Ten Times As Big As A Man

This review originally appeared on the Anime Jump website in 2005.







Back when UHF television was the great babysitter for the nation, all sorts of crazy shows wound up getting syndicated and parceled out to the upper reaches of the broadcast dial. One of those shows was KING KONG / TOM OF T.H.U.M.B. Long after its original 1967 premiere as part of ABC's Saturday morning lineup, this show got a new lease on life entertaining children on weekday afternoons after school. That’s where I saw it, sandwiched between MIGHTY HEROES and ROCKY & BULLWINKLE. Watched, enjoyed, filed away as a pleasant memory; and only when I got copies of episodes from some guy in Australia did I notice that KING KONG / TOM OF T.H.U.M.B. was animated by the Toei Animation Company of Japan, the same folks who produced many of the other shows that populated my personal pantheon of TV potentates. Who woulda thunk it?







Actually, KING KONG was one of the first co-productions ever attempted between hungry American cartoon outfits and cheap Asian animation studios. It's a system that proved lucrative for both parties and would lead to greater and greater percentages of American TV cartoons being written in the States and animated in Japan or points east. KING KONG's American side, Rankin-Bass, would later become famous as the producer of THE HOBBIT (a Toei co-production) and those endless Christmas specials starring stop-motion puppets of Burl Ives and Fred Astaire and the kicky character designs of MAD MAGAZINE stalwart Paul Coker Jr. Rankin-Bass's predilection towards cherry-picking top American illustration talent is evident in the credits for KING KONG, which lists MAD and EC Comics legend and good ol' Georgia boy Jack Davis as character designer. It's hard to spot after the layers of cleanup, but his touch is visible, especially in the older characters.







But enough of this trivia. What about KING KONG? Well, for what it is, a 1967 TV cartoon written in one continent and animated in another, this show is pretty entertaining. It's got a great theme song ("TEN TIMES AS BIG AS A MAN!!"), the animation is stripped-down basic, the character designs show the clean-looking international style so popular with all Japanese exports of the period, and the stories are all self-contained 8-minute vignettes with little time for anything but action.







Bobby, Susan, and their hairy friend. And Kong.





Young Bobby Bond lives with his scientist dad and teenaged sister Susan on Mondo Island, home of the giant King Kong (copyright RKO Radio Pictures, Inc). Jimmy and Kong form a fast friendship and together they defeat monsters, invaders from space, centurions from the depths of the earth, evil white hunters, and the machinations of the evil Doctor Who. No, not the BBC guy with the police box, but an evil scientist who looks like Captain Marvel's Dr. Sivana as drawn by Chester Gould, full of dastardly plans to kidnap Kong and use him to either conquer or destroy the world, whichever comes first. You may remember him from the Toho film KING KONG ESCAPES - also a Rankin/Bass co-production.







The Evil Doctor Who



As a cross between JOHNNY QUEST, GIGANTOR, FRANKENSTEIN JR, and ADVENTURE ISLAND the show fits neatly into the mid 1960s, a time when children's TV cartoons were able to feature action and adventure, a glorious age of fun and excitement ended only by the monstrous onslaught of Action For Children's Television. If not for these shrewish bluenoses, American animation might have continued to match Japanese cartoons in the two-fisted entertainment category, and American cartoon fans might now be obsessed with American panty-flashing maid shows instead of the Japanese ones. KONG enjoyed a bit of success in the ‘60s; merchandising included toys, books, and even a board game.









The companion show TOM OF T.H.U.M.B. is just as entertaining, if not more so. A wacky spy romp in the GET SMART vein, TOM stars a secret agent who used to be a janitor. He and his assistant, a stereotypical 60s “Oriental” named Swingin’ Jack, were caught in an experimental shrinking ray and instantly reduced to Smurf proportions. Naturally his minature stature comes in handy when battling the evil plots of M.A.D. (which stands for “Maladjusted, Antisocial, and Darn Mean”, as we’re reminded every episode). The show is still fun to watch. The dialog is deliberately corny, the plots are bare-bones excuses for gags, and the agents of M.A.D. speak in foreign accents that range from Russian to Hispanic to Brooklyn, sometimes in the same sentence. Tom’s outfit, by the way, is the Tiny Human Underground Military Bureau. Yes, I remember all this stuff from when I was 8. And before you bring up INCH-HIGH PRIVATE EYE, this show did it first.







Tom of T.H.U.M.B. blastin' away 'cause he got little-man syndrome.



The DVD release is a swell package, you get 8 Kong episodes, each with 2 Kong segments and 1 TOM OF T.H.U.M.B. segment, separated by the original bumper segments. Vol. 2 has the KONG pilot episode as well. The transfer is sharp, and while the colors seem to be a bit washed out, that's understandable for a show that's been sitting in 16mm reels in somebody's vault for the past 20 years. I noticed some varispeed artifacting in one episode due to cheap time-compression, which is an odd thing to see in a show that hasn’t been broadcast in 20 years. Still, this is a $10 DVD you buy at Target, of a dimly-remembered licensed show from the mid-1960s, released by a now-defunct studio, so you can’t really expect Criterion quality.





New York crowds already have King Kong fever as we can see by this bystander's T-shirt.



Sure, maybe this show is only getting a DVD release because of the current KONG film. So what? If it gets forgotten classics like this show onto home video, I’m all for it. Maybe this series will inspire more outfits to unlock their vaults and share the goodness with us. At $10 a pop (or less, nowadays) that’s hard to beat.



KING KONG VOL. 1&2, released by Classic Media / Sony / Wonder.

can't stop the littles

North American anime fans impatiently await a release date for Studio Ghibli’s new picture ARRIETTY THE BORROWERS, based on Mary Norton’s children’s books. But didja know that this isn’t the first time a Japanese animation studio has produced work based on Western stories about a race of tiny people that live in our walls? Huh? Didja?



THE LITTLES was one of the earliest animated series produced by DIC Entertainment – once the entertainment powerhouse responsible for INSPECTOR GADGET, THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, part of CAPTAIN PLANET, some of the English dub of SAILOR MOON, and many others – now, after mergers and buyouts, a completely different beast altogether. But in the glory days of the 80s DIC was the kidvid king, responsible for giving many Western cartoons a distinctly international flair. Their Japan connection, producer Tetsuo Katayama, spearheaded Miyazaki’s CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO over at TMS. This relationship would pay big dividends as the Japanese studio was tapped to provide animation for a wide variety of DIC projects, including the aforementioned INSPECTOR GADGET, the Homeric SF adaptation ULYSSES 31, the video game tie-in POLE POSITION, Cousin Oliver’s comeback show KIDD VIDEO, and of course, THE LITTLES.



A loose adaptation of the children’s books by John Peterson, DIC’s THE LITTLES began a three-year run on ABC in 1983. The adventures of Tom and Lucy Little, their parents Frank and Helen, Grandpa and goofy aviation enthusiast Cousin Dinky as they survive inside the walls of the Bigg family house – with the help of normal-sized Henry Bigg – were popular enough to spawn both a feature film and a TV special, as well as resurrection in the syndication television afterlife and on DVD.



Up against Saturday morning cartoon rivals like THE GARY COLEMAN SHOW, RUBIK THE AMAZING CUBE, DUKES OF HAZZARD, MR. T, BENJI ZAX & THE ALIEN PRINCE, and of course BISKITTS, television viewers couldn’t help but notice THE LITTLES’ clean-line look and solid animation backbone. Unlike THE SMURFS, THE LITTLES had to ground its fantasy elements firmly against the real world of 1980s suburban housing. You can’t cheat your way through animating a series about tiny people that live in crawlspaces and underneath floorboards. The show’s versimilitude proved the fantasy staple of magical beings lurking in the nooks and crannies of the ‘real world’ translates well to television. Personally I was a little older than the target audience, but I enjoyed THE LITTLES regardless; how else was I gonna kill time before the premiere of MIGHTY ORBOTS?



There’s a strange appeal in tales of hidden creatures living on the margins of the human world – MRS FRISBY & THE RATS OF NIMH is still a juvenile SF favorite (and would get a big-screen animated adaptation around this time, though Disneyfied with enough magical fairy dust to make my teeth itch) and I’m pretty sure I read at least one of the original Littles novels to be at least familiar with the concept.

Henry and the Littles (with pet turtle Slick), the Bigg family, Dr. Hunter and his life partner Jeffrey

Viewed 25 years later THE LITTLES is aggressively 80s, from the lowercase font of its title to the pastel colors of the characters clothes, from the boxy compact cars the Bigg family drives to the dirt bike (and helmet, can’t forget the helmet) Henry uses to get around town from one Littles-infested crisis to another. Chased by Doctor Hunter and his assistant, LITTLES author John Peterson (!!), the Littles civilization is always at risk of being exposed to the outside, giant-sized world. This doesn’t stop them from using the big people as a template for their own lifestyle – there are apparently enough Littles living in our cellars and attics to require Littles-sized highways, filled with Littles traffic, running through our cities. One hopes the Littles are thankful for whatever zoning board decreed all structures needed lots of air vents and steam tunnels. When they aren’t going about their mysterious Littles business, Tom and Lucy always have time to help Henry out of a jam - complicated as usual by the antics of Cousin Dinky- and Grandpa can always deliver a lecture about how drugs are bad or how stealing is wrong, except when the Littles use it as the basis of their civilization. Well, that’s not really stealing. We didn’t need all that stuff anyway, go ahead, take it. THE LITTLES – charming children’s fantasy, or commentary on the wasteful nature of Western civilization? You decide.





Miyazaki's 'Famous Detective Holmes' makes an appearance

Episodes were capped with a “make it yourself” segment usually involving pipe cleaners, balloons, straws, scotch tape, and elementary laws of physics. In the third season of the series Henry’s family travelled the world (with Littles in tow) and the end segments became history or geography lessons. I’d quit watching by that time. My Friday nights were lasting a lot longer – movie theater popcorn isn’t going to pop itself, y’know – and my early Saturday mornings were spent sleeping instead of watching cartoons. Did the little people living inside our HVAC system shed a tear as one more viewer succumed to creeping teenageism? Only THE LITTLES know.

you know the game of King Kong

A few years back when the Peter Jackson remake of the famous giant ape movie King Kong was released, anime fans got a little bonus in the shape of a DVD release of the 1966 King Kong cartoon. Why anime fans, you say? Because the 1966 King Kong cartoon was a co-production between Toei Animation Company (you know, Sailor Moon, Dragonball, Captain Harlock, Mazinger Z, etc) and Rankin/Bass(you know, the Hobbit, those stop-motion Christmas specials, etc). If you didn't catch the show on ABC in 1967, you might have seen it in syndication on your local UHF station in the afternoons, as I did, along with episodes of Mighty Heroes and Journey To The Center Of The Earth.



At the time of the discs' release I reviewed them for (the now defunct) Anime Jump. This review is now back online here at Let's Anime. What I DIDN'T have at the time was the King Kong board game. Yes, a Milton Bradley board game based on the 1966 cartoon, thanks to a 60s cartoon licensing boom that I missed out on having not yet been born. I'd sighted the game once years before in an antique mall in Georgia and it was stupidly overpriced, so I didn't buy it. Well, yesterday I saw it again and it was NOT stupidly overpriced, so buy it I did.







The board art features characters from the show - Professor Bond, his children Bobby and Susan, steamer skipper Captain Englehorn, and of course King Kong and that dinosaur he's always fighting. Not pictured is the series' nemesis, the evil Doctor Who. I love that jazzy King Kong logo that never seems to be in the same exact typeface twice. One might surmise it was created by someone for whom English was not their first language, but I'm guessing. But what about the game itself?











Well, you roll a die and move your Milton Bradley plastic marker around the board, avoiding dangers. Not exactly setting new standards in game play, no.



















Still, the board has some great jazzy 60s graphics of ships and islands and birds and the Various Moods Of King Kong, which can't help but captivate the monster-infatuated youngsters of the 60s. Anyway, the important thing is that I have the game now, and one more example of obsessive-compulsive behavior can be safely put behind me. A double victory!