This TRUTH was, of course, that we'd now reached a point in Western civilization where people would buy DAMN NEAR ANYTHING that had a Japanese cartoon character on it. I'm talking skateboards. "Hook-Ups" T-shirts. Comics drawn in the "manga style" by Americans. And, of course, videos! Videos of new anime releases, videos of anime movies, and videos of anime TV shows from twenty years ago that have been through the "public domain" mill so many times that the "public" is looking desperately around for somebody to take over the copyright just to get it out of the "$1.99 Movies" bin at the Wal-Mart to make way for Dorf golfing videos and remaindered copies of "Batman Forever".
But how to sell goofily-dubbed primitive Toei super robot cartoons to the sophisticated American retailer? One word - packaging.
And that's how Parade Video (distributor of, among other things, the incredible Peter Sellers film THE WORLD OF HENRY ORIENT) came to unleash SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION on the world! Yes, SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION, the amazing 4-tape set that satisfies ALL your Japanimation needs,as long as your Japanimation needs include "buying a Christmas present for that nephew who will NOT SHUT UP about something called "Japanimation". How many kids asked Santa for, say, GUNDAM WING or ESCAFLOWNE videos, and instead found SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION under the tree? Many a forced grin and a stammered "Thanks, Granpa!" would be heard on Christmas morning that year, I can tell you!
Sold through your snappier mall video outlets like the late, lamented Suncoast Video, SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION stands as a testament both to the staying power of cheap, public domain video AND to a public's brief but intense love affair with those big-eyed Japa-heeno cartoons. Not to mention the "throw it all up there and slap a gradiated logo on it" design aesthetic of the 1990s, where minimalism and taste were abandoned in favor of FLAMES!!! and METALLIC SHEEN!!! If there isn't a van out there with this artwork airbrushed on the side, I can only ask "why not?"
And yet, SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION is not without its charms. This 4-tape set devotes one tape each to GRANDIZER, SPACEKETEERS, GAIKING, and STARVENGERS - all Jim Terry dubs from the seminal super robot TV package FORCE FIVE that entertained us all in the fall of 1980 when the world was young and we wanted nothing more than to climb into a flying saucer that jammed itself into a giant robot armed with "hydro-phasers" and "space thunder" like in GRANDIZER. STARVENGERS enlightened us all to the possibility of jet planes that combine to form super robots battling demons, and GAIKING asked the anime question, what if an alien planet was destroyed by a black hole and the aliens attacked Earth which was defended by a giant robot space dragon that launched a horned super robot piloted by people dressed as baseball players? What if? And SPACEKETEERS - well, SPACEKETEERS had Princess Aurora, whose beauty entranced us all whether she was dressed in her space miniskirt or her space prom dress. Missing from the SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION set is DANGUARD ACE, the series where Leiji Matsumoto really started working out his Velikovsky theories about tenth planets careening wildly through our solar system. But they only had room for 4 tapes in the set, so something had to go.
The subject of a wide early 1980s home video release from Family Home Entertainment, the FORCE FIVE shows could be found in episodic and compilation-film versions in your neighborhood video rental shops. A few years later incredibly cheap public-domain video releases with titles like "Robo-Formers" and "Zalo" began to appear in drugstores and discount shops across the land, poor transfers of FORCE FIVE episodes.
On first glance, SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION would appear to be just another cheap, 6-hour speed public domain copy of a copy of a copy release of our old Force Five favorites. But the surprising fact is that, even though these tapes are recorded in the penny-pinching SLP 6-hour mode, the transfers are actually pretty good. Better, in fact, than the video quality of the bootleg DVD sets that are floating around. When we consider that the FHE tapes are starting to disintegrate because of their age, SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION becomes a possible alternative to our other choice, which is the unthinkable possibility of NOT WATCHING SPACEKETEERS EVER AGAIN. And we can't let that happen.
SPACED OUT JAPANIMATION - exploitative bargain-basement video release? Signpost of a time when anime ruled the video stores? Or valuable part of your balanced Japanese cartoon collection? It's all these things... and more.