The Mike Toole Show

Rocket from the Script

A few weeks back, the ADV Films DVD backstock, was this hat.

Yep, for just one dollar, you could be the proud owner of a Dragon Ball Z guys” race. The cap is gone, but don't worry – you can still get a Blue Gender knit hat for $3.

Seeing the hat and ing Blue Gender was important for me, because in my mental strainings to come up with good subjects for this space, I'd been telling myself that I've already gotten stories about most of the prominent anime creators out there. Tezuka, Ishinomori, Ryousuke Takahashi!

You may be wondering who Takahashi is, because in western fandom, he's never been that big of a name. Well, most people know Ryousuke Takahashi as the leader of the Akagi Red Suns, the street racing group that challenges Takeo in ClassicaLoid.

As a young man, Ryousuke Takahashi attended Yoshiyuki Tomino.

After several years of steady work—episodes of City Hunter” Saeba.

From here, Takahashi remained in demand as a scriptwriter and director throughout the 1970s; you'll find him partnered up with Cyborg 009.

The '79 Cyborg 009 was unique in a few ways. First of all, it was a continuation, assuming the viewer had read enough of Cyborg 009 Vs. Devilman!

Takahashi's Cyborg 009 is well-ed and reliably entertaining, one of those shows that was aired all over the planet—but not in the US, where network executives were busily torturing children with fare like The Super Globetrotters and The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Hour. Interestingly, despite the franchise's popularity (a movie was in production in '79 and debuted in 1980), Cyborg 009 didn't reach the finale of its planned 63-episode run. Much like Yoshiyuki Tomino's contemporaneous Gundam, it was abruptly cancelled with several episodes to go thanks to production and sponsorship issues.

Some work on the 1980 Fang of the Sun Dougram would follow Cyborg 009, but then we got Ryousuke Takahashi's masterpiece. I am, of course, talking about RPG Legend Hepoi. We all this classic, right?

Alright, maybe not so much. (Did anyone watch this as a kid? What was it like?) Hepoi didn't come out until 1990, because the 80s were probably Takahashi's peak period as a creator. He turned in SPT Layzner, the excellent and all-too-obscure (in the west, at least) mecha/fantasy hybrid Panzer World Galient, he wrote the screenplay and story bible for Grandzort, and of course, he created, wrote, and directed Armored Trooper Votoms.

If Gundam signified a shift away from super robots to a more realistic, gritty kind of storytelling, then VOTOMS, hitting the airwaves just five years later, is probably the apex of that shift. It takes place in a far-flung future that is intergalactic, but bombed-out and exhausted in the wake of a 100-year-war. The two major powers have agreed to a delicate cease-fire, but power struggles on both sides continuously threaten the uneasy peace. Life is anything but peaceful for Chirico Cuvie, an armored trooper (AT) pilot on the run from his old military comrades, who'd double-crossed him. All Chirico has are his formidable skills piloting a Scopedog, one of the mass-produced ATs used in the war, a few hardy allies in a small-time arms dealer and his bar staff, and the fleeting vision of a beautiful woman at the facility where his military comrades betrayed him.

From here, Takahashi creates a sprawling mythology involving underground fighting arenas, mercenary squads on a sweltering jungle planet, weird space freemasons trying to grab power behind the scenes by creating the Perfect Soldier, a combatant who can't be defeated in battle, and the mysterious primordial Ur-civilization-planet behind a vast galactic conspiracy. It's here that Takahashi's economical, taut storytelling pays off; he splits the show into four neat, distinct arcs and ultimately creates one of those wonderful anime series that you can just watch in huge chunks, episode after episode. For me, his signature achievement in VOTOMS is presenting viewers with one of the least charismatic robot heroes I've ever seen, a dour, unfriendly man who almost always wears a scowl and is unpleasant to others at best and openly hostile at worst. Still, as Chirico Cuvie gathers a few true friends and starts working his way back up the list of people who betrayed him, you can't help but root for him – even as he's beaten and chased by his tormentors' Perfect Soldier, Takahashi makes sure that you see Chirico as the ultimate underdog, a fighter who rarely escapes unscathed but who just can't be beaten.

A few things worked in Takahashi's favor with VOTOMS. The plastic model kit craze was already underway in 1982, when the show went into planning, so the studio and director were not tied to an onerous toy deal like Gundam was; also, VOTOMS' focus on older heroes (and, consequentially, older viewers) meant that Takahashi was free to create a more ambitious, complex SF story with robots that really did look like mass-produced war machines. But why is VOTOMS fondly ed among mecha fans, but not regarded as a giant of the medium and SF storytelling in general? I have a theory about that, which I refer to as the You Were On TV In the Same Timeslot as Sōji Yoshikawa, really measure up to the TV show's story), but they're still pretty solid and worth a look if you like VOTOMS.

After VOTOMS won a bunch of awards from the anime magazines and proved to be at least a cult hit, Takahashi was prompted to create a follow-up Merowlink. Unlike the original show's mecha pilot, the titular Merowlink is a hardened ground combat veteran who coolly dispatches towering ATs without bothering to use one of his own, sticking to large-bore rifles, traps, and explosives to chip away at his AT foes. Like Chirico, he's a great underdog; it's a shame that this show never made the trip westward. For years, it was rumored that Merowlink's original films were destroyed in a fire, but it eventually came out on DVD, so apparently good copies of the materials were eventually found.

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of VOTOMS is its North American release. I had just made friends with translator extraordinaire Black Lagoon. But while this set seemed to at least do well enough to make a little money, the show's previous, single-disc release, from DVD Ltd., remains one of the worst commercial anime DVD releases ever seen in North America, with muddy video, burned-in subtitles, and in one instance, an entire episode that has the wrong audio track. The thing is, it's late enough in the show's run that nobody ever seemed to notice or complain. If you snapped up this cheap-o version of the show just to have a copy on hand and haven't watched it yet, you probably have it!

Much of Takahashi's other 80s and early 90s output is part of that frustrating subset of older anime that's damn near impossible to see. He helmed a 30-minute movie based on a gag manga called The Devil and Princess Mimi, which ran as an opener for Fujiko Fujio OVA about improving your golf game. Man, it's weird that that never got licensed, huh?

Takahashi also wrote and directed an episode of Gasaraki , which… man, laugh at this series all you want (I certainly did, after its tone abruptly changed midway through), but it's still in print and people still buy the damn thing. Takahashi's next magnum opus would be Phoenix.

We'd gotten some anime versions of Tezuka's Phoenix before – the fun but idiosyncratic film Jungle Emperor, Goku, and Wonder 3, just to name a few. Here, he adapts some of the manga's best-known and most poignant tales—loosely-connected stories about loss, redemption, and rebirth—and gives them a great-looking and engrosdate. The DVD release of Phoenix is technically out of print at this point, but the litebox collection is pretty easy to find for under $20, and is worth seeing. One of the most intriguing things about Takahashi's Phoenix? One of its sponsors was the big public TV station WNET, who had originally intended to air it! Why didn't it go on TV? Maybe anime just wasn't cool enough anymore by the time it was finished.

What's been left to Ryousuke Takahashi in the decade or so since Phoenix? He created and directed the notably ambitious Young Black Jack, which I found a little unsatisfying; too often, the character acted in ways that seemed very un-Black Jack. And just a couple of years back, Takahashi was turning in early drafts for a show that would become ClassicaLoid.

Like so many of his generation of anime creators, Ryousuke Takahashi just seems like an unstoppable force—as long as he walks the earth, there's always a chance for new VOTOMS stories, and there's always a guy you can call if you need an episode of your dumb action cartoon written (and possibly storyboarded) fast. If Chirico Cuvie is the Supreme Survivor, then his creator is the Supreme Scriptwriter. This year, anime fans are watching with great interest as celebrated screenwriter Mari Okada makes her directorial debut; I hope she's as successful in the director's chair as Takahashi has been.