Vegans, who are a fun bunch of weirdo aliens of varying shapes and sizes. Vegan General Bellicose will belt out ineffectual orders to his subordinate Commander Ding and every once in awhile, Bellicose's face will split open and his four-inch tall wife Lady Gandar will just erupt out of his empty skull to holler at everybody.

peek-a-boo!

When the Vegan scheme of the week threatens Earth, Orion Quest does his thing. Meaning, jumping into the emergency exit chute, zipping through a series of tubes and tunnels, soaring into the Grandizer hangar, exclaiming "Orion Quest!", transforming into his flying outfit, and finally being deposited into the cockpit of the Grandizer robot-saucer combo. When Orion/Duke Fleed feels the situation calls for hand-to-hand action, Grandizer just leaps right out of that saucer and starts kicking robot monster butt with any number of really impressive weapons that include the screw-crusher punch (like a rocket punch, only more pointy), the rainbow beam, the hydro-phasers, the hand beam, the shoulder boomerang, the double sickle, and the Space Thunder.

 

When our heroes aren't blasting alien saucers there's time for romance; Duke and Hikaru/Brenda have a tentative thing while Koji Kabuto says “Sayaka who?” and crushes hard on Duke Fleed's sister Maria, who also survived their home planet's destruction and appears just in time for Grandizer's mid-show power-up which includes zippy new mecha for Lance and Brenda to pilot, and which is also right around the time Jim Terry quit dubbing episodes for us. So we never get to see the awesome combination robot vehicles featured in the second half of the series, and we never get to see Emperor Vega sliced in two with Grandizer's double sickle. Ooh, what a giveaway. Famously popular in Europe, Grendizer’s record-breaking ratings in Italy were used to sell Force Five to American markets.

Spaceketeers, or SF Saiyuki Starzinger, is the wild card in this pack of shows, one with a female lead and nary a combo super-robot to be seen. This science fiction version of the “Journey To The West” Monkey King legend swaps ancient China for outer space. American audiences might not get the Asian mythological references, so Jim Terry renamed the show Spaceketeers, after the Three Musketeers, which fits the show’s aesthetic reasonably well, I suppose. This series was developed by Leiji Matsumoto to replace Danguard Ace in the original Fuji-TV broadcasts, a fact which will become obvious the minute you spot Spaceketeers’ star, the willowy blonde Princess Aurora, one of a long line of ethereal Matsumoto beauties. 

 

As our Spaceketeers story opens, mysterious radiation from the center of the galaxy is turning all animal and plant life into weird monsters rampaging through the galaxy. Princess Aurora’s palace on the moon is destroyed and the Empress, or Dr. Kitty as she’s known in Japan, sends Aurora in the spaceship Cosmos Queen to travel to Galactic Center and deal with whatever crazy thing is causing all this chaos. Three mighty space warriors are assigned as her bodyguards for this journey. The cool, aloof Sir Jogo/Aramos, master of the pocket calculator and the Star Copper, is the leader of a water planet. Porkos, or Don Hakka, is our plump comedy relief guy hailing from some kind of mud planet and whose personal craft is the Star Boot. Jan Kugo aka Jesse Dart is the invincible cyborg bad-boy Monkey King character who must learn patience and courtesy when he'd rather be destroying things in his Star Crow.

Episode after episode our heroes launch from the Cosmos Queen to battle animoids and vegemoids on the way to the Deklos system while the Princess stands around, worries, and changes in and out of various outer space mini-skirts and outer space prom dresses. Characters zip around space in their little space scooters dodging zap rays and giant monsters to encounter the various villainous space armadas that have been warped into action by the Deklos system radiation. 

 

The series has a certain charm, the mythological context works with the SF setting, but the show lacks momentum- at one point the Cosmos Queen just turns around and goes back to Earth because they forgot to turn the TV off, or something. There’s a vagueness to the galactic menace and a weird lack of purpose to the galactic journey of the Spaceketeers, but I guess we should just enjoy the ride; 70s kids across Asia and Europe certainly did.

Last but not least we arrive at my favorite of the Force Five series, Starvengers. This series is the localized version of Getter Robo G, itself a sequel to Getter Robo, the seminal Go Nagai/Ken Ishikawa combination robot series that gave us jet planes that slam into each other to create super robots and battle the underground Dinosaur Empire. Jim Terry didn’t bother with this first series, an understandable move considering the animation is a little primitive and things get a little bloody there when the dinosaurs start getting ripped in half. American viewers began with the fiery funeral of the original Getter Robo robot, and we’re thrown right into Dr. Copernicus building a new, improved Starvengers mecha, finding someone to replace the pilot who died at the end of the first series, and doing both of these things in time to confront the new menace threatening mankind. 

 

The evil hollow-Earth armies of the Pandemonium Empire seek to conquer the surface world with an army of giant robots and secret agents who communicate via mechanical horns (all the Pandemonium people have horns, because in Japan, they're known as the Hundred-Demon Empire, and devils have horns, obviously). Our Starvengers, in their new Star Dragon, Star Arrow and Star Poseidon machines, must battle for the fate of the entire world. Hero pilots Ryo (now Hummer, yes, Hummer) and aloof anti-hero Hayato, or “Paladin”, are joined by comedy relief baseball fanatic Benkei or “Foul Tip.”

The three spend the rest of the series piloting their Starvengers machines against Pandemonium menaces, supported by Dr. Copernicus in his science center and his daughter Ceres/Michiru flying her Space Glider. There are several reasons this series is my favorite. The robot violence is intense and never-ending, the characters are all either driven by revenge or... well, revenge, mostly, and the villains are bizarre Dick Tracy-style freaks and weirdos, including Captain Fuhrer, whose Japanese name was, yes, "Captain Hitler.” 

I only have two Getter Robo G cels, but I like the ones I have

 

The design of the various Starvengers vehicles are sleek, powerful and bold. Both as aircraft and as robots, their 70s muscle car look makes them my favorites. Starvengers subverts expectations as Ceres falls for Paladin, because he’s the coolest, proven as he single-handedly destroys the flying fortress of the Pandemonium Empire in a climax we’ll only see in the compilation film.

Force Five was off the air by ‘83 in most markets, but the series lived on in home video. Family Home Entertainment released compilation films and a few episodes from all five series to the growing home video market, the tapes landing in the children’s sections of many local video rentals across the country. Two different cheap labels would later release the same episodes under the titles “Roboformers" and "Z-Force” on bargain-bin SLP-recorded tapes to fill discount retailer shelves. Best Film & Video would also take a turn with those master tapes, and eventually they’d appear in Suncoast Video as part of the infamous “Spaced Out Japanimation” collection.

In recent years some of these former Force Five properties would make their way to North America in various new forms. William Winckler would produce newly-dubbed compilation films for Starzinger, Gaiking, and Danguard Ace, while crowd-pleasers Discotek Media would put a subtitled version of Gaiking on both DVD and Blu-Ray. However, English-language media still lacks any iteration of UFO Robo Grendizer and Getter Robo G. In a world where children of the 80s still have a soft spot in their heart for Jim Terry’s Force Five, and where properties thought lost or abandoned are being reissued with alarming frequency, can it be merely a matter of time before our 1981 TV Guide dreams are reawakened, and Force Five returns to us in all its Mr. Angelo-dubbed glory? 

-Dave Merrill

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Anime Hell Presents: That 70s Show

Gang, I am super excited about next week's Anime Hell screening at Eyesore Cinema! It's an all 1970s presentation of Manga Matsuri films and TV episodes and commercials and OPs and some special surprises, too. Most everything is in Japanese with English subtitles! 

It's an evening of super robots, tragic orphans, and international thievery as the Japanese animation of the 1970 explodes across the Eyesore Cinema screen at 8pm on February 22! Doors open at 7:30, admission is only $5.00! 

Eyesore Cinema, of course, is one of the last remaining video rental shops in North America, with thousands of films for rent, movies for sale on DVD and VHS, and some records and zines for good measure. Their screening room has quickly become Toronto's home for offbeat screenings, art sales, swap meets, and badfilm uprisings. If you're ever in town you should wander in and spend some money! 

And of course, if you're in town next Saturday you should wander into Eyesore around 8pm, for ANIME HELL PRESENTS: THAT 70s SHOW! See you there!