Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1964
Jan. 2nd, 2023 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWith a body of work that’s been added to for long enough to have “developed” by at least some definitions but where taking in every bit of it has become “optional,” “first moments” seem to wind up getting much more attention than the mere early steps that follow them. DC and Marvel comics might come to mind here, or perhaps Doctor Who, but I have to admit that after forming that thought my mind jumped to the first Peanuts comic strip, which I saw many years before seeing just how things got from “the little guy in the plain T-shirt” to “the morose boy in the collared shirt with the zig-zag around it.” Likewise, it was one thing to think about “watching a bit of anime from each of the years since Mighty Atom got on TV,” another to find anime from the first years after its premiere. (Mighty Atom itself did keep getting new episodes until the end of 1963.) When I found “sample fansubs” of Big X, a series that had premiered in 1964, that filled in one of my very last gaps.
Big X was also based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, but it wasn’t adapted by his Mushi Productions. I have to admit its first episode left me with the same “the animation’s not nearly as good as Mighty Atom’s” feeling as when I managed to see the very first two episodes of Tetsujin 28. On the other hand, that first episode had a rather early example of “English tossed into the Japanese dialogue” as gangster Nazis try a mere twenty years after the end of the Second World War (there’s a quick flashback shot of Hitler holding a gun to his head) to recapture the secret of Big X, which was inscribed on a metal plate and surgically implanted in the body of a Japanese scientist. By the end of the episode, though, that secret is now safe in the hands of the late scientist’s son Akira, who can transform into a stories-high giant in a still somewhat German army-like outfit, Big X himself. I was able to watch two more episodes of the now mostly lost series, which had improved animation if fewer tiny “cartoony-comedic” moments. The last one I watched featured a flying boy robot (named “Pete,” mind you) and happened to bring in a girl named Nina as Akira’s companion. Her usual character design has her legs come to sharp points rather than feet, but she did just happen to mention her “telepathy” along the way, which would make her something other than “a potential person at risk.” I can admit now that in watching my sample episodes of Mighty Atom and noting there were female characters every so often, but not major recurring female characters yet, I was inclined to draw a contrast between then and now.
In considering 1964 I recalled the stories of Osamu Tezuka getting to the New York World’s Fair and meeting Walt Disney, who went so far as to bring up Astro Boy. I have to admit that when I first saw them it was in a context where I wondered if they were somehow “tales passed along from fan to fan to the point of disconnecting from actual proof”; then, I read Frederik L. Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays, which included the story and also mentioned the stories of Stanley Kubrick contacting Tezuka about doing design work for a science fiction movie in preproduction only for that to fall through. In that case, I have to admit to wondering, given the impression I’ve formed of 2001: A Space Odyssey from some of the more perceptive early reviews if only to avoid the risk of “forever lamenting what was on screen didn’t show up in the real world at the proper time,” if Tezuka’s designs would have somehow been presented in a “this future doesn’t just have banal real-world dialogue and people becoming more machine-like than their artificial intelligence, but features somehow infantilizing design work” way...
Big X was also based on a manga by Osamu Tezuka, but it wasn’t adapted by his Mushi Productions. I have to admit its first episode left me with the same “the animation’s not nearly as good as Mighty Atom’s” feeling as when I managed to see the very first two episodes of Tetsujin 28. On the other hand, that first episode had a rather early example of “English tossed into the Japanese dialogue” as gangster Nazis try a mere twenty years after the end of the Second World War (there’s a quick flashback shot of Hitler holding a gun to his head) to recapture the secret of Big X, which was inscribed on a metal plate and surgically implanted in the body of a Japanese scientist. By the end of the episode, though, that secret is now safe in the hands of the late scientist’s son Akira, who can transform into a stories-high giant in a still somewhat German army-like outfit, Big X himself. I was able to watch two more episodes of the now mostly lost series, which had improved animation if fewer tiny “cartoony-comedic” moments. The last one I watched featured a flying boy robot (named “Pete,” mind you) and happened to bring in a girl named Nina as Akira’s companion. Her usual character design has her legs come to sharp points rather than feet, but she did just happen to mention her “telepathy” along the way, which would make her something other than “a potential person at risk.” I can admit now that in watching my sample episodes of Mighty Atom and noting there were female characters every so often, but not major recurring female characters yet, I was inclined to draw a contrast between then and now.
In considering 1964 I recalled the stories of Osamu Tezuka getting to the New York World’s Fair and meeting Walt Disney, who went so far as to bring up Astro Boy. I have to admit that when I first saw them it was in a context where I wondered if they were somehow “tales passed along from fan to fan to the point of disconnecting from actual proof”; then, I read Frederik L. Schodt’s The Astro Boy Essays, which included the story and also mentioned the stories of Stanley Kubrick contacting Tezuka about doing design work for a science fiction movie in preproduction only for that to fall through. In that case, I have to admit to wondering, given the impression I’ve formed of 2001: A Space Odyssey from some of the more perceptive early reviews if only to avoid the risk of “forever lamenting what was on screen didn’t show up in the real world at the proper time,” if Tezuka’s designs would have somehow been presented in a “this future doesn’t just have banal real-world dialogue and people becoming more machine-like than their artificial intelligence, but features somehow infantilizing design work” way...