puppets for peace

The guy who does the www.astroboy.tv site tipped me off recently NHK
released a DVD called "Puppet Chronicle Series Vol.3", I forgot if I
asked for more info, but I eventually tracked it down. the cat# is
ASHB-1117 and "Floating City 008" in Japanese is printed very large on
the package. It's NTSC Region 2 protected. I got it from Amazon.co.jp

Apparently it's a documentary on TV shows featuring puppets and this
volume focuses on three 1960s TV shows featuring the puppetry of the
Takeda Marionettes. What's of interest here is Tomita seems to have
cornered the market on sci-fi action starring puppets having scored all
3 spanning the entire decade. Japan's Barry Grey.

What you get is a documentary framework featuring interviews with a now
elderly Sennosuke Takeda some behind the scenes photos and a 1960s
documentary film on the life of a puppet master. Each of the 3 shows is
represented by a pretty much intact example episode. Not really as music
intensive like some anime all the shows have themes and incidental music
by Tomita and he's mentioned as a core creative member but not seen or
interviewed. He's listed 3rd on the shooting script covers seen before
each show.

The first show is "Spaceship Silica" (1960) which is pretty much just a
space adnevture and the b&w video looks kinoscope relatively degraded.
You can see though that these characters are close designwise to the
Japanese stop motion animation used in the Rankin Bass Xmas shows

The second show is a major curiosity "Galaxy Boy Troop" (1963 B&W) It's
a very early Tezuka TV series featuring the characters as puppets rather
than animation, but making it even more unique, I guess the special
effects proved lots of trouble in miniatures so any shots of spaceships
and future cities, planet flybys are all cel animation. This one isn't
great image quality but better, it seems to be on 16mm film. Now for the
odder part it's got huge French subtitles on the film (not for the DVD).
I guess the image quality was best on this version I guess for France.
There is some French narration overdubbed too but the characters speak
japanese. Maybe they tried to talk over a foreign language like they do
a lot in Easter Europe but then resorted to subtitles as the show is
pretty dialog heavy. Quite fun.

The third one is in color and my translation is "Aerial City 008" (1969)
this one is clearly influenced by Gerry Anderson's UK shows like
Thunderbirds down to it being about an International SOS team organized
to intercept disasters. It's much lower budget than Anderson at his
height but has plenty of late 60s decor and the main characters, who are
japanese look exactly like Chappie (the late 1990s Groovisions idol
character with lots of character goods, pop CDs and appearances in
inbternational art galleries) while the international cast characters
have huge noses. It has that very groovy theme song with that
enthusiastic female singer. The image quality is high though it seems to
have it's title sequence faked or reconstructed. Maybe the shows were
archived without titles or this came from a foreign source (remember the
BBC found a lot of early Dr.Who in South Africa after their own archives
were disposed of). The end credits and openning narration are in british
accented english which would support that theory.

The pictures on the back of the box are from different episodes than the
ones on the tape, must be stock shots.