Destroy All Podcasts DX Episode 141 - Dinosaur War Aizenborg (a.k.a. Attack of the Super Monsters) Episode 1
Hosts: Betty, Dylan, Jeremy, Nat, Zuey
This is about hyper-intelligent, subterranean, fire breathing dinosaurs with mind control eye lasers. This show is animated. It's tokusatsu with guys in rubber monster suits. It's stop motion clay dinosaurs. It's puppets. It's all this and so much less.
Click [HERE] to turn all dogs into red angry monsters.
More pictures after the cut.
Yeah, that's sure a sweet American cover!
Guy in a rubber suit.
Stop motion clay dinosaurs.
Lazy animation for lazy characters!
This dissection is going strangely.
Bionic twincest gattai!
Eye sparkle!
| Posted 24 May, 2010 - 03:11 by Destroy All Pod... |
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Comments
18 comments postedJoking apart, is there anyone who wants to see the whole series in DVD quality .avi? I have the links to all the episodes in Italian/Japanese. Contact me if you're interested. Thanks.
Again, because Italians ended up getting more than we Americans did in the 80's when it came to weird Japanese imports.
Count me in I guess!
HOLY S**T You are talking about Aizenborg?!!!
Do you have any idea how famous this show is in the Arabian Gulf region?!! Ask anyone who is over 20 or close to 30. It's a classic!
Known to the Arabic fans as "Iron Man" ((Not to be confused with the Marvel character)), and a lot of fans consider the dub as one of the best with voice acting and how the voice actors capture the personalities of the characters perfectly. The names were changed, but that was the norm back in the days.
We got the whole series ((although some episodes were out of order)), and I don't think there was any edited-out violence scenes.
Anyway, this is a rare show and I don't think you can find a lot of fans of the show beyond the Arabian fans.
If you'd want to search for the Arabic dub on youtube.com, copy and paste الرجل الحديدي or الرجل الحديدي الحلقة الأولى.
*Edited for language*
You know, I am constantly surprised how many obscure Japanese shows are wildly popular in other parts of the world. Many of these shows were just flash in the pan direct to video releases in the US, but wow, I'm pretty surprised to hear it was a big hit in that part of the world!
I think Golion is a good analogy here. It was a huge hit as Voltron in the US, but was just another giant robot show in Japan. Successful enough to have a nice 52 episode run, but you don't see sequels and revivals of Golion in Japan like Voltron has gotten in the US.
I mean, remember back when we we did "More Than Meets The Eye"? We were talking about how the animation in The Transformers was just fundamentally different from the standard American TV style that had been invented by Hanna-Barbera.
Also, it could just be familiarity versus uniqueness. Voltron, for a lot of people, was their first exposure to the super robot and sentai genres; the fact that Golion was nothing new to the Japanese didn't matter because we'd never seen anything like it before. (You can say the same thing about Robotech's constituent elements; Mospeada is hardly anything exciting to the Japanese.)
Well, don't lay limited animation at HB's feet. UPA did Gerald McBoingBoing in the early '50s, long before Scooby Doo and the like. And while shows like Rocky & Bullwinkle used limited animation, they used it to present an interesting style inspired by abstract expressionist art. I think the trap here is to think that one is better than the other. It's merely different.
Limited animation CAN be crap (witness Clutch Cargo), but hey.
For Voltron, yes, it was nothing new to Japan. Macross, however, was a huge sensation in Japan and still is popular today despite in many ways being a combination of Yamato and Gundam. Southern Cross and Mospeada were not why Robotech was popular.
I didn't really mean that American animation was "crappy and cheap", so much as it was stylized and representational in a cartoony manner. And it was nonthreatening in a very calculated way; even nominally-action stuff like GI Joe and He-Man went out of their way to focus on property destruction and clearly show all the people getting out alive. While they toned Golion WAY down to turn it into Voltron, it still had something of an edge.
As for Robotech: My point is that American fans still have impressions of Mospeada and Southern Cross as being important because they were part of Robotech, whereas Japanese fans didn't like those shows even when they were new.
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"All the dogs in this sector have turned into red monsters!...don't tell me that it's impossible!"
You said it was "better than homegrown stuff", but anyway. Remember that American cartoons were originally theatrical shorts before movies and both short and movie were intended for adults. It was much, much later that cartoons became a kids only thing in the US. The carefully calculated non-dangerous feel you refer to was brought on by the deregulation in the late '70s/early '80s that allowed TV shows that were just advertisements for toys for children. Bullwinkle is a great example because that's a show that is bright and fun for children but almost all of the jokes are really only understandable by adults or at least teenagers. It's not a hyperviolent action cartoon, but let's say The Simpsons did not invent that style.
I LOVED THIS AS A KID!
I need to see Attack of the Super Monsters again.
Also, I saw some pics of what happens later in the series. Think Ultraman, is all I'll say.
Kindly contact me via email and I'll send you the whole series in DVD quality in Italian/Japanese.
Actually, I'd like to find a working torrent for the dubbed compilation film out of nostalgia.
I just bought the dub DVD used off Amazon for like ten bucks: http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B000PKG8X8/ref=sr_1_olp_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1274826377&sr=8-1
I assume this is the Gemini twins' bionic combined mode growing to gigantic proportions?
The whole combining thing reminded me of what happens in Magne Robo Gakeen (or "Magnos the Robot" as per US dubbed compilation movie) where the two characters pull the same stunt too.
That was the line I often use to describe "Attack of the Super Monsters" upon my first viewing of it many moons ago. Gerry Anderson if only for the models thing, Yoram Gross for the use of live-action photography as the backgrounds of the series (Dot and the Kangaroo brings this to mind), and Sid & Marty Krofft for the goofy dinosaurs (or thinking back to Land of the Lost, since that was a cool show). Otherwise, it's a pretty unusual and bizarre entity in anime's past (the dog plow thing will never leave my brain).
I think Tyrannus' voice in this was done by Mike Reynolds, a lot of Robotech regulars were on this one.
Being reminded of one of the team members resembling Charles Nelson Reilly in this cartoon (if only for the glasses).
Yeah, Cam Clarke was a lot of people in this in addition to being Leonardo and Max Sterling.
Also apart from Kaneda in Akira, I found it amusing he even voiced "Snoopy" in a few places.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p77Az5Lmn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W_mXGcqoSs
One of the things that stuck with me about this was the theme song used after the twins become Gemini.