NoScans: Oogon Bat – the unknown precurson of superheores

[leahandillyana]

When asked about the first superhero, the most legitimate answer will be the Scarlet Pimpernel. Emma de Orci’s early 20th century character established the basics of masked vigilancy: having a secret identity unconnected with your public persona, characteristic costume obscuring your identity, doing good deeds in a way that would be impossible to do officially etc. When it comes to the origin of super powered heroes, the distinction is less clear, but most would point to late 30s American comics. However, there’s a character that predated them by many years, a character almost completely unknown outside of Japan.

Oogon Bat is an… unique character. It’s very difficult to find much information on this character, and much of the media is lost, partially due to unique origin of the character. Oogon Bat (‘Golden Bat’) originated in paper theater, a form of media popular among the Japanese children in the pre-war era, when tv did not exist, only wealthy people owned a radio, and theater tickets were out of reach for most children. Paper theater was nominally free – you could pay the performer as much as you wanted to if you liked the performance. The play itself consisted on illustrations shown by the narrator to illustrate the tale he was telling. The spoken aspect is particularly important because during that time most of Japanese population was illiterate. However, because of that the stories were initially not written down and evolved with each retelling, making it difficult to say exactly who Oogon Bat was and what his adventures were.

Few things can be said for certain. The character was co-created in 1931 by Takeo Nagamatsu and Suzuki Ichiro. The final version of the character’s lore combines Silver Age insanity (lots and lots of it), Golden Age violence, and fascination with monsters characteristic to Japanese folklore, even though the creators insisted they wanted to create a sci-fi hero. From the Western point of view, Oogon Bat looks like a villain – he is a golden skeleton dressed in a colourful swashbuckler costume with a cape, inspired by the Scarlet Pimpernel. Not only does he look like a skeleton, he is in fact a reanimated skeleton – to be precise, an ancient magician from Atlantis awoken from his eternal rest in Antarctic by means lost to time (in the 60s animated series it is done by a bunch of kids who then become his sidekicks). He doesn’t have much of a personality, only appearing when there’s a monster on the loose and announcing his arrival with a characteristic evil sounding laugh before beating the shit out of his opponent with powers including flight, super strength, speed, stamina and invulnerability. Some of his recurring opponents look truly riddiculous, like a character who replaced his bottom half with an UFO.
 

There’s been three movies based on the character, two of them missing, the earliest one being considered the earliest tokusatsu movie in Japan. The surviving movie and the acompanying animated series were created in mid-late 60s and introduced most of the more associatted with the character, such as supporting cast and details of his arrival in modern age, alongside simplifying the characters design so that he’s easier to animate – remember this was not only a very early anime, but possibly the earliest anime made in colour. The character enjoyed mild popularity in the 60s but was quickly displaced by younger manga and tv series, better suiting the likes of modern audience. The latest appearance of a Oogon Bat character is a brief scene in Daicon IV animation in which Doctor Nazou appears. (I honestly love this video, in addition of it being a wild crossover, it’s also a brilliant parody of Ideon anime.)

 

Comments

[cricharddavies]

Fascinating.

[lordy_co]

Thanks for bringing this up! I searched for some images of Oogn Bat and his looks are really cool!

[onsokumaru]

Interesting. I've read about the 60s cartoon, but wasn't aware that the character was so old.
I'm surprised that he doesn't have more recent appearances, but there are so many remakes of old stuff that his turn will probably come at some point.
Some "Legion of Monsters" crossover involving Ôgon Bat, Enma-kun, Kitarô and Yôkai Ningen Bem could be fun.