An Interview With Takeo Mitsui
!@(images/2007/03/figureoh53.jpg thickbox:gal1 “April 2002 issue of Figure Oh”)
Translated from the April 2002 issue of Figure Oh magazine. Mitsui joined Takatoku Toys in 1975 and supervised many of their toy projects until the company’s bankruptcy in 1984. The gold chrome “Gyakuten-Oh” pictured below is a special prototype that never reached the production phase, still in Mr. Mitsui’s posession after all these years.
Please tell us about Takatoku Toys.
The company was originally founded to provide products for fairs and festivals. Then, we got the license for “Kamen Rider,” which turned out to be a massive hit. From that point on, we changed our focus to mass media characters (characters from TV shows and the like).
What’s the origin of the Z-Gokin brand name?
During the Russo-Japanese War, the warships of the Japanese Navy sailed under what were called “Z-Flags.” “Z” has always encompassed the meanings of “strongest” or “final.” I think that’s what they were thinking when they came up with the name.
The Z-Gokin seem well-proportioned even by today’s standards.
The designs were unconventional right from the start. Perhaps to the point where they weren’t really fashionable? A lot of work was put into bringing that novelty to life in toy form.
The Z-Gokin toys get all the attention, but the soft vinyls are well done, too.
Even though those were 150 yen toys, we sold millions of units. Tiny wholesale shops and festivals and things like that moved a huge number of them. To the point where even I was surprised by it. Final approval was really annoying for those. The faces wouldn’t look right, and they’d have to be re-worked again and again. So there was a whole lot of fuss over the prototypes. In the end, they’d be like, “look, just tell me what you want! Come over and show me yourself!” (Laughs) So I’d go over there with a spatula or something, that kind of tool. There was nothing to do but tell them to make some time for me, a day or so, and tell them to watch what I was doing and copy it. (Laughs)
So you made them yourself!?
I graduated from the sculpture department of an art school. I had studied the structure of the skeleton and facial expressions and things like that. So I’d only change the faces. But the funny thing was, they started resembling me! (Laughs) It was a lot of fun to do, getting involved in that.
!@(images/2007/03/robot.jpg thickbox:gal1 “April 2002 issue of Figure Oh”)
So the faces of the soft vinyls are partially based on your own, Mr. Mitsui!
I’m pretty sure that started with Zendaman (1979).
So that’s why the soft vinyl toys started looking so good from that show on. You’ve solved a mystery for us! (Laughs)
I’d only been with the company for about a year when Time Bokan (1975) started, so I was totally flying by the seat of my pants. But by the second and third year, I started becoming more aware of what I was doing. Thinking along the lines of what I could do to make kids happy with the product. When you’re in that kind of mode, you’re more aware of the response to what you make. So I decided to make the mechanical characters more angular, things like that. In a nutshell, I started thinking up ideas that would look cool in a three-dimensional form.
Yattodetaman (1981) was the first time giant robots started appearing in the Time Bokan series.
We’d been saying we really wanted to do robots for a while. Because the other companies had been putting out a lot of robot-related products. There was a lot of doubt as to if robots could be integrated into the Time Bokan series. But they said, we’d like you to try. The development side still wanted to make the next show have an animal theme, just as before, but sales were starting to drop off. [Show producers] Fuji Television said they wanted to keep the comedic theme, and they wouldn’t give the go-ahead if including robots made the show serious. So I took on the role of going to [animators] Tatsunoko to talk things over with them, and the result was that Mr. Sasakawa there settled it himself: “Robots can be funny, too.” (Laughs) We were worried about how we’d pull off making a funny robot into a toy, ourselves, but Mr. Sasakawa told us, “I want you to take a look at the show. But toys are toys, so just relax and make them.” Finally, he managed to persuade Fuji Television somehow and put a robot in the show for us.
How were sales?
They were good. Just under what we did for the peak of the series, Yattaman (1977). We felt glad that we’d gone ahead and done it.
In Ippatsuman (1982), the robot suddenly switched from Gyakuten-Oh to Sankan-Oh halfway through the show.
That was actually planned from the very beginning. It was a request from our side. One robot a year was fine, but then we wanted to sell more. And it was a kind of insurance, in case one of the designs wasn’t popular. We asked Tatsunoko to handle the design itself, but from Daikyojin forward we handled color selection on our side. There were issues with the breakdown of parts and the molds and things like that. We had to consider where to use gold plating, where to use yellow, things like that. We heard all sorts of things from Tatsunoko about the colors not working on screen, and how difficult we were making the cel-painting process. (Laughs)
In Itadakiman (1983), the giant robots disappeared from the storyline, and the mechanical animal theme made a comeback.
They decided to make the change because the television station said robots weren’t working anymore. And so based on Tatsunoko’s idea of mechanical animals that transformed, we came up with the concept of flipping the characters around to make them transform.
And with Itadakiman, the series came to a close. What sort of feeling do you have about the Time Bokan series?
Time Bokan was my first opportunity to work with mass-media characters. We all learned a lot from it. The difficulties of animating shows and making toys for them, and the fun of it all. It was the foundation of my learning the “character business,” so I think of it as the show that taught me my own style for making toys.
