hrough hundreds of television episodes and more than a dozen feature films—including the charming The Castle of Cagliostro, the debut feature of Spirited Away writer/director Hayao Miyazaki—Monkey Punch's lunatic master criminal Lupin III has built up an avid, loyal following in Japan, beginning with his initial manga appearance in 1967. Just in time to help cross-promote the Cartoon Network's Jan. 13 launch of the Lupin the 3rd TV series, as part of its weekday-night Toonami block, Pioneer is releasing the first volume in a series of Lupin TV DVDs.
The show's opening installments (though both the DVD release and Cartoon Network's midnight Lupin airings are skipping one early episode, "Hitler's Legacy") don't really introduce the characters; this is the second incarnation of Lupin the 3rd, from the late 1970s, rather than his early-'70s TV debut. As the first episode, "The Return of Lupin the 3rd," begins, Lupin and his three sometime partners, Jigen, Goemon and Fujiko, reunite aboard a luxury cruise ship. They've been
separated for five years, but return supposedly at each other's behest, only to find they've been tricked. When Lupin's arch-nemesis, the clumsy but dogged Interpol inspector Zenigata, shows up with arrest papers in hand, it briefly seems like he's put together a cunning trap, but Lupin cheerfully points out that Zenigata's warrant is a forgery, and he was clearly duped into the same trap. It soon becomes apparent that the entire ship is designed with murder in mind: Among other things, the dentist's equipment contains a venomous snake and the swimming pool is stocked with sharks. Ultimately, Lupin and his friends have to face a psychotic cyborg obsessed with vengeance.
Apparently deciding after that that four heads are better than one, Lupin and his buddies then launch right back into their usual capers, plotting to steal everything from $10 million in Brazilian soccer-match box-office receipts to Tutankhamen's cursed treasure. In the process, they run afoul of the Loch Ness monster, a giggling psychopath with an earthquake-creating device and a corresponding blackmail scheme, and—endlessly and inevitably—the relentless Zenigata.
Old-fashioned animation, classic good humor
Whether planning an elaborate heist or just trying to get into Fujiko's bikini, Lupin carries out all his plans with reckless, unhesitating confidence, if not always the style and panache of his later incarnations. That confidence, his sheer unpredictability, his ludicrous luck and his companions' phenomenal, over-the-top skill is most of the Lupin franchise's fun. Certainly no one's likely to fall head over heels for this series' klutzy, primitive '70s animation. But the show's sense of fun tends to be infectious.
So is its creativity. Each episode has a slightly different flavor—"Gold Smuggling 101" is mostly taken up with a complex heist, with a new surprising twist every few minutes. "50 Ways to Leave Your 50 Foot Lover," by contrast, is mostly just goofy fantasy, though it's mildly touching to see Lupin's obvious concern for the safety of his "Fuji-cakes," and her corresponding concern for the safety of the Loch Ness monster. "Cursed Case Scenario" actually gets a bit grim, as Lupin falls victim to King Tut's curse, while the Chicago sharpshooter Jigen and the absurdly skilled samurai Goemon mumble superstitious disavowals (Goemon claims he sees an ominous "shadow of death" on his sword, while Jigen says his prescient athlete's foot is acting up) and refuse to touch Tutankhamen's loot.
But whether slightly serious or straight-up silly, Lupin the 3rd is full of good-natured, over-the-top, old-fashioned limb-flailing slapstick. There's a lot of bawdy humor (Lupin constantly expresses his desire to bed Fujiko, and the show's opening-credit sequence even depicts him leaping out of his clothes and into her bed, before a trap takes him down) and a lot of running gaggery. (Zenigata shows up everywhere, convinced that Lupin is behind all the world's troubles; while he sometimes takes Lupin by surprise, the master thief mostly regards him with condescending affection.) And the show's fantasy elements mean that just about anything can happen. All together, it's not exactly a cutting-edge modern show, but it's a lot of fun in its way, and it's easy to see how Lupin earned his fans and his franchise: one unexpected laugh at a time.
I was surprised at how rarely Lupin actually escapes with any kind of loot. I always thought that was the problem with Cowboy Bebop, a modern series that leans strongly on the Lupin archetypes—Bebop's bounty-hunter protagonists never do earn a buck or get their man—but it turns out that Bebop was following the Lupin pattern more closely than I realized.
— Tasha
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