So, I’m not going to watch much of Ishiro Honda’s television work, but considering how it dominated his output through the 70s before he returned to Godzilla for one final time in Terror of Mechagodzilla and became Akira Kurosawa’s assistant director in his final working years, I felt like it was appropriate to take a look at some example. So, why not start (and end) with his work bringing the first episode of the series Mirrorman to Japanese television screens? In addition, this first episode was re-edited and released in theaters for the Toho children’s festival where Godzilla films were then being targeted.
So, there’s a lot that happens in this twenty-eight minutes. It’s setting up a cadre of regular characters, the overall conceit, the basic structure of an episode. The action centers around the Science Guard Members led by Professor Mitarai (Jun Usami) who collect in his fancy, technologically advanced basement to protect the world. When tornadoes start striking spots across the world with uranium deposits, it’s obvious that something otherworldly is up. His ward, Kyoutarou Kagami (Nobuyuki Ishida) gets sent to photograph what he can on orders from his editor at the newspaper he works at. He encounters an invisible man that he kills with mirror shards. The invisible man bleeds green as well. After this, Mitarai reveals to Kyoutarou that he’s the son of an alien, that his mother may still be alive, and that he’s the Mirrorman.
As previously mentioned, there’s a lot of story to get through, and the one character beat is around Kyoutarou dealing with the idea that he’s this superhero. It’s angsty but done very quickly. I have no idea why he’s so caught up in it, if his father was a superhero/kaiju fighter before him, or anything. It’s not helped by the fact that we get no real sense of who Kyoutarou is before the reveal. Honda does lean into some psychedelic visuals when he merges with a mirror to have a conversation with his dead father and receive a memento that…may give him the power to increase in size?
And then the aliens attack in their glass spaceship, depositing a giant monster in a miniature city to fight, which Kyoutarou does as Mirrorman. The fight is a small-scale version of what Honda created with Eiji Tsuburaya on the Godzilla films. It’s quick and lightly entertaining, but it definitely feels smaller and less ambitious.
And that’s really what this is: a less ambitious attempt and the first entry in a long form version of the films that had delighted a generation of Japanese movie goers, providing that on a weekly basis through their televisions. It’s hard to judge how the whole show is worthwhile based on this one episode, but I suspect there’s manic editing, some thin angsty melodrama, and the punching of monsters. As a first episode, it throws a lot of the screen that needs to be retained for following episodes, but it explores little of it. That’s the duty of following entries. Did it make me want to watch more?
If I lived in the early 70s in Japan, I might have tuned in for the next week’s episode. As it stands now, I think I’m good. I mean…it seems to function well enough, but it’s not nearly enough to get me over my anti-TV biases.
David Vining, Author 