(Image: Asatsu-DK)
Before RoboCop, there was . . . 8 Man!
8 Man was an anime and manga series from the early 1960s. The premise is that Japanese police detective Yokoda was murdered by criminals. A brilliant scientist named Tani took his body and turned it into an android using an experimental process. That process had failed on 7 previous attempts. But on the eighth attempt, Tani was successful. Now Yokoda maintains a double life as a private detective and a cyborg superhero named 8 Man.
Whenever Yokoda was depleted of energy, he could resupply by puffing on special cigarette-shaped tubes developed by Professor Tani. These were filled with radioactive isotopes—just the kick he needs to keep on fighting crime.
-via VA Viper
Newest 4 Comments
HEY! That's an awful thing to say about W. Watts “Buck” Biggers, Creator/Producer of Underdog and other "Total Television" cartoons... about whom I wrote a long retrospective as part of a short-lived 'cartoon blog' I made earlier this year (this would be a self-promotional link if I were still keeping up the site).
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Our pal Daven of Today I Found Out has a neat write-up about 8 Man.
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The Underdog cartoon was just a grand delusion inside the mind of a pill junkie who lived on the streets, occasionally shining shoes for spare change.
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...and you thought you couldn't do worse than "The secret compartment of my ring I fill / With an Underdog super energy pill"... or Roger Ramjet's "Proton Energy Pills (PEP), which give me the strength of twenty atom bombs for a period of twenty seconds". There were a lot of pill-popping superheroes in the '60s...
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