Okay, I’m going way back here, so most of you are probably too young to even remember this… but maybe you’ve read something that I haven’t been able to find…
Back when I was a wee little tyke, there were a couple of animated series that get credit in the anime history books as ground breakers in getting Japanese animation over to America. The ones I always see are namely Kimba and Speed Racer (both the American names).
When I was about five or six, I used to watch Kimba every Saturday morning, but it didn’t make much of an impression on me–I can’t remember much about the series, except that the title character could essentially be called a prototype for Disney’s Lion King. Oh, yeah… and the first two lines of the theme song, which were "Kimba… Kimba…"
Anyway… what made more of an impression on me at about the same age was another series that I am almost positive was Japanese animation, called (American title) Marine Boy. It had many typical anime elements: wierd science (Marine Boy’s special suit for moving around the water), a special weapon attack (a boomerang, in this case), the benevolent scientific genius father (who provided all the wierd science), a quasi-love interest (a mermaid, in this instance), and an animal companion (a dolphin), among other things. The artwork was typical of anime–in fact, a couple of years later, as an eight-year-old, when I had moved to California and was flipping through TV channels looking for things to watch, I settled on Speed Racer because my first thought was, “Why is Marine Boy driving around in a car?” That’s how similar the styles were. But I’ve never been able to find out anything about the series, even though I’m pretty sure it ran about as long as Kimba.
Anyone ever hear of it?
(By the way, I can still remember almost the entire theme song to Marine Boy…)