So it was 35 years ago today, when my life changed forever. 35 years ago today, I officially became a "tokusatsu fan."
I was 15 going on 16. I was still in junior high at the time, about to graduate in a few months, and high school was 9 months away (around which time The Ren & Stimpy Show, one of my favorite cartoons of all time, would premiere on Nickelodeon).
On Sunday, after New Year's Day 1991 (which would make it January 6), Mom and I went downtown to Manhattan to go to NYC Creation-Con. It was always exciting to spend a day at Creation-Con. This was my fourth time at the convention. (The first, my first-ever con, was on Thanksgiving Saturday 1989, the second was in early June 1990, and the third, I think, was in July or August of that year.)
We spent the whole afternoon going to the Dealer's Hall, and I made 3 purchases. First, I stopped off at a dealer's table where I bought both Ultraman (Tsuburaya; 1966) Vol. 1, with the first 5 episodes dubbed in English, and Voyage Into Space (AIP-TV; 1970), the compilation film of Giant Robo (Toei; 1967), AKA: Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot. I even got to watch the first five minutes of an episode of Ambassador Magma (P-Productions; 1966), AKA: The Space Giants! It was absolutely wild! As I mentioned in the past, I'd seen Voyage Into Space before, on ABC Channel 7's The 4:30 Movie back in about 1978, but I always wanted to see Ultraman, and with this, I finally did, for the very first time! (My third purchase made that experience all the more special, but I'll get back to that in a bit...)
Near the end of our day at the con, I watched something else on another dealer's table: It was an awesome superhero similar to Inframan! A shiny, black insectoid superhero riding on a motorcycle. It was the first Toei Manga Festival theatrical episode (Hurry to the Island of Demons!) of Kamen Rider Black (Toei; 1987)! I watched Kamen Rider in action for the first time! (I saw toys of this guy at Forbidden Planet in 1988.) I would soon find out that this guy is the other famous superhero in Japan besides Ultraman, and is basically the Japanese equivalent of Spider-Man! (Though I would soon become aware of the actual localized Spidey, which I saw exactly a year later.)
My third purchase was this very magazine, which I read about a few months earlier in Filmfax Magazine. This is the first issue of Markalite Magazine, from Summer 1990. Markalite (named after the Markalite FAHP/Flying Atomic Heat Projectors from Toho's 1957 sci-fi epic, The Mysterians) was devoted to Japanese sci-fi, both live-action and anime, and the first one I ever read of its kind. Ever since reading it on the train trip back home with Mom, it opened a whole new world for me, and I finally found the name of the medium of Japanese live-action special effects I loved so much: Tokusatsu (short for "tokubetsu/tokushuu satsuei," or "special photography" in Japanese).
It had a "Superhero Rollcall," which had me on the lookout for almost every Japanese superhero TV show up to 1990 (just a few of them I'd already seen, and this magazine had more info on them!). From the Rollcall, I was gobsmacked to learn that Ultraman and its follow-up series Ultraseven (Tsuburaya; 1967), who I saw pictures and toys of, were created by Eiji Tsuburaya! EIJI FUCKING TSUBURAYA!!! Godzilla and Ultraman (and even Ultraseven) are BROTHERS!!! It had an in-depth look at its main feature, Godzilla Vs. Biollante (Toho; 1989), which I saw months earlier. It had an article on Japanese giant robot anime and their effects in America, where I learned about Go Nagai's Mazinger Z, Getter Robo and others. It had an article on the aforementioned Kamen Rider Black, and an interview with its star, Tetsuo Kurata. There was an article about Spectreman (P-Productions; 1971), which I learned about for the first time! Tributes to deceased veterans like actors Akihiko Hirata, Jun Tazaki, and screenwriter Takeshi Kimura (AKA: Kaoru Mabuchi)! And many others! Reviews, commentary, etc. And I learned about the experts in fandom, who were behind this magazine: August Ragone, Bob Johnson, Ed Godziszewski, and even the late Guy Mariner Tucker. This magazine was PACKED!!!
I was one crazy obsessed guy, looking around for this stuff. Long before we had the Internet, file-sharing platforms, and even YouTube and streaming! Even when that unfortunate phenomenon called Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (Americanized from Zyuranger, which I saw almost a year earlier) premiered in 1993 and caused a meteoric market for tokusatsu (which kind of hampered things for me, because I loved this stuff being so obscure so only I could find it; Godzilla was much more in vogue at the time)! And thanks to this magazine (of which I bought Issue # 2 a year later at NYC Creation-Con), I've become a tokusatsu master in my own right, even though, true to my childhood dream, I was already more inspired to want to *create* my own version of this stuff! And you're already seeing that with my life's work in progress, Rekira the Super-Monster, which I started work on (originally as a Godzilla fan-fiction) just a few months later. But that's another story.
If you stumble upon this magazine with limited knowledge of tokusatsu and even anime, I guarantee, your life will change forever as mine did. But don't say I didn't warn you that it was an addiction! Seeking out all the stuff I read in Markalite (and being informed about stuff I've already seen) was one hell of a journey. ;)
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