Flinthart’s review: One of the things I enjoy about being a Mutant is that I get the chance to revisit the weird shit I couldn’t quite nail down in my childhood and youth. Case in point: “Giant Robo” – or “Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot” as it was renamed for the USA (and Australia.) Mind you, they didn’t just rename it. They redubbed it (naturally) and then gave the writing credits to one “Reuben Guberman,” and blamed the production on Salvatore Billitteri.

Look, I may be a clueless gaijin but frankly I don’t think Reuben and Salvatore really had a whole lot to do with the creation of a Japanese TV show about a weirdly well-dressed little boy with a wristwatch that lets him control a gigantic, vaguely pharaoh-themed murderbot.

Hmm. Probably let the cat out of the bag there once I mentioned a gigantic robot and a little kid, right? I mean, it’s Japanese, so right away you know the whole sushi-shoving show is gonna be about the kid using his giant robot to fight off gigantic monsters sent by alien invaders. Because judging by the history of Japanese cinema and television, aliens attacking earth with gigantic monsters would appear to be the single most common threat to world peace that there has ever been. Climate change? Overpopulation? Biodiversity collapse? Don’t be stupid, gaijin! It’s gonna be aliens with gigantic monsters!

Anyway. My parents brought me to Oz when I was unfeasibly young (Year 3 in primary school, which is Oz-speak for ‘Elementary School’ if I remember my Merkinese correctly.). We set up way, way up north in Far North Queensland – Cairns, if you wanna look it up – and back in the day it was such a total cultural backwater you couldn’t even get yoghurt happening. (Get it? Bacterial culture? Yoghurt? Aww, come on!) To top it off, my parents were of the ‘TV Rots Ya Brain’ school (that’s right, kids: back then we had to rot our brains with black-and-white moving pictures on a cathode-ray tube because nobody had figured out what mobile phones were good for yet) so we didn’t even have a television.

I was a weird kid already. I liked reading, for example. That didn’t go over so well in the Deep North. And of course, I had the funny Merkinese accent, so I was the subject of considerable suspicion at school. When they discovered I didn’t have a TV and therefore I wasn’t watching the adventures of Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot (see? I got there. You just have to be patient, that’s all!) that was the absolute end. It meant I couldn’t run around the school flailing my arms stiffly and pretending to annihilate stray teachers with my missile-fingers. It meant I didn’t have a reason to dash off to home at 3.30 every afternoon. And most of all, it meant that I pretty much had no idea what every other kid in the class was talking about most of the time.

C’est la guerre. I did a lot of reading. My brain didn’t rot. But I always wondered what the hell Johnny Sokko got up to with his Flying Robot. Cue a few decades down the track, now I’m a Mutant, and I can bloody well find out for myself.

I did. Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot is online if you’ve got a yen to indulge in some rubbersuit-giant-monster shenanigans that make the worst excesses of Godzilla look like Citizen Kane. But honestly, I can’t recommend it.

First: Yeah, I was right. The kid and his Flying Robot are fighting giant monsters brought to destroy human civilisation so an alien named Emperor Guillotine (whose outfit is so completely pants that I can’t tell whether the shiny blue lump of ugliness atop his shoulders is meant to be his alien head, or some kind of cheap mask) can take over. Emperor Guillotine, who arrives on earth for Ep 1 in what the narration calls “a weird UFO” hangs out on the bottom of the ocean, sending orders to his minions the Gargoyle Gang by way of video link. (Far out, Daddy-o! Futuristic technology!)

The Gargoyle Gang are a bunch of hapless, clueless munters who dress kind of like the Wehrmacht if Hugo Boss had been a big fan of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Mostly the dreaded Gargoyle Gang seems to exist purely to get into firefights with UNICORN – some kind of UN based agency tasked with battling alien invaders while wearing absolutely scrotular orange plastic helmets atop craptastic red-trimmed beige uniforms that really set off their jaunty robins-egg blue turtlenecks. (What was it with the ‘60s and turtlenecks, anyway? Were they afraid of vampires? Was there some obscure sex-related law that demanded the covering of the trachea?)

The first episode sets everything up with remarkable economy. First, Emperor Guillotine rocks up in his ‘Weird UFO’ and settles in on the ocean floor after annoying a lot of jet fighters. Then we see young Johnny Sokko introducing himself to some random guy named Jerry Mano who turns out to be a UNICORN agent. And lucky for Johnny he is, because moments after they swap phone numbers the ship (floaty boaty thing, not spaceship) they’re travelling on gets snotted by Dracolon, who’s meant to be an enormous, tentacle-waving sea monster thing but is really just an uncomfortable-looking dude in a genuinely atrocious rubber suit. (No. Really. Indescribably bad.)

The boat goes down, with Johnny and Jerry clinging to each other in the surf but never mind because they wake up after a quick cut, lying perfectly dry and still impeccably suit-clad on some rocks on the shore of an unnamed island. The island is infested with the aforementioned Wehrmacht/Che-Castro Gargoyle Gang guys who make the rookie mistake of capturing dauntless Johnny and his UNICORN buddy. Johnny and Jerry quickly get loose in the inevitable underground base, and somehow Johnny winds up with a pistol. Man… things were different back then. It’s really weird watching what looks like a ten year old kid racing around with a pistol taking potshots at the bad-guys as if he was practicing for his senior year in any big US high school…

While J&J are going all run-and-gun on the Gargoyles in the depths of the Lair, they discover a gigantic metal robot with a head like a third-rate Tutankhamen Halloween costume. Before they can do much more than gawp, a grumpy Science Dink leads them away from their Gargoyle Gang pursuers. Science Dink is grumpy because his name is Dr Lucius Guardian, and because he has to wear a powder-blue lab coat, but mostly because the Gargoyle Gang has been forcing him to build the robot – apparently all by himself, which would make me pretty cranky too.

Now, the robot is all but ready to go. It just needs a good jolt of atomic energy, at which point it will come to life and be The Most Powerful Thing In The World. It will also be totally under the control of the first person to speak into the crappy-looking wrist-watch communicator that Dr Guardian immediately hands to Johnny, who – predictably – opens it up and speaks to the Giant Robot with it. Wow! Didn’t see that one coming, did you, Dr Guardian?

Anyway. Grumpy Doc G tells J&J to get the hell out of the base because he’s just activated an atomic time bomb to destroy the place. (He’s a civic-minded kinda guy, and he doesn’t like this whole invading-alien nonsense. But apparently it’s easier to build a Giant Flying Robot AND an Atomic Time Bomb than it is to just tell the Gargoyle Gang to get knotted and refuse to build the GFR in the first place. Who knew?)

Moments later, J&J are on the shore trading shots with yet more Gargoyle Gangsters when suddenly the underground base blows up. (And seriously. I thought the Japanese of all people would have some idea of what an atomic explosion looks like. Lamest. A-Bomb. Evar!) The Big Boom does for Doc G and the local chapter of the Gargoyle Gang, but naturally the sudden jolt of atomic energy is just the ticket to bring the GFR to Johnny Sokko-obeying life. Young Sokko orders his new bestie to fly him and Jerry back to Tokyo – but by that stage poor dyspeptic rubber-suit Dracolon is back in da house, making for Tokyo himself (as all good Giant Rubber-suit Monsters must at a certain point in their lives. It’s a hormonal thing, like puberty.)

At the request of Jerry and UNICORN, young Johnny sics his GFR onto Dracolon, and seeing as the episodes are only a little over 20 minutes long, the Giant Monster Fighting Giant Robot Scene is pretty brief. No, just brief. There’s nothing pretty about it. It gets the job done, and the requisite amount of (really poor) miniature scenery gets stomped flat, but you can tell Robot Guy and Dracolon Guy are really just going through the motions – not like the heartfelt emotional engagement of say, Godzilla vs Megalon or maybe Gamera vs Zigra.

Eh. Whatever. So UNICORN accepts that a ten-year-old kid with an astonishingly bad haircut is now the sole controller of the most powerful weapon on the planet. They give him an orange plastic helmet and a red-trimmed beige uniform and a powder-blue turtleneck of his own, and that’s it: Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot are all set to kick rubber-suit alien monster butt for 27 mind-numbingly repetitive episodes. I mean – here’s a few sample titles:

• Ep 6 – Dragon – The Ninja Monster
• Ep 13 – Opticon Must Be Destroyed
• Ep 21 – The Terrifying Space Mummy

Wow. I was really missing out back in grade 3, wasn’t I?

Tell you what: just to piss off the American TV producers of this crap, I’m going to actually list the Japanese cast members. Because there’s not a single credit for any of them on the videos. Thanks, Reuben Guberman and Salvatore Billitteri!

• Mitsunobu Kaneko as Daisaku Kusama/Johnny Sokko
• Toshiyuki Tsuchiyama as Giant Robo/Giant Robot
• Koichi Chiba as Narrator
• Akio Ito as Juro Minami/Jerry Mano
• Shozaburo Date as Chief Azuma
• Tomomi Kuwabara as Mari Hanamura
• Hirohiko Sato as Emperor Guillotine
• Yumiko Katayama as Mitsuko Nishino

Also, you’re not getting Intermission stuff. Instead, you’re getting extra screen shots… because they explain everything.

That’s Johnny on the left. Short pants, Atomic Haircut, Nifty Handgun.

Emperor Guillotine. And yes, the backdrop is the interior of his ‘weird UFO’. The exterior is even groovier.

Oh God! Why couldn’t have I taken that Godzilla job? ‘Dracolon’ sounds like a laxative!

Yep. The Gargoyle Gang. Enough said.

And there he is! Johnny Sokko’s Flying Robot. Or Giant Robo, if you prefer. Apparently it was pretty popular under that name in Japan.