For those not in the know, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot is the greatest television show ever made.
Roughly speaking, this show is to Ultraman what Gamera was to Godzilla; an imitation with half the budget and about twelve times the madness. The plot revolves around our title character, Johnny, a young lad who battles injustice with the aid of the other title character, a remote-controlled robot. If that sounds a lot like Gigantor/Tetsujin 28, it’s because they were both created by the same guy, and shut up, ideas are hard.
In more abstract terms, though, the show is more than a confluence of rehashed ideas. It is a perfect storm of giant monsters, extreme violence and child endangerment. It’s like if Ultraman had a baby with Jonny Quest and the midwife was Picasso’s Guernica. Small children are constantly engaging in lethal gunplay, reckless car chases, and other insanity that should logically render them unable to feel long before puberty sets in. Henchmen are violently killed in just about every scene, and the monsters of the week rarely fare better against Giant Robot. If childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, this is manifestly the worst children’s show ever made.
The opening credits are pretty great. They’re the lowest possible video quality without actually being a woodcut, and they showcase all the neato powers of the Flying Robot of the title. I guess at some point they decided Giant Robot was a better name, because he is always very tall but he only flies sometimes. If they were going for accuracy, though, they should have just gone with Murder Robot, because he can kill you more ways than Australia. He has fire breath, finger missiles, a megaton punch and an atomic kick. Before he does any of these, he must perform a complex series of arm signals, ostensibly to signal passing aircraft to retroute because MONSTER PARTS FLYING EVERYWHERE.
We begin our dizzying journey in space, where a hastily-painted ping pong paddle enters our atmosphere. Earth’s first line of defense, the Fabulous Jet Fighters, armed with planes and kicky pink scarves, engage this strange craft and demand that it identify itself or be destroyed. This alien vessel, however, is controlled by the mighty Emperor Guillotine. Emperor Guillotine is pretty amazing. He’s some kind of ghetto-fabulous squid man, a papier-mache Bill Nighy-cum-Randy Savage armed with glittering robes and a sceptre.
Unimpressed by our puny aircraft and barely-flamboyant pink scarves, he makes short work of the jets and plunges his ship below the waves. Months go by without incident, but eventually, ships in the area are being sunk by mysterious forces. Not deliberately vague, if-we-don’t-offer-a-hypothesis-maybe-nobody-will-notice-nothing-is-actually-happening Bermuda Triangle style mysterious forces, either. Mostly giant tentacles.
Remember that scene in Superman: the Movie when he said that flying was the safest way to travel, statistically speaking? Well, I think that data may be skewed by the fact that literally every ship traveling in Japanese waters gets attacked by a giant monster. Nevertheless, the world don’t stop turning just because there are kaiju in the shipping lanes.
Here we meet Our Heroes, Johnny Sokko and Jerry Mano as they share a quiet Bruce Cabot/Fay Wray moment aboard a ship called the Merry. Their relationship dynamic is established right away, as Jerry reveals himself to be one of the worst secret agents this side of James Bond by introducing himself by name AND code name (!) and summarizing his mission to a complete stranger before backtracking in a panic and saying he’s a writer. Meanwhile, Johnny perks up at the mention of danger, because he is dead inside and adrenaline is all he can feel these days.
Jerry excuses himself to have a loudly public conversation with headquarters about various top-secret ephemera, and just then we get our first real look at our first kaiju: Dracolon, the Great Sea Monster. Dracolon is a Gill-Man-with-tentacles affair; he kind of looks like a cosplayer made a costume of Harryhausen’s kraken out of a shower curtain. Given his name I was hoping for a butt vampire, but, well, here we are.
Dracolon flops a besuckered arm across the deck, triggering a fiery explosion; this was evidently one of those combination oil tankers/cruise ships. Surveying the situation, Johnny says, “Mr. Mano, we’d better jump in the water.” And they DO, because Johnny Sokko’s immense balls can be used as a floatation device.
Our heroes wake up on the rocks where Errol Flynn kills Basil Rathbone in Captain Blood, their clothes remarkably dry. Jerry immediately begins Secret Agenting, shouting at the top of his lungs into the detached radio antenna we are obligated to pretend is a communicator. Because Jerry is the dirt worst, though, his yelling of state secrets attract members of the Gargoyle Gang, who we will soon learn work for Emperor Guillotine. Anyway Jerry immediately surrenders, while Johnny kind of just stands there awkwardly, like he was going to try and fight it out if this asshole hadn’t just given up.
The Gargoyle Gang aren’t really a gang, as such. They’re more like a chimeric mixture of unappealing military tropes. The foot soldiers all have Ché-ish beret-and-goatee ensembles, and commanders sport Third Reich caps and jodphurs. They’re basically the Commie-Nazis that menaced McBain, and they’re lovely. There’s a couple dozen guys on this island, so I guess Emperor Guillotine spent his few months under the sea running recruitment drives and sewing uniforms.
In interrogation, the villains reveal that they know that Jerry is Agent U3 of Unicorn Secret Police. Hey, the villains know him on sight, just like with James Bond. I wonder if he also checks into five star hotels under his own name and murders foreign dignitaries in broad daylight. You know, secret stuff. To his credit, though, Jerry only offers up sensitive information to strangers of his own volition, never when asked. The Gargoyles suggest that they’ll kill Johnny if Jerry doesn’t spill, so our heroes have no choice but to get dangerous.
Despite having like 4 automatic weapons trained on him, Jerry springs to his feet and knocks out his captors with a few maneuvers from the Captain Kirk hand-to-hand combat collection before any of them remember to fire. He wrestles an assault rifle from one of them, Johnny brandishes a pistol from nowhere (!) and we have our first prepubescent firefight of the series. 6 bad guys die in about 30 seconds, my favorite being a guy Jerry uses as a human shield. He screams to his comrades not to shoot, that they’ll hit him too; they shrug and open fire anyway, hitting ONLY HIM. FOUR GUYS WITH ASSAULT RIFLES OPENED FIRE IN A CRAMPED HALLWAY AND HIT ONLY THE GUY ON THEIR TEAM. Somewhere, imperial stormtroopers are watching this and high-fiving.
Jerry and Johnny soon find themselves traveling down an elevator into a silo that houses Giant Robot. “Tremendous,” Johnny says, and the kid isn’t wrong. Frankly, in the harsh light of hindsight he looks like nothing so much as Bender’s pharaonic monument from Futurama. And that is far from a bad thing, because horizontally striped headdresses are boss. Robot is covered with rivets, which appeals to me immensely. At some point we decided as a culture that we wanted our robots as sleek and streamlined as possible, but I’m a sucker for exposed joints, angular design and rivets. Rivets so large you can clearly see them from the ground on a 200 foot robot. Rivets the size of manhole covers. Oh man.
All of his major joints are done up in some kind of accordion-style flex material, though I’m unsure of the composition there. I can’t really think of anything that both works like a bendy straw and can deflect giant monster punches, but the last robot I built was made of wood and designed for hugging so I have no stones to throw here.
That said, Giant Robot’s hips are kind of a problem area, inasmuch as it looks like he’s wearing a big riveted diaper like some kind of fetishist steampunk.
They’re immediately met by Bill Nye’s Dad, Dr. Lucius Guardian. He is a super scientist being held captive and forced to build the machine by the Gargoyle Gang. He helpfully explains that Giant Robot is so powerful as to be unstoppable, and that he will imprint upon the first voice spoken into his controller. Johnny immediately grabs the device and starts giving the robot orders, because a kid like him isn’t going to let a beautiful death machine like this get away. Dr. Guardian doesn’t bat an eye at this child calling dibs on his weapon of mass destruction, noting that Robot won’t come to life without the radiation from an atomic bomb. This seems like maybe the biggest possible design flaw I have ever heard of, but again, I guess that’s why I’m not the one being kept on an island by beatnik pseudo-Nazis.
The good doctor has a further revelation: though he’s a captive, he’s going full Tony Stark on the Gargoyles. In less than five minutes, an atomic bomb will go off, destroying the entire island and killing everyone. This raises several questions, most notably: why bother building a robot of apocalyptic power at all if you’re going to blow everyone up? Also, maybe don’t use the very type of explosive needed to bring said robot to life and also leave his voice imprint controller lying around unprogrammed. Seriously, Johnny’s bloodlust is the only thing that kept Dr. Guardian from dumbly killing himself and simultaneously leaving a fully-powered, indestructible robot for someone to find. Anyway, Johnny and Jerry flee as Dr. Guardian grabs a machine gun and tries to hold off the henchmen until the bomb goes off. Amazingly, the Gargoyles manage to concentrate their fire on their target and mow him down with relative ease. Somewhere, those stormtroopers are no longer feeling good about themselves.
Jerry and Johnny make it outside the compound, just in time for it to explode in the most modest atomic blast ever. They didn’t even get knocked off their feet, but when the dust settles, the silo is gone and Giant Robot is standing there, awaiting orders like a goof. Jerry and Johnny do likewise, just dumbly staring at the robot despite the fact that literally every part of the incredibly unlikely chain of events necessary to activate the thing literally all happened at once. All of a sudden Jerry and Johnny spontaneously remember the robot and start ordering him around.
Guillotine is understandably miffed that his base is wrecked, and that the murder machine he paid for (with space dollars?) is under the control of a small child. I get that he’s angry, I just think that I would register surprise first. Shit, I’d probably hang up and chalk it up to a crank call, because that is ridiculous news to be getting out of the blue.
Guillotine calls up Commander Spider and gives him control of Dracolon with orders to crush Tokyo before our heroes arrive. Suddenly, Jerry’s antenna works and Unicorn HQ is on the line demanding he return to Tokyo to intercept Dracolon. Jerry and Johnny take a seat in Giant Robot’s outstretched palms as he blasts them across the pacific to Tokyo, where Dracolon is already clumsily kicking apart an oil refinery. Despite having been briefed on literally zero of Giant Robot’s combat capabilities, Johnny commands his charge into battle. Just like Jimmy Sparks, Johnny tests my credulity by giving the vaguest possible direction to his robot. I get that Giant Robot has a brain powered by an atomic bomb, Johnny, but I’m sure he’d appreciate a little more guidance than “destroy Dracolon”. I guess Johnny really wants to cultivate outside-the-box thinking in his unkillable death robot.
This show’s monster fight choreography makes your standard kaiju clubbering look like an Eddie Guerrero/Dean Malenko match. Giant Robot and Dracolon just kind of stand there, chest-to-chest, with their arms waving around. It’s like watching two blindfolded sumo wrestlers trying to slow dance, and it’s amazing.
Johnny soon gets bored of this bloodless carnage and cries out, “Giant Robot, use the rocket missiles!” I guess maybe Johnny has seen the opening credits. Still, I love the idea that Johnny really has no real handle on the capabilities of Giant Robot, and he just shouts various methods of murder into his watch, and we only get to see the times it works. I would love to see the director’s cut of Johnny shrieking “Robot! Tombstone piledriver! Kamehameha! Chainsaw vision!”
Anyway the missiles crash into Dracolon and send him careening into the water. Smelling blood, Johnny insists that Robot continue to pump explosives into the flailing body of his foe, “just to make sure.” Johnny then makes this face:
That’s not the cherubic grin of a lad caught up in high adventure. That’s the twisted smirk of an embryonic Colonel Kurtz. Who doesn’t love the smell of roasting monster flesh in the morning?
Because Jerry Mano is as bad at child psychology as he is at keeping his voice down, he congratulates Johnny and offers him a job with Unicorn, rather than, say, post-traumatic counseling. The fact that these goverment (extra-governmental? Which is worse?) agents are able to simply adopt Johnny raises even more troubling questions.
Where are Johnny’s parents? Why is this young man so icy-hearted, and why is he so willing to dedicate his life to battling monsters? Maybe, a la Thomas and Martha Wayne, they were gunned down by a squid pimp in a dark alley behind a remote control toy expo.
Where was Johnny actually trying to go when his ship got attacked by Dracolon? Since I’ve already decided that my previous Batman-esque origin is canon, it sure wasn’t to visit his parents. Or to go to school, unless Japan has exploding cruise liners instead of school buses. I dont know, maybe homeless orphans in 1960’s Japan just dressed really well. I’m going to run with my alternate character interpretation of Johnny as a cold, vengeful chess master playing Jerry, Dr. Guardian and Emperor Guillotine like fiddles on the way to getting his hands on the robot that can smite his enemies, the only flicker of joy his coal-black heart can still feel.
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