While doing a recent article about All-Might being anime Superman I came upon an intro for the Japanese dub of Filmation’s The New Adventures Of Superman. Of course I already did the original in a previous installment, and if I had found other Superman shows with Japanese intros I probably wouldn’t have done this article. Even when I did the Transformers intros I stuck to the native country because running so many intros for every country would be a lot of work.
So why make the exception here? Because this is the only Japanese show intro for Superman I could find outside of fan works, and it has original animation. I found out Batman and Scooby-Doo also have intros so I may cover those in their respective article series. Right now, however, it’s Superman.
Filmation did bring a few of their shows to Japan, just as Japanese studios allowed or brought their work to the US. It’s an exchange of ideas, and for Japanese people at the time probably their first exposure to America’s greatest superhero. (Not to be confused with The Greatest American Hero, which was also a superhero.) So what changes did they bring? An original intro and original animation on top of the Filmation clips. Check this out.
Dang, I wish some of those were actual episodes.
As a reminder, here’s what the original was like.
Interesting how they seemed to keep the original intro before adding to it. Of course, the American opening narration is taken from the George Reeves series, with some minor changes at the end. The Japanese distributors redid the American title reveal with kanji, but then goes into an original theme, using one of the background pieces for title reveal. That’s an interesting choice.
Sadly I couldn’t find a translation of the lyrics. The video I used for this article was posted by a Japanese person so the description and most of the comments were in Japanese, and Google translate had a few lines by nostalgic posters. I can tell you the song was by Ke Chap. I can’t tell you what else they did or if the translation is even correct. All I found tied to that name was some similarly named group, and they weren’t Japanese. The show apparently came out in 1971 in Japan. I can’t tell if they’re saying that Superman yelled out “Super” or “Spar”, the latter tied to a department store or something, when he took off rather than the “up, up, and away” they took from the old radio show. I’m not even going to try to confirm the other things outside of the Superboy segments did air, and one of the commenters thought Krypto was cute.
I’m not kidding about wishing some of those adventures happened in the show. While Superman and Superboy fought monsters and aliens, I don’t remember that particular monster, though it has been awhile. I’d also like to know why Clark is digging his way around under the town. Is it Smallville or some other location? This is where the Japanese intro shines versus the original. While the Filmation intro shows off his powers, the Japanese intro shows them in action against actual threats. Instead of just missiles bouncing off of Superman’s chest for some reason or Superboy lifting a tractor we get Superman saving lives and fighting monsters and invaders. That’s very cool.
Now I just have to see what the Batman and Scooby-Doo intros look like to see if those series have another entry or not.
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