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Steve Harrison's avatar

Gentlemen, I always listen to your ‘cast. I just haven’t posted in awhile because my life is… well. Anyway. I will post here for science!

This clip is from a program called Beyond the Horizon. It was a weekly… honestly I think it was technically an infomercial bartered for the commercials ad revenue… program that ran on the Christian Broadcast Network cable channel, run nation wide. It was produced by a group called TeleJapan which I think is tied to Fuji Teribe. It was a one hour program that had three hosts on a ‘local station noon program’ set who would smilingly read some copy and throw to a package. Does that sound too ‘inside’ ? 😁

AFAIK it ran from 1983 to 1984. It then became Japan Today and lost two of the hosts. The vibe I got from the show is totally Pro-Japan happy talk. Given the growing ‘Japan Panic’ over the strong and growing economic power, talking about auto plants and mag-lev trains and making miso soup probably seemed like a good thing. 👍

Little did they realize that the perfect soothing balm was already being applied, Japanimation. And the show never leaned into that, except for this segment and two episodes of Mazinger Z dubbed into English, the episodes cut into two parts with no intro or outro or any explanation or context. Just bam! Mazinger Z going up against a mechanical brute.

So this segment, from visual clues, had to have aired in 1983, the interview with Pat must have been Spring ‘83 because those kids sure weren’t dressed for NYC winter! That’s an amazing catch on the Srungle toy! All I could recognize was the Valkyrie, the Clover Xabungle, a Popy Gold Litan and something that kinda sorta looked like either Daiojya (sp?) or maybe Daitarn 3? I suspect they were all 1982 releases from her collection.

And nobody says a damn thing about that English dub on the Queen of a Thousand Years clip (series coming in Sept. from Sentai! Holy cats! Has hell froze over? 😆)

Keep doing it guys. I’m here.

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