This is both a show that started in 1991 and also one that that started in 1987. Which goes some way to explaining why it’s a lot better than most of the TV anime from 1991.

The first City Hunter anime aired 1987-1988, two years after the launch of the manga. It was followed, pretty much immediately by City Hunter 2. When that ended in 1989, there was a break of 3 months before City Hunter 3 aired. There was over a year between that show ending at this one beginning. However, if you needed a City Hunter fix there was a couple of OAVs in between.

All of these were directed by Kenji Kodama (Detective Conan) and produced by Sunrise, so there’s an argument that you can look at them as a holdover from Eighties anime trends rather than fitting into what was new in 1991. But there’s only so many spikey haired Toriyama clones one can watch in a row so consider this me treating myself.

In their fifth year of adapting Tsukasa Hojo’s manga, this is a very slickly made TV anime. There’s plenty of limited animation short cuts, but its strengths overpower any budgetary restrictions.

It’s biggest strength? Akira Kamiya. He is/was THE BEST, and he was perfect for the role of Hojo’s hero, the lecherous gunman Ryo Saeba. It’s hard to imagine anyone else being able to switch between stone cold killer, dapper playboy & goofball idiot and make you believe it’s all the same guy.

Another strength is in how it uses its soundtrack. It’s not afraid to let the soundtrack do the heavy lifting on a scene if needs be. I believe it’s just Tatsumi Yano on the music here. There are entirely still establishing shots in this episode that are boosted immeasurably by the soundtrack cueing you into the following scene.

When Tiger & Bunny prompted my look at the buddy TV show, I didn’t look ahead to the 80s and where the buddy show went then. One place it went was female/male buddy show with “unresolved sexual tension”. From US TV you had Remington Steele, Scarecrow & Mrs King and Moonlighting. From the UK you had Demspey and Makepeace. And City Hunter firmly fits into that trend with the relationship between Ryo Saeba and Kaori Makimura. It almost seems like the makers of Tiger & Bunny had set things up to do a version of that in the future with Barnaby and Kotetsu, but I wonder if the popularity will make them stick with the NC1978 era heroes for now.

Next, the final 1991 anime I will look at and another show from City Hunter ’91‘s Kenji Kodama…

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The 2011 anime series Tiger & Bunny takes place in NC 1977 to NC 1978. While this clearly isn’t our 1970s, there is no such place as Sternbild City after all, there are definitely thematic and plot necessities for it taking place in a version of the 1970s.

First of all, it’s a superhero story, and the story of the superhero starts in the 1930s. Which is where it starts here too. We’re told that the first being with superpowers (a NEXT in the parlance of Tiger & Bunny) appeared 45 years earlier. So around 1932, the year that Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster created Superman. Other key plot elements, such as Mr Legend (the first superhero) inspiring a young Kotetsu, Kotetsu and Barnaby’s age difference and the age of Kaede mean that it has to take place in the 70s on a practical level, if you are starting from the 30s.

However, even without those plot elements, thematically the Seventies is the right era to set the story in. Far more than being a superhero show, Tiger and Bunny is a buddy show. And the Seventies were the golden age of buddy shows. An era that started in 1969 in the cinema.

To cash in on the popularity of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the great Roy Huggins and Glen Larson created Alias Smith and Jones, a buddy western TV show.

The difference between this and an ITC buddy show that appeared a year earlier, The Persuaders, is the chemistry between the male leads. There’s a closeness in the friendship you don’t get from a Roger Moore and Tony Curtis playing millionaire playboys (though the anime Licensed By Royal does owe The Persuaders a debt). The Persuaders did have something that Tiger & Bunny inherited though, and that’s a bickering between two seemingly mismatched characters. The obvious source for this is in another feature film (and the original play and subsequent TV series), namely The Odd Couple.

You can’t really go to far wrong copying The Odd Couple‘s formula. Red Dwarf at its best was just The Odd Couple in space before it started thinking it was a sitcom about sci-fi, rather than a sitcom with sci-fi set dressing. 

So what happens if you take the chemistry of a Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid, combine it with the mismatched leads of an Odd Couple, and then throw in a load of action too? Well you get THE buddy show of the Seventies.

Starsky & Hutch, more than any actual superhero project, is the most obvious predecessor to Tiger & Bunny. It even has the fanservice. Did the open credits need David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser wandering around in just towels? No, but it certainly helped its popularity. If you have any doubt, please check out these samples of Starsky and Hutch doujins.

Adding to the need for Tiger & Bunny to be in Seventies, is the character of Lunatic. He’s definitely the sort of vigilante you started to see in superhero comics in the Seventies, most obviously in the Punisher. Moreover, with the gimmick of being part of the law enforcement process by day and vigilante by night, he also is a reflection on another David Soul role, namely that of the cop turned vigilante in Magnum Force. He marks both the darkening of “justice” in both comics and the wider pop culture of the Seventies.

The lack of resolution in Lunatic’s plot also reflects that it didn’t go away in the Eighties. Lunatic doesn’t surplant Wild Tiger’s version of superheroics, but at the same time Wild Tiger doesn’t end Lunatic’s vigilantism. Instead they end up existing side by side.

So where does Tiger & Bunny go from here, as they head towards their fictional 1980s? Well, I’m hoping that Kotetsu’s cousin from Greece arrives in Sternbild to team up with him.

BONUS: As I’d been sitting on this post since November, and I’ve still not figured out a segue to talking about The Professionals, which was basically Starsky & Hutch if they were UK television James Bonds and the main character was actually their boss, here’s a link to some recent-ish Japanese fan art of The Professionals. 

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We are joined by Lewis Smith for a lengthy talk about Sunrise’s superhero buddy comedy, Tiger & Bunny. There were some recording problems during this, meaning we lost some material. I think I edited it to make sense, but apologies in advance if you hear call backs to things you didn’t hear earlier.

00:00 – 50:00 SPOILER FREE series overview
50:00 – 100:00 SPOILER-laden in depth discussion of the show. And there might be some Big O spoilers in there too. Though possibly not as I couldn’t recall exactly what I was trying to recall. You have been warned.

Lewis’ plug: Zen Creations Canvas Painting

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Theme music by Paul Smith of quiet quiet band.

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Today we talk about the Spring anime shows we’ve been watching over the last three months. They involved a lot of demons, some bawdy humour, superheroes and eating exotic foods. All this plus minds going blank and the promise of someone wearing make-up!

NIS America’s Enma-kun trailer:

Tiger & Bunny at Anime On Demand

Toriko at Funimation

Ask us questions at Formspring

Theme music by Paul Smith of quiet quiet band.

You can find Anthony Askew on the web here, here and on twitter here.

Subscribe on iTunes

Subscribe on Feedburner

Join our Facebook fanpage.