According to Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, Sesame Street owes its general aesthetic to the NBC comedy variety hour Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In. The educators at Children’s Television Workshop borrowed the fast-paced, psych-pop style after noticing that children seemed to love Laugh-In and its zany punchlines. In the early 1970s, Japanese executives at Nippon TV must have realized this lineage for the Sesame Street formula and reunited the production staff of NTV’s popular late ’60s Laugh-In rip-off, Kyosen • Maetake Geba Geba 90pun, to make a daily kids’ show. The result — Curriculumachine (『カリキュラマシーン』) — premiered on April 1, 1974, and for the next four years, the fifteen minute educational program was shown six days a week to pre-school and early elementary school students in the early morning. Curriculumachine featured many talented members of the Geba Geba cast, plus adorable idols Okazaki Yuki and Sakurada Junko, and early Johnny’s Jimusho stars The Four Leaves.¹

Visually, Curriculumachine is as close to The Electric Company as humanly possible. The opening title sequence is almost an exact copy, perfectly reproducing EC’s lysergic video distortion techniques. The theme song (from Miyagawa Hiroshi) is equally groovy, although a bit more Pizzicato Five club-jazz than Fifth Dimension sing-a-long soul-pop. Analog synth squirts provide clever sound design, while dreamy animations, lacking any real resemblance to modern anime conventions, teach kids in whimsical ways. And yes, Curriculumachine even has its own gorilla — named Ichiro. Unlike my earlier disappointment with the Japanese adaptation of Hair, I can happily report that Curriculumachine is incredibly good and stands up well over time. (A more commercial blog would write: Click here to buy the DVD boxset.)

Children’s programming, however, very rarely pleases everyone and is always under attack for being a “bad influence” on its young viewers. Wikipedia notes that Sesame Street was not only criticized for its attention span-reducing style, but also for sometimes featuring “inappropriate” content:

For an animation on the letter “J”, the writers included “a day in jail.” This drew criticism from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Terrence O’Flaherty, despite executive producer David Connell’s assertion that kids are familiar with the word through shows like Batman and Superman, and that “when you’re trying to come up with a lot of words starting with J, you soon run short” of words they are already familiar with.

If the mere mention of “jail” was enough to sound alarms in the United States, what would child advocates have thought about these live-action sketches on Curriculumachine?
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After the television series Superdimensional Fortress Macross debuted in Japan on October 3, 1982, the fantasy lives of Japanese geeks would never be the same. Originally conceived as a slapstick parody, Macross eventually evolved into an iconic sci-fi drama brimming with now-classic anime stereotypes: the introverted protagonist who’s a total klutz with the ladies, apocalyptic imagery, grand space battles, and the first portrayals of transforming robots that felt realistic. As one of the very first anime productions created by and for hard-core fans, the success of the series played a major role in defining and legitimizing the otaku as a consumer demographic. (A demographic, incidentally, that never tires of gleefully pointing out that the premier episode of Macross contains the very first use of the eccentric second-person pronoun “o-taku” [お宅] in an anime.) Most importantly, the series and its subsequent theatrical follow-up offered an updated take on the relentless rehashing of the Japanese World War II narrative: consumer culture as an antidote to militarism.

The basic plot: in the far-flung year of 1999, a massive, uninhabited spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin crash-lands on the fictional South Ataria Island located in the Ogasawara Island chain. The continually-warring nations of the Earth lay down their arms to study and rebuild the mysterious craft, code-naming it “Super Dimensional Fortress 1” for its apparent ability to “fold” space-time. Exactly a decade later, the once quiet island is home to a bustling metropolis of scientists, soldiers, and workers who are involved with the SDF-1 project. Although the re-construction effort for the ship was ostensibly funded by a global organization called “UN Spacy,” the social culture on-board the space fortress is unmistakably Japanese. The bridge crew is staffed by a bevy of energetic and uniformed office ladies, overseen by an absentminded, pipe-smoking ojiisan named Captain Global, while the ship is defended by all-male squadrons of stalwart “Valkyrie fighter” pilots who are portrayed with salaryman-esque dedication to their jobs and “country” (i.e., the SDF-1 itself).

The story starts on the day of the SDF-1’s official launching ceremony. Now re-christened the “Macross,” apparently in reference to its huge size, the ship is about to take its maiden flight under human control when the island comes under attack. An enormous fleet of alien invaders appears in the skies over the city, intent on reclaiming its lost property. During the confusion, the rookie crew activates the SDF-1’s as-yet untested Hyperspace Fold Drive, sending the ship to the edge of our solar system along with a huge chunk of the city, island, and ocean. Although temporarily safe from enemy attacks, the fold drive “folds in on itself” and vanishes during the process, stranding the ship in deep space with tens of thousands of civilian refugees on-board.

The situation of the Macross could be seen as an apt metaphor for the shock and sense of drift Japan must have felt at the end of World War II. The inhabitants of the SDF-1 end up reacting in the same way as the families of the animators nearly four decades earlier: by rebuilding. Before long, “Macross City” has been almost perfectly reconstructed within SDF-1’s cavernous interior. The city inside the SDF-1 is microcosm of Tokyo life as seen through the eyes of the show’s young creators. Romance blossoms in video game arcades while giggling ladies linger over panty purchases at lingerie shops. The streets are lined with toy stores, restaurants, and nightclubs. Fans queue for the concerts of comely teenage idol-girl Lynn Minmei, whose fluffy tunes tackle close-to-home issues like “zero-G love” and flirting with fighter pilots. Nary a nursing home, hospital, supermarket, waste-treatment plant, garbage dump, or anything remotely outside the scope of a teenage or twenty-something otaku’s interest makes an appearance. Many anime are set in vaguely-defined foreign locales. Not Macross: the portrayal of life aboard the SDF-1 is almost defiantly Japanese, an attempt by the creators to re-cast the narrative of Japan’s role in World War II within the context of their own comfortable modern consumer lifestyles.
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