Gigantor Set 2 (1964)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Jack Curtis and Fred Ladd
Directed by Fred Ladd

Features:

• Director’s commentary on first three episodes
  
• Essay by noted anime historian
  

Doc's Anime Warnings:

• Morality as black and white as the picture
• Cheezy dialogue
• Transparent plots

Released by: Rhino
Region: 1
Rating: NR, suitable for all audiences
Anamorphic: N/A, appears in original 1.33:1 ratio

My Advice: Anime historians or nostalgic 30-somethings should at least rent.

Back for another bevy of black & white butt-kicking, this set contains the second half of the American television run of anime grandpappy Gigantor -- 27 more episodes of simplistic, early Cold War robotic badness. For those in the audience that don't know Gigantor, it's a very simple premise: He's a gee-whiz fresh-faced school boy with a too-simple joystick controller and access to a rich professor's private jet. It's a massive, rocket-pack wearing, steel-clad ass-whipping robot of doom. They fight crime!

If you're looking for poignant and clever commentary about the social insanity of the McCarthy era and the first tense years of the Cold War, this ain't your cup of tea. The robot does precisely one thing well -- it stomps the crap out of wannabe terrorists and criminal masterminds. Pretty much every plotline will at some point boil down to Gigantor stomping something flat. If this sounds too simplistic, that's because it is. As one of the earliest examples of anime, it predates the daring exploration of the medium that made it such a broad-ranging cross-cultural phenomenon later. This was just a kid's show. Dialogue is painfully cheesy in places, the animation is occasionally repetitive, and the stories are dirt basic. None of these has anything to do with my unconditional love of Gigantor. It's a part of my childhood the way that cartoons on Saturday morning and a paralyzing nightly fear of nuclear apocalypse were.

The show looks surprisingly good for its advanced age. The audio mix is as good as can be expected from four-decade-old mono originals, and the picture is free of lots of scratches and blips. There are, naturally, some blemishes from time to time, but nothing so pervasive as to be distracting. It's amazing that such a quality print existed to create the DVD transfer in the first place, and the transfer doesn't add any artifacting or loss of clarity at any point.

The DVD includes a few special features, which is pretty impressive considering the relative obscurity and age of the title. Fred Ladd, the uncredited director (and writer in many cases) of the English translation of the show, provides a commentary track on the first three episodes, though it isn't really all that impressive a commentary. It's like having Fred sit in your living room and occasionally say something about the show, but for great stretches of the shows, he's not saying anything. None of his comments are particularly enlightening or really address things like the technical challenges of the show (assuming there were some at some point). There's also an essay by an anime historian, who provides an excellent sense of Gigantor's importance as one of the earliest butt-kicking robots in the anime world. It would have been nice to have the option of Japanese language tracks, as is so common with most anime titles, but no such luck.

So, if you're within rock-chucking distance of 30 or 35 years old and remember this bad boy, I highly recommend picking them up, even if it's only for a night's rental to go back to being five again. Settle in with a bowl of popcorn and let the tribal bassline of the themesong wash over you, and forget all about mortgages, car payments, dental insurance, and the like. It's damned effective therapy, if you ask me. For you whipper-snappers that don't remember the show, there's probably not much here for you (unless you happen to be fan of old cheeze-laden animation shows from before your birth)