Doctor Volga, forgive me!

October 25, 2011 1:32 PM

CHARGEMAN KEN episode 35: DYNAMITE IN THE BRAIN (Youtube, 5:19)
...in which our poorly-animated, generic 70s anime boy superhero finds a unique way to thwart the villains' plans. (Via the excellent let's anime.)

More CHARGEMAN KEN madness:
Episode 1: Danger!! The Children's Space Station ("Men, here are your orders. Kidnap all the children of the world!")
Episode 4: Mysterious Handsome Boy (A good player on the opposing team? You know know he'll turn out to be evil.)
Episode 23: The Mental Clinic of Terror (In which our boy hero goes undercover in a sanitarium! His dad is completely okay with this.)

What the hell IS Barikand anyway? Has there ever been so horrifying a creation?

posted by JHarris (15 comments total)

Yeah, I'll admit this one's a little bleah. For some reason the show cracks me up though, and it's an excuse to link to let's anime, which I love.
posted by JHarris at 2:37 PM on October 25, 2011

You like snacks, Ken?

SO BAD
posted by infinitewindow at 2:57 PM on October 25, 2011

Wow. Five minutes, nineteen seconds, and they still found room for a flashback.

And there are five establishing shots in the first minute of Episode 1!
posted by Iridic at 3:02 PM on October 25, 2011

Maybe dropping the kidnapped scientist/architect out of the superhero spaceship so that he smacks into the alien spaceship and destroys it isn't the most heroic thing ever, but it got the job done.

And the scientist/architect was already murdered. OH SO SAYS CHARGEMAN KEN.

But then, why dies he apologize to the guy ...
posted by Bunny Ultramod at 3:18 PM on October 25, 2011

What I like is that, after seeing him get murdered out of the window of the theater, he doesn't tell anyone, he just goes home like nothing happened.
posted by JHarris at 3:29 PM on October 25, 2011 [2 favorites]

Iridic, according to let's anime, the show was only ten minutes long in total. The YouTube clips excise the five whole minutes of opening and closing sequences repeated in every episode. And what animation there is is extremely limited, like classic Hanna-Barbera limited. The show's budget must have been absurdly low.
posted by JHarris at 3:38 PM on October 25, 2011

You mean that was the entire show? I thought it was edited down to the nub, with lots of missing scenes. Geeze, Japanese kids in the 70s must have been really good at filling in the blanks for themselves. It took me a couple of minutes to realize that they were watching a movie, and not facing an actual dino threat.
posted by Kevin Street at 3:56 PM on October 25, 2011

Yeah, in fact I think one of the little treats of that episode is the opening shot: seeing the Godzilla-like dinosaur filling the screen, then the subtitle DYNAMITE IN THE BRAIN. And it's like half a minute before you get any context at all!
posted by JHarris at 6:32 PM on October 25, 2011

Unfortunately, the episode 23 link doesn't seem to work.

Here's another version where somebody made up their own subs, and it seems to work as well as the other episodes. Quite violent for a kids show.
posted by Kevin Street at 10:51 PM on October 25, 2011

When life hands you kidnapped scientists with bombs in their brain, make grenades.
posted by Zed at 12:17 AM on October 26, 2011 [1 favorite]

Ah Kevin Street, I must have made a typo in composing the link.
posted by JHarris at 2:18 AM on October 26, 2011

Fixed!
posted by cortex at 6:44 AM on October 26, 2011

There is a bit of tomfoolery with episode 23 where the writer of the subtitles is more interested in injecting himself into the text than letting the awfulness of the show shine through, I think. It's like when Everything Is Terrible decides to slow down or creatively edit material to try to make it funnier; it's really at its best when the badness you see is the badness of the original, unmodified. There are one or two more subtitled episodes on YouTube that I didn't link to because of this meddling; they aren't hard to find in searching.

Apparently a lot more of the show is on Japanese video site Nico Nico Douga, but that has a fairly impenetrable interface for a non-Japanese-reader and they seem to insist on having an account before you can watch videos.
posted by JHarris at 8:07 AM on October 26, 2011

I've watched it several times now, and each time it seems a little stranger:
- Why did they use the same background music for the movie dinosaur and kidnapping scenes? When the TV comes up, why do they change the music so it sounds like it's coming from the TV speaker?
- Why is there a full-length mirror in the conference room?
- The sequence is, Ken: "There's a bomb in his skull!" Transformation sequence. Ken carrying Volga through the air to his ship. That must have been an awkward trip outside.
- "You were murdered and turned into a human robot." HOW COULD THAT EXPLAIN ANYTHING TO ANYONE, let alone provide justification for dropping you out of a spaceship?
- They show the clock approach 6 o'clock a couple of times to provide dramatic tension, but we really don't know when the heck the bomb is set to go off.
- When he is ejected from the ship, how does Volga have the foresight to carry his cane with him?
- I ask again, WHAT THE HELL IS BARICAN?
posted by JHarris at 9:30 AM on October 26, 2011

Dun dun dun...... dun dun dun..... dun dun dun...... dun dun dun......
posted by chairface at 10:17 AM on October 26, 2011