THE INGLORIOUS DEATH OF MIC

(First off, some GREAT belated news: my friend VF5SS is currently fansubbing Srungle, at the pace of about an episode or per week. He’s now over halfway through the series, so check ‘em out!)

So… let’s go back to the end of January 1984. Both Srungle and Sasuraiger, as TV shows, came to their end, Srungle naturally at Episode 53, Sasuraiger cut short at 43 episodes.

Both of them got replaced by MIC shows (“Super High Speed Galvion” and “The Story of the Souya” respectively. Galvion is a robot anime, with designs by Srungle’s Koichi Ohata. Souya is an historical series (planned but not CREATED by Yuu Yamamoto, so it’s outside the scope of this blog) about the 48-year lifespan of a Russian/Japanese cargo ship)… but who is MIC?

MIC (Movie International Company, known in Japanese as “Kokusai Eiga-Sha,” which means the same thing) was founded in 1974 by a group of people associated with Nikkatsu films, and headed by Juzo Kubota.

Kubota’s son, Shigeo, would produce most of the MIC shows, before going into politics in 1989, where he remains today.

Unusually, MIC is located far north of Tokyo, in Hokkaido, in the town of Nemuro (Japan’s easternmost spot), and it’s that town that Shigeo Tsubota represents today. [EDIT: As you can read in Ardith Carlton’s comment below, in at least ’83-’85, the office was located in Tokyo. Thanks for the correction!]

In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, MIC co-created a number of not-very-well-remembered anime shows (usually with Ashi-Pro, who never let animation quality get in the way of a weekly deadline). So under this umbrella, they produced a bunch of kids’ anime that I’m not going to screencap (If you want the full story, David Merrill at Let’s Anime has done all the work), and they were the ones receptive to Yuu Yamamoto and Takao Yotsuji’s idea of doing a “rock-themed” giant robot show, which turned into Braiger.

And it was popular!

So it got a sequel, which wasn’t as popular. BUT they let a second sequel be released. And that was even less popular.

Still, I think they could’ve done this forever, kicking out J9 sequel after J9 sequel. Certainly there are less popular shows that kept getting greenlit. The problem was their sponsor: Takatoku Toys.

I think U.S. fans of a certain age (like me) remember going into our local toy stores and coming out with absurdly inexpensive Japanese robot toys. We didn’t realize that they were cheap in the U.S. because they didn’t sell in Japan, and our American toy stores bought them for pennies. To us, it was a cornucopia of robot toys. But REALLY, it was a bunch of Japanese toy companies collapsing like card castles.

And Takatoku fell victim to this. In 1982, they’d gotten the Macross license, and their “Macross Battroid Valkyrie” was EXTREMELY popular.

Their next ventures into transformable robot toys (including Sasuraiger) were less so, and by the end of ’83, they were facing bankruptcy.

So they owed a lot of money to MIC, but they couldn’t pay it. They went out of business instead (finally finishing up on May 25, 1984). They’d already pulled out from Sasuraiger, which is why it’s only 43 episodes instead of 52. The robot train toy simply wasn’t selling like the Braiger toy had.

(The model company Mark couldn’t pick up the slack, either, since they also went out of business after their Baxingar and Time Bokan lines failed, which is why there are no plastic model kits for Sasuraiger.)

So ANYWAY, as I said, Takatoku owed a lot of money to MIC, and they couldn’t pay it. So the money that MIC had invested just vanished. And it essentially killed the company.

But not LITERALLY. MIC still exists today. Their address is listed as Shigeo Tsubota’s office in Nemuro. But in 1984, it was a crisis. They had no revenue. The Story of the Souya finished, Galvion was canceled. They started another series, “Two Hawks,” based on Area 88 mangaka Kaoru Shintani’s (GREAT) motorcycle story, but that failed, too (and check out the OP if you want to see what a TRULY cash-strapped production looks like…). And then MIC left the anime producing business.

Which wouldn’t be all THAT TERRIBLE, except… a lot the negatives of their shows apparently ended up in the trash.

There aren’t many MIC shows that get rereleased, and of those that ARE… WELL… even Justin Sevakis of Discotek and now AnimEigo says (in a now-deleted Tweet) that the Braiger masters were some of the worst that he’s ever had to clean up.

It isn’t Discotek’s fault. The negatives were lost. Some of the shows may be even be lost forever..

Which is why I think J9 never got a true revival. Not even an early ’90s OVA (as it seemed like every ‘80s robot show was getting at the time). The original was lost, the company was lost, best move on to something else.

So yes, MIC still exists these days, but really only on paper, as an entity that rubber stamps licenses.

I did, however, come across this interesting interview with Tsubota from last year, where he said he might go back to producing anime at some point… but I’m not holding my breath.