Anime from 1956 The Robot Arsenal the Roots of Saturday Morning Kids TV HD Stereo Corrected Clarity

There seems to be a lot of interest in this historical animated anime series from the 1960s (1950s in Japan). Not only was Gigantor a ground braking series, they were the first TV cartoon series to have part 1 and part 2 episodes, which were 1/2 TV format each. There were many TV series that were chopped up into 4-7 minute episodes part 1 - 5 which were really just 1 1/2 hour format show, but Gigantor was the first that was a full half hour show every week or in the US every weekday!

Today we have Gigantor in Robot Arsenal, the roots of Saturday morning kids TV now in HD, stereo and with improved clarity.

trivia: there were 2 groups of episodes with a part 1 and a part 2, these "pieces' are actually 4 parts of what would have been the Gigantor Spider movie, made in 1957. The financing for the distribution of this movie fell through so the Japanese company, Mitsutru Yokoyama, quickly added a bit of material and turned the footage of the canceled film into the two 2 parters.

Now here is the exciting news, we have gotten hold of the Japanese script for that film, lost totally to history as an edited entity, but not beyond our capabilities to re-create! We at Cartoon Crazys are announcing here and now we will be creating the never seen 1957 movie script from the material available and we will release it before the summer of 2021, as usual, free here on the Cartoon Crazys Channel. It will not be available for sale, you will only be able to see it here on Cartoon Crazys Channel, so subscribe and hit the notification bell and you can be one of the first to see the never before seen Gigantor Movie!

The original Gigantor series was actually called Tetsujin 28-go when it was released in Japan in 1956. Then Fred Ladd had the idea of dubbing this strange (to US audiences) half hour cartoon series into English, packaging it with Speed Racer and searching for a US and Canadian Distributor. He found the Peter Rodgers Organization and made a deal. The US version with English language and edited for violence debut on US Television in 1964. Kids loved Gigantor and made it an instant hit, but parents hated it, protested the violence and widely laughed at it for the terrible English script and the feeling the voice actors had no idea what they were actually saying.

The other problem with this series is that in Japan it was already going on 10 years old, and was very dated to them. It was being eclipsed by The Big World of Little Adam later called Astro Boy in the US. You can see how this series evolved into Astro Boy, the boy in this series that controlled Gigantor with a remote control (Huge and Tesla like) simply became Astro Boy the Boy Robot.

Interesting Trivia fact is that this same group under Fred Ladd were the ones working on Pinocchio in Outer Space, a movie also available on this channel. The difference with Astro Boy was Ladd formed a company with Al Singer called Delphi Associates, Inc - and hired much better Voice Over actors! Bottom line was that there were 52 episodes of Gigantor made in Japan in the 1950s and it did not matter how much of a hit is was in the US Mitsutru Yokoyama had moved on to Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion and Gigantor was done! It was soon lost to time.

A new series for Gigantor was produced in Japan in 1980 and later dubbed into English (better this time) but only got as far as Sci-Fi Channel from 1993 to 1997 as part of their midnight cartoon hour.

Wonder where the movie is? Well it is one of those Hollywood stories, the funding was pulled when the Speed Racer movie ran over budget to south of 100 million and took in less than 14 mill at the box office. Then Mitsuteru went bankrupt, and the other executive producers simply went away.

What we did to make this very nice version of: Gigantor Who? Roots of Kids Anime Robots - Restored Original Japan 1956 Anime with 1963 English Trak:

The Copies I am working from are from the 1956 series in Japan, with the violence left in, it is not violent at all compared to US cartoons today! But here you see how the series was intended to look on TV when it was sent from Japan for its US TV run, however what you saw in the us, and her on YouTube was an edited version of these cartoons, with much of the "violence" removed to satisfy the 1964 era censors!

This is not the best anima TV ever made, but is is the first show made specifically for TV, not the first in the US the first in the World, 1956, the year before I was born!

Thomas R Reich PhD
Cartoon Crazys Channel