Giant Robo (tokusatsu) - Violence Concerns

Violence Concerns

The series was astonishingly violent by American standards of children's programming in the 1960s; in its home country of Japan, though, it was no more violent than any other tokusatsu airing at the time. Gunfights are staples of every episode of the series, and the series' two child leads--Johnny Sokko and Mari Hanson; the latter, called Mari Hanamura in the Japanese version, is a 9-year-old girl, introduced in the seventh episode, who speaks 39 languages and is a crack shot with a firearm--were frequently seen shooting along with the rest of the Unicorn agents. In one episode, Johnny and Mari are captured and tied to trees by Gargoyle, and are within seconds of being executed by firing squad, when Unicorn agents rescue them. Oddly enough, though practically every Japanese anime exported to the United States during that period was edited due to violent content, Johnny Sokko And His Flying Robot seemed to have escaped close scrutiny in that regard, and what editing was done on the show seemed to have been more for the purposes of squeezing in another commercial or two rather than in the interest of curbing the show's violence. (At least one US TV station, WXON in Detroit, ran disclaimers before each show saying, "Remember, kids, Johnny Sokko is make-believe and the actors are just pretending.")

In addition to dubbing American voice actors for the US release, many of the show's sound effects were also remixed or re-recorded entirely. And though the show's jazz-influenced score by the prolific Takeo Yamashita was used, it was frequently tracked in different places from the Japanese version of the series. The credits for production and direction in the U.S. version seem to be randomly chosen European names of various origins.