The Mike Toole Show

Old's Cool

In Captain Future?"  At this point, I was shaken from my inner monologue at the top of my lungs by my wife, who pointed out that it was three o'clock in the morning.  But I couldn't stop thinking about all of the great stuff that cried out for the kind of lovingly detailed coverage Justin provided, so I went and asked Zac for a column.

After ANN's customary rigorous editorial and financial review, Zac said yes.  Wait a minute, he said yes?!

Oh, shit.  What the hell have I gotten myself into?!

Anytime I overhear some kid at a convention talking about "old school" anime, they're inevitably discussing something less than fifteen years old.  Azumanga Daioh?  Old school.  Dragon Ball Z is also old school, which seems somewhat more plausible as it's more than 20 years old. 

However, this gets me thinking about the term "old school," and how each individual might define it.  To younger fans, Gatchaman. 

Stretch the timeline out enough, however, and there's only one Osamu Tezuka, were more or less making the entire craft and industry up as they went along.  These old shows also tend to look dated simply because they're in black and white.  Monochromatic TV was on its way out in the sixties, but there was a narrow window of black and white TV anime stretching from its origins in 1963 to 1969.  That's what I want to talk about in this column-- televised anime's B&W old school, its True first wave.


The first anime TV series was Osamu Dezaki) but it would've been a hard sell to American children raised on comparatively lavish (ha!) UPA animation-- not to mention the fact that heroic Akira injects the serum by jabbing himself with a disguised fountain pen, an act which would have no doubt seen imitative kids in playgrounds across the nation injuring themselves with pen-inflicted stab wounds.

1965 was the big year, not just for black and white anime, but for TV anime in general.  The most obvious evolutionary step was the emergence of a bona-fide trend, which took the form of a string of no less than five Astro Boy copycats.  Well, okay, calling them "copycats" is a little uncharitable, but whereas the productions of the previous two years were all over the map-- a kid and his giant robot here, a cyborg defender of justice there, and even ninjas-- here we'd see several shows in succession, all of them about boy champions of justice with amazing super powers.  Space Ace.  Space Ace (no relation to the Don Bluth-animated 80s video game) actually has an intriguing history in English.  It was dubbed and shown in its entirety in Australia.  Fred Ladd, the man who imported and adapted Astro Boy, Gigantor, and many other productions, liked the look of the show but didn't think it would sell to American audiences increasingly hungry for color productions.  Eventually Tatsunoko would re-animate the entire first episode in color to facilitate Ladd's attempt to sell the show to American TV, but there were no takers.  Therefore, Space Ace remains an obscurity. But getting back to '65--after Space Ace, there was just one Astro Boy-a-like left in the succession, and that was Prince Planet.

Miraculously, Prince Planet is known to western anime fans.  This is mainly because the series was dubbed and shown on American television, by dub makes a number of clumsy sidesteps to avoid onscreen problems like the dastardly Warlock's fondness for booze ("prune juice" in the dub). 


1965 also marked the debut of anime's first color television productions.  Isao Takahata.  The show is whimsical, zany, and fast-paced, and it's a source of constant irritation to me that only four episodes of its 26-episode run are available on DVD in Japan.


By 1966, the flow of black and white anime would start to ebb as the new wave of color productions swept in, but there were still some potent hits. Mitsuteru Yokoyama's Tokyopop) and followed by two theatrical features before the B&W series hit, these exciting exploits of renegade cyborg soldiers taking on a conquest-hungry secret society have gotten the remake treatment not once but twice.

Ironically, black and white anime was just about done for by the time Cyborg 009 reached the airwaves.  There would be only a few productions in 1968, but the honor of being the final black and white anime TV series goes to a little production by Osamu Tezuka called Eiken some years back.  They're working on an 8th Man redux right now.

Hopefully, internet, you now know a bit more about the interesting history of monochromatic Japanese animation.  But the point of this column isn't just to educate.  I'm hoping to stoke some interest, because in spite of the sometimes primitive production values, this stuff is honestly and truly amazing to watch.  There are animation tricks and techniques that most anime studios of today wouldn't even attempt, and wonderful characters and stories galore in this dusty old stuff.  Justin named his column "Buried Treasure" because that's precisely what a lot of older anime is-- and the worst part is, an awful lot of it is truly buried!  Much of Big X's 52-episode run was never preserved and is now considered lost.  Even Astro Boy, the original and (to many) the best, is not available in its entirety in English, because several episodes are just missing.  Why, you ask">Toei has released DVDs of their earliest productions, but full sets are usually not available because various episodes just aren't in good enough condition. 

In the end, though, there's plenty of good old B&W anime to go around.  Astro Boy and Gigantor are both available on DVD, and have each gotten airtime on MGM have really gone above and beyond by making Prince Planet available online.  And if you're willing to go searching, there are volumes and volumes of classic hits like Space Ace and 8th Man available on DVD in original Japanese.  There are a great many of these remarkable shows, just waiting to be discovered by fans both young and old. Massive chunks of these shows remain all but unknown, not just to American fans but to fans all over the world.  So don't just sit there, swashbuckler-- grab your shovel and start digging!

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Astro Boy - 1963 Tezuka Productions
Sennin Buraku - © 1963 Eiken
Big X © 1963 Tezuka Productions

Super Jetter © 1965 Eiken
Patrol Hopper © 1965 Toei Douga
Space Boy Soran © 1965 Eiken
Space Ace © 1965 Tatsunoko
Space Boy Papi © 1965 Eiken

Hustle Punch © 1965 Yasuji Mori / Toei Douga
Rainbow Sentai Robin © 1966 Shōtarō Ishinomori / Mitsuteru Yokoyama / Hikari Pro / Toei Douga