Gigantor

jpn Tetsujin 28, aka Tetsujin 28-go. 1963–65. TV series. Black and white. (52 X 30 min., Japanese series: 97 X 30 min.) Super robot adventure. org Mitsuteru Yokoyama (manga). mus Toriro Miki. -jd

The very first giant robot anime series, Gigantor tells the story of a powerful machine that can be used for good or evil, controlled by a young boy through a remote-control box.

Jimmy Sparks (Shotaro Kaneda) is a twelve-year-old boy who controls a giant robot, Gigantor (Tetsujin 28), through a radio transmitter box topped by two joysticks. When summoned by the bumbling policeman Inspector Blooper (Inspector Otsuka), and with the occasional assistance of scientist Bob Brilliant (Dr. Shikishima) and secret agent Dick Strong, Jimmy travels all around the world to solve crimes and foil plans for world domination with the help of his powerful robot. Even without Gigantor, Jimmy Sparks is a formidable force; a famous boy detective before he was entrusted with Gigantor’s remote controller, Jimmy is an energetic overachiever who lives alone in his own mansion, and operates all sorts of adult equipment, including cars, speedboats, pistols, and jets. Gigantor has no intelligence of its own, so it’s up to Jimmy to decide how to use Gigantor’s rocket-boosted flight capability, bulletproof armor, and mighty punches. The remote-control console is Gigantor’s greatest weakness—anyone who gets hold of the transmitter box can command Gigantor to do whatever he wants, for good or for evil.

The action almost always begins with a mystery: a kidnapping, industrial espionage, or terrorist act leads Jimmy and Inspector Blooper to a secret base or a diabolical invention that Gigantor must smash. Other stories revolve around villains’ efforts to seize control of Gigantor itself by stealing its remote-control box. Most major villains take two or three episodes to defeat, and sometimes return later in the series to seek revenge. Gigantor’s tactics involve flying at great speed, providing a defensive shield against missile attacks, and tossing tanks around like Tonka toys. Like Max Fleischer’s Superman cartoons of the 1930s, Gigantor is filled with unscrupulous scientists and aspiring dictators trying to take over the world, and only the awesome power of Gigantor can save the day.

Gigantor’s animation was created in black and white, like several other early anime series (Astro Boy and 8-Man being two such examples that were shown on U.S. TV). Unusual design work and compositions often make up for limited motion, such as inventive aerial shots over the top of Gigantor’s head, or worm’s eye views of cars or tanks rolling overhead. Characters strike dramatic poses, fingers pointing out of the camera frame at tilted angles. One scene even places our point of view inside a character’s mouth, peering out between his teeth as they gnash open and closed. Other experiments with animation techniques were less successful—beads of nervous sweat tend to look like acne outbreaks and smoke clouds like inky puffballs—but Gigantor’s action scenes still have the power to excite. A burst of electricity surrounds the robot’s metal body just before it launches into the sky, fists upraised in a superhero pose.

Gigantor’s character designs are campy in the manner of very early Walt Disney cartoons. There are comically huge eyes, oversized jacket buttons, and gravity-defying pompadour hairdos. Bob Brilliant and Dick Strong are relatively handsome (and virtually identical, save for the fact that Brilliant wears glasses), but the fumbling Inspector Blooper is squat and clownish, with an upturned mustache. Jimmy is sharply dressed in short pants with a plaid suit jacket and tie.

The globetrotting adventures take place in exotic locations—India, Australia, Africa, the Middle East, and tropical islands, although the depictions of these far-flung places are often far from accurate. “Treasure Mountain!” features South Americans wearing Mexican sombreros, and “The Secret Valley!” shows Australian aborigines riding horses and wearing feathered headbands like Native Americans in a cowboy movie. The enemy mechanical devices that Gigantor fights follow an animal theme—there are robotic penguins, turtles, whales, octopi, kangaroos, a gorilla, a mole, a cobra, and airplanes constructed to look like manta rays, among others.

Debuting in the U.S. in 1965, Tetsujin 28 was one of the earliest anime TV series to be translated into English. Retitled Gigantor, the English version was set in the far future, in “the year 2000,” and featured an all-new musical score and a catchy opening theme backed by bongo drums. The characters were renamed in the style of crime-fighting comic strips like Dick Tracy, with villains sporting monikers such as The Spider, Mr. Ugablob, Double-Trouble, and Mr. Nefarious. Only fifty-two episodes (of a total of ninety-seven Tetsujin 28 episodes) were adapted into English. The robot’s origin story as a superweapon created by the Japanese military during World War II was omitted, as was the first appearance of his most infamous opponent, the robot Black Ox. The series was also edited for violence, although to modern eyes, Gigantor is amazingly violent for a children’s cartoon. No episode is complete without gunfire, explosions, screaming artillery shells, or an entire fleet of battleships. Characters fight with knives, brandish pistols, face off against whole armies with machines guns. Vehicles explode and burn, with only the occasional voiceover to reassure viewers that the occupants “got out.”

The legacy of the Japanese series behind Gigantor is obvious: as the first bona fide “giant robot” anime, Tetsujin 28 launched an entire genre of anime revolving around humanoid fighting machines. But the English series is also worth watching for its strange prescience about certain elements of international politics: Jimmy uses the phrase “weapons of mass destruction” when talking over a case with Inspector Blooper; full-scale war breaks out over natural resources in “The Great Hunt!”; in “The Submarine Base!” terrorist bombs left on a train and tucked inside shelved toys at a store create a citywide panic; the villain of “Trap at 20 Fathoms!” kidnaps scientists to build him a nuclear arsenal; and radar operatives mistake a flock of birds over the ocean for enemy aircraft in “The Mystery Missile!” The world of adults was clearly insane, conscientious scientists like Bob Brilliant aside, and only a superpowered robot controlled by a twelve-year-old kid had any hope of bringing order and sanity.

Of the later sequels and remakes, the 2004 TV series is closest in spirit to the original Tetsujin 28, preserving the original title and names for the first time in English translation. (A 1980 color remake was adapted into English along the same lines as Gigantor, keeping both the new music and the established character names.) Directed by Yasuhiro Imagawa (Giant Robo), the 2004 series is set in 1956 Japan, the same postwar timeframe as the original manga. Manga artist Mitsuteru Yokoyama had seen the devastating aftermath of World War II with his own eyes and created Tetsujin 28 to be a parable about technology’s dangers as well as its benefits. Inspired by the German V2 rocket project and the American movie Frankenstein (the series cocredits Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley, for inspiring Tetsujin 28’s character concept), the Tetsujin Project was the perfect illustration of Cold War tensions—a superpower that was only as safe as the people who had their hands on its controls.

A live-action movie version produced in 2005 updated the story once again to the modern day. The wartime origins of Tetsujin were preserved, and the computer-generated robots were well rendered, if sluggish, but a disappointingly inept and whiny Shotaro was a letdown compared to his action-oriented anime ancestor. The 1992 series Tetsujin 28 FX, set in the year 2002 and featuring the adventures of the original protagonist’s son, is still unlicensed for English as of this writing.

The machinations of evil mastermind Spider cause a blackout on his island stronghold in “Return of the Spider!” and his entire private army, along with Dick Strong (undercover as usual), is reduced to pairs of blinking animated eyeballs in the darkness. Meanwhile, on Bob Brilliant’s island stronghold, mobsters trying to break into his villa to steal an experimental device fall prey to Home Alone–style booby traps set by Jimmy Sparks, including a basket of pincher crabs dumped on their heads.

“The Submarine Base!” shows Jimmy Sparks at his best: the boy detective goes on a solo mission in which he pilots a speedboat, scuba-dives to a hidden underwater base, and then kung-fu fights his way through a gang of henchman to escape, rescuing a kidnapped scientist while he’s at it, all without the help of Gigantor.

The first two episodes of Yasuhiro Imagawa’s 2004 remake series retell Tetsujin 28’s origin story in beautiful, modern animation, complete with Tetsujin 28’s red-eyed autopilot rampage before Shotaro is able to retrieve the control box. There is also an impressive showdown between No. 28 and a rival robot, No. 27, and in an anime in-joke to another classic series, No. 27 is drawn to look like a mechanical version of the famous boxer Joe from Tetsuya Chiba’s Ashita no Joe.

Tetsujin 28 (1959–60, radio drama)

Tetsujin 28 (1960, live-action TV, 13 eps.)

Tetsujin 28 (1978, radio drama)

Tetsujin 28: Messenger of the Sun (aka The New Adventures of Gigantor, 1980–81, OAV, 51 eps.)

Tetsujin 28 FX (1992–93, TV, 47 eps.)

Tetsujin 28 (2004, TV, 26 eps.)

Tetsujin 28 (2005, live-action movie)

Tetsujin 28: Moon at Midday (2007, movie)

The original run of Tetsujin 28 on Japanese TV is rather complicated and often results in conflicting episode counts: a first run of eighty-four episodes aired in Japan between October 20, 1963, and May 27, 1965, including a special compilation episode that aired the week after episode 11, and a second batch of thirteen episodes aired between September 1 and November 24, 1965.

The English theme song, with its bongo-drum backbeat and deep male voices chanting “Gigantor! Gigantor! Gi-gaaaAAAn-tor!” was created by Lou Singer and Gene Raskin to replace the original Japanese theme song (a jaunty tune reminiscent of a polka, sung by lilting male voices). It’s an undeniably catchy song, and has been covered by the punk bands The Dickies and Helmet.

The 1980–81 OAV was originally titled Tetsujin 28, but was later changed to Tetsujin 28: Messenger of the Sun to distinguish it from the earlier TV series. It was broadcast on the Cartoon Network under the title The New Adventures of Gigantor in 1993.

The Brocken, a mecha that appears in Patlabor, is an homage to Tetsujin 28, and the Griffon mecha, also from Patlabor, was inspired by the design of the villainous Black Ox.

Fred Ladd supervised production of the English version of Gigantor and did the same for Astro Boy, the first anime series to be broadcast in the United States, and Kimba the White Lion. He was later involved in the adaptations of Speed Racer and Sailor Moon. Billie Lou Watt, the English voice of Jimmy Sparks, also dubbed the voices of Astro Boy and Kimba. Other cast members included Peter Fernandez, Sonia Owens, Ray Owens, and Gilbert Mack, who all worked on the English versions of Kimba, Superbook, and The Flying House.

violence By today’s standards, Gigantor breaks every rule for children’s TV. There is full-scale warfare, including tanks, battleships, and even nuclear missiles. There are kidnappings, suicide, and child endangerment. Preteen Jimmy shoots pistols and rifles. advisory There are also some uncomfortable racial caricatures.