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Among the many
ultra obscure straight-to-video titles from the eighties, Mugen Shinshi is a distinct one I wish would have been a longer
franchise, even if at first you are caught off-guard by the protagonist, a
young man named Mamiya Mugen, a detective who when we are introduced to him
looks like a kid but is a good sharpshooter practicing in his office. Without
time to breathe, a fifty or so minute production, a young woman who we will
learn is an exotic dancer runs in on him and his servant Alardo/Alucard, in the
midst of being pursued by Egyptian crocodile headed behemoths.
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This, the only
adaptation in anime, is sadly a really tantalizing image of the source material
of Yosuke Takahashi. The art style is a cartoonish style close to “chibi” in
how, a style usually meant to depict tiny and cute figures in anime/manga, the
cast includes a lot of fresh faced and young figures despite being clearly
adults, but this is a work of a prolific pulp and horror manga author. He is
capable of creating grotesque sounding (and looking) work like Man Eater (1997), a horror short story
collection, but here with Mugen Shinshi,
he was clearly tapping into Japan’s history of mystery story telling,
especially clear as the comedic side character, a bumbling detective for the
police, is named Inspector Edogawa. He is named after the legendary author Edogawa Ranpo who, whilst known for
creepy and twisted tales like “The Human
Chair”, was also writing detective stories for adults and children. Mamiya
Mugen could have easily found himself a detective character in the centre of The Black Lizard (1934), a tale in
which a mysterious femme fatale kidnapping women and turning them into statues
to preserve their beauty, which sets the tone for this adaptation perfectly
even if at times, like a plane versus hot air blimp battle with dynamite, you
can even see a touch of early Hayao
Miyazaki in the tone too.
Mugen himself is
in a pretty diabolical tale of his own, the tone set in how this is also set in
the Showa era after 1926, where the exotic dancer Atsuko Fukune, a key
character in the manga, is one of six women of notability to be kidnapped and
sacrificed in a melding of Egyptian occultism and science, all to resurrect the
secret underground leader of Japan. The production is a one off, but it would
have been a perfect pilot to a larger work with enough characters to work from,
not only with Edogawa, but Atsuko, who come off as the antagonistic love-hate
love interesting to Mugen, and Alardo as I had him in the subtitles, the giant
manservant who in the manga is Alucard, a vampire who we see here is a gentle
man who yet, when needs to, can turn into his more monstrous form for subhuman
strength. Its heightened, slapstick tone is also, with all the humour, fun to experience;
even the villains behind the kidnapping of women of all fields of talent, one
and his bumbling assistant, are as put upon especially when their staff have
gone on strike for having to look after the kidnap victims for too long. It is
a shame we only have this, as right away, this could have been an extended
episode pilot for a very good series, or an OVA one which had the world of
possibilities to it. There is intrigue with Mugen as a very good detective, even
able to disguise himself as one of the female kidnap victims, who has quests
can vary between the supernatural and world politics, as here you have the German,
the French, the British and even Japanese armies staging a blow for blow gun
battle in a pyramid over this arcane resurrection secret eventually. The horror
is also there too in touches like the crocodile headed thugs. Sadly this never
got more than this, adapting one of the many different retellings of the
characters in manga form by his creator, and we never got it in the West
either, one resurrected through the power of the internet and fan archiving for
a secret gem.
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