Yuke! Megaloman!

the fiery superman, Megaloman is possibly my favorite giant Japanese superhero series.  produced by Toho for tv in 1979, it ran 31 episodes.

I first saw the series mentioned in issue #11 of the Japanese Fantasy Film Journal (pronounced  Jay Eff Eff Jay) back in about 1980.  just a blurb by one Mr. August Ragone, saying this was the first Japanese hero to use kung fu.

of course, there was no way I was ever going to get to see one episode of this show back then, so I had to wait.  I had to wait about 20 years, but it was worth it!  thanks go to Chris "Owari" Elam for getting 30 of the 31 episodes to me.

it was full of monsters, kung fu, weapons, beams and explosions.  what more could you ask for?

well, at the time, some nicer copies.  I was happy to watch the show, but they were grainy PAL conversions from an Italian source.  having it dubbed in Italian helped my understanding of the episodes a bit, and it was nice to be able to translate the titles a lot easier that way.

the episodes did not look like these screen grabs, though!  add to that a funky new theme song (kind of cool, but not as great as the original).

however, it was enough to do a pretty indepth episode guide for the late, much missed Oriental Cinema, with great help from Mr. Owari and Damon Foster himself.

it's something I should revisit someday in the future, since most of it would be easy to do now.  it's a fun show, a cool cross between sentai and Ultraman.  the Japan Action Club provided the stuntwork for it.

this here critter is the monster Goran, because the world needed to know!