Monday, June 6, 2016

GHWP Superhero Summer Tuesdays - Spider-Man in Japan


             Venturing farther into the reaches of unknown space, Gaping Head Wound Playhouse comes to rest on Planet Spider. Tuesday nights after #TrashTue this summer, coincidentally falling in line with their June Bugs marathon, #GHWP is happy to present the adventures of Spider-Man. Peter Parker? No. Miles Morales? Guess again. Parallel universe Gwen Stacy? I’ll give you one more chance. The clone Ben Reilly? Now you’re just being silly. It’s none other than Takuya Yamashiro, Toei’s very own Spider-Man in Japan.


             Marvel Comics helped change the landscape of Toei’s superhero universe forever in 1978 when an overseas partnership threw some major new ideas on the drawing board. While American audiences were watching Nicholas Hammond web-swing around the city as Peter Parker, audiences in Japan were treated to Shinji Todo (best known and loved in GHWP circles for playing Metalder's nemesis God Neros) as motorcycle racer Takuya Yamashiro, fighting the forces of evil with a different arsenal of skills and gadgets. Not unlike Peter Parker, Takuya has the tragic death of a loved one on his shoulders that urges him forward against his enemies, but Toei’s Spider-Man is an instrument of vengeance rather than one of power and responsibility. The Iron Cross Army, led by Professor Monster, murders Takuya’s father and comes close to killing Takuya himself, but Takuya soon discovers that there is more than one alien hiding on Earth. The Iron Cross Army’s previous conquest was Planet Spider, and its sole survivor, Garia, followed Professor Monster to Earth to seek revenge.
Overpowered in his final battle against Professor Monster, Garia was trapped in a cavern of poisonous spiders, but Professor Monster did not count on Garia’s ability to endure his imprisonment. It couldn't have had something to do with Garia coming from a planet called Spider, could it? Nah. Silently, patiently waiting for 400 years, Garia finally sees his opportunity and his successor, injecting the wounded Tayuka with a serum of Garia's blood called “Spider Extract.” Takuya Yamashiro’s very DNA is altered, making him both a brother of Planet Spider and of Earth. Takuya Yamashiro is Spider-Man, and he has access to Garia’s entire cache of Spiderian weaponry including the signature Spider-Man uniform known as the “Spider Protector,” the flying Spider-car GP7, and the massive space battleship Marveller that, with a simple command, transforms into the sword-wielding giant robot Leopardon. The Iron Cross Army, big or small, doesn’t stand a chance.


 
Shotaro Ishinomori’s previous formula, successful from 1971-1978 with series such as Kamen Rider and Himitsu Sentai GoRanger, kept its superhero tales mostly at a human-sized level. Mecha, or giant robots, were considered a separate sub-genre of television science fiction, finding their own success in series such as Jonny Sokko and His Flying Robot and Super Robot Red Baron. Ishinomori’s superheroes were more espionage-based action stories, adding costumes and stunts to stories that were more dramatic and closely related to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. or the James Bond franchise with a science fiction twist. Toei’s Spider-Man, however, was the first to blend both of those ideas together, partnering Spidey with a giant transforming robot. Branching away from Ishinomori’s formula once and for all, Toei’s sentai series would come to be known as the Super Sentai series, and every team of Rangers, beginning in 1979 with the Marvel-inspired Battle Fever J, would incorporate a giant transforming robot. Fortunately, Ishinomori’s style and influence remained intact for the Kamen Rider franchise and several other one-shot Toei sentai series, but Super Sentai became forevermore a mixture of costumed heroes and giant robots that progressively relied more on gimmicks and merchandising than plot. 

Change, Leopardon! (Leopardon now available at your local retailer. All parts sold separately and some assembly required and you don't really love this show and have terrible parents if you don't get up right now and BUY ONE!)

Ultimately, this isn’t another sad tale of the West tainting eastern culture because it was Toei’s decision—with some disagreement from Marvel at first—to include mecha in the story, and it seemed as though this was to prevent that sort of thing from happening. Perhaps Toei didn’t think the plain, average, every day American Spider-Man was capable of pulling off 41 episodes of human-sized action drama on his own without the help of a giant robot. Ironically, the giant monster and robot battles barely took up two minutes of each episode, consisting more often than not of repetitive stock footage of the robot Leopardon himself almost never coming into the same frame with his opponent, so, in the end, the success of the series truly did hinge on Spider-Man following roughly the same human-focused superhero formula as the Riders and Rangers that came before him.


With sooooooo much more posing. Move over, Madonna. Voguing didn't start with you.

Under the #GHWP hashtag on Twitter, episodes of Spider-Man will be live tweeting every Tuesday night around 10PM EST following #TrashTue beginning June 7. Streaming availability comes courtesy of Kissasian.com and their beautiful catalog of tokusatsu and Asian drama.



I did mention a lot of posing, right?

 And in case you've been off the radar, #GHWP's flagship series Spectreman is back on Friday nights at 10PM EST following #Kolchak. The hand-talking misadventures of Dr. Gori and Karas are even more fun the second time around.

1 comment:

  1. With much sorrow, this little live tweet had to come to an end after just one month. The powers that be would rather these classic gems stay buried under strict copyright ownership than to see the light of day again as they deserve. Make all of the arguments you want about intellectual property, many of them valid, but this much is a fact: no one wins when you lock your product in a vault to rot. You can't exactly argue a profit loss over free streaming websites when you aren't even selling your existing product and have made public statements the product will not be sold again. The logic is baffling.

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