Youth Culture Killed My Dog(S)
Shrieking and honking its way out of the cough-syrup nightmares of a nation of feverish preadolescents, HELLHOUND LINER 0011 TRANSFORM! (Maken Liner-0011 Henshin Seyo!) is, barring my ignorance of an entire genre of movies about evil space amoeba-squids sending monster robot bugs to smash an Earth defended by children in giant space helmets and rocket-firing submachine guns aided by talking cybernetic pet dogs who occasionally transform into spaceship-combining super dog robots, a unique film experience.
Americans of a certain age will remember our 70s cartoons; suffocated by emasculated parent-approved blandness, full of funny dogs and singing teenagers solving mysteries, interrupted with public service announcements by has-been actors eager to work off their drunk driving charges. This was a reaction to the acid rock psychedelic-biker-Manson Family grindhouse insanity that was creeping into our culture courtesy The Hippies, to be fought at every turn by the Silent Majority and their henchmen at Action for Children's Television. Japan had their own anti-cartoon crusaders, legions of kendo moms and PTAs agitating against Go Nagai's Shameless School and other national disgraces.
But while American producers knuckled under and wimped out, Japan doubled down on the wild, filling their 1970s kidvid with outlandish action-adventure quivering with barely repressed raw power. That's where HELLHOUND LINER 0011 comes in, and keep in mind this isn't some kind of weird desperate failure produced by some forgettable fly-by-night outfit. It's from Toei, the Walt Disney of the Orient, the industry leader in fantastical fantasy films for children, hosts of their popular Manga Matsuri summertime children's film festival, which in July of ’72 gave Japan's kids this story of friendly transforming robot dogs and their orphaned master seeking vengeance upon an entire race of deformed space devils.
HELLHOUND LINER 0011 TRANSFORM!, or as Toei would like you to know it, “Go Get Them 0011”, has a solid anime pedigree with direction by Takeshi (Captain Harlock, Great Mazinger, Grendizer) Tamiya and a script by Tsuji Masaki and Toei legend Yugo "Little Prince And The 8-Headed Dragon" Serikawa. However, it's Hiroshi Sasagawa whose imagination powers HELLHOUND LINER - the film is based on his 1963 Shonen King serial "Hellhound Goro", and Sasagawa would go on to a long and fruitful career at Tatsunoko, where he'd give TIME BOKAN its sexy Doronjo-sama and let CASSHAN's transforming robot-dog-jetplane Frenda out of the robot-dog-jetplane kennel.
Sasagawa's original Maken Goro manga
The theater lights dim, the Manga Matsuri kids dial the popcorn-throwing back a notch. HELLHOUND LINER 0011 starts, and immediately you're assaulted by the soundtrack, deeply painful atonal free-form jazz, like Miles Davis, an irritable Miles who won't quit stepping on the goose that somehow got into his studio. There's all sorts of tinkly percussion, echoey beatnik scat vocals, reverb'd keyboards and a beefy sax that is simply drilling a hole into your skull. As the background for a children's cartoon, this is nothing less than a sneak attack. One imagines parents enduring twenty or thirty seconds of this before simply walking out of the theater and abandoning little Saburo to the mercy of whatever creepy deviant is 30,000 MILES UNDER THE SEA, which also features a young boy and his fairly implausible pet fighting giant monsters. 0011, however, raises the stakes at every opportunity. You’ll see a super mechanical fighting beetle shoot its head off and destroy a highway overpass, a talking dog with the voice of CYBORG 009's 007 (Machiko Soga!!) turn into a sexy centaur and wink at a 10 year old boy, the same boy who later dons a space suit to shoot rockets at a giant slug whose abdomen is lined with fanged jaws and whose eye-stalks shoot dripping acid, all accompanied by the piercing soundtrack by Takeo Yamashita, who wrote the score for the game show “I Crush The Perfect Crime Detective.”
Remember these are ordinary dog brains. This is what dogs think about, apparently
Of course they can’t spend a lot of time on subtle nuance in a fifty minute film designed for a theater full of short-attention-span kids out on summer break and stuffed with candy. Like Toei's later Manga Matsuri shorts starring Bluefixer for making this available!
