the power of the lens

[davemerrill]

I wrote a big article on E.E. "Doc" Smith and the Lensman saga and the anime film based loosely on his "Galactic Patrol" and the subsequent TV series and toys and games and the two different manga series and the American comics and oh, lots of stuff. Check it out at Let's Anime!



Had to buckle down and get this one finished before the end of the month. I'm trying to get at least one Let's Anime every month. Maybe two if I'm lucky. Combine that with our trip to Anime Boston - which went great, by the way, thanks for asking - and getting Stupid Comics this week done and work being busy and oh, everything, and it's been a super busy past week or so. Nothing scheduled this weekend so it's going to be playing with the new computer stuff I got from Neil and watching some TV and doing a little house cleaning and just taking it easier than I have been for the past week.

Comments

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Geeze, it's a shame so many people we know have abandoned LJ. Sure as hell can't say anything meaningful about Lensman in 148 characters.

*ahem* (repeated in part from the Let's Anime blog)

By Klono's hairy ears, that's a good job there, Dave! Gave it every beam hot enough to light a match and more besides!

The one thing I am surprised that wasn't mentioned the Möbius strip of borrowing, where the Silver Age Green Lantern was kind of sort of borrowing from Lensman, then the anime in turn kind of borrowed from how Hal Jordan got his Power Ring...

I ALWAYS wanted one of those Tomy Lensman Lens, the one with the cheap digital watch in it. Lusted after it. Pony Toy-Go-Round had them in their wholesale catalog but was out of stock by the time I figured it out. And DAMMIT I could have bought the Brittania from either Pony's or Comic & Comix table at the '84 Worldcon! DAMMIT.

Of course I also left that Popy/Bandai 'Big Scale' Yamato back there as well. I was such a damn idiot. Never mind I had NO way to get toys that big back home in my luggage.

Seeing Lensman was a bit of a chore at Worldcon. They set up the screen (preetty sure it was film and not video) in a flat hall filled with steel folding chairs, not the best way to show a hard-subbed film print! It was pretty amazing to see the movie in a room filled with hard core book-readin' SF fans at that early point of the Japanimation Invasion. I think most enjoyed it simply because it was f'ing Lensman, and it was an honest to Gnu MOVIE, something Hollywood still hasn't managed.

Time for me to break out the paperbacks again... :)

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

I know that people mention that the "Green Lantern Corps" was influenced by Smith's Lensman, Arisians, etc, but then you gotta get into asking how much George Lucas was influenced when envisioning the whole "Jedi" mind control thing, etc, and that's a whole can of worms, and anyway, if there's a super character thing that fills me with more boredom than Green Lantern and everything about Green Lantern, I have yet to find it. Bored just typing "Green Lantern".

I believe I paid $10 for my Brittania (as they spell it) from a Korean grocery store somewhere off Roswell St. near downtown Marietta GA, sometime in 1985, me and Shaun Camp were tooling around hitting Asian grocery stores just to see what we could find. Score, I think. I want to say Shaun had advance intel on this particular store and its Brittanias, though.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Well, I have fond memories of Gil Kane and Green Lantern, so we must agree to disagree. Mind, Green Lantern today is s**t as is all of the current Nu52 DC crap.

$10 USD for the DX toy?! Holy CRAP man, holy freaking crap yes that is a legit score!

And here I thought I was king of the score with $15 for the deluxe HMC L-Gaim toy also in 1985, bought at some comic shop in Indianapolis (part of a roadtrip while enduring working in Ft. Wayne)!

Man that was some crazy time back before they re-valued the Yen and screwed it all up.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

It feels like there was a period in the 1985 time frame where there seemed to be a lot of Lensman toys filtering into our area, the Asian groceries, the comic shops, the toy dealers at conventions. A very short period. I might be misremembering. But I get the feeling it wasn't quite the hit in Japan that Towa/Toho/Kodansha felt it would be, and that surplus of merch got exported quickly to make way for the next batch of Saint Seiya toys or whatever.

[tochiro998.livejournal.com]

Tomy got out of the anime toy biz pretty quick. I want to say their main deals were Ideon and Lensman.

Huh. my pals at Toybox DX never did a cataloging of Tomy anime toys. There is however, this, just to incite gokin lust. http://toyboxdx.com/brog/?p=467

Jerry and I saw that at a comic shop (famous and known to the anime locals. Barbarian?) outside of Washington DC back around '86 or early '87. It was lusted after but way too much at like $80. HAW! $80...that's nothing compared to what that thing goes for now. WE were poor and preoccupied with other nonsense at the time.

Of course now Tomy owns Takara and Tatsunoko. In no way are they even attempting to challenge Bandai. OTOH I suspect they're doing well with New Thunderbirds and New Star Wars.