This new wave of killings is caused not by traditional "natural" vampires but by decadent thrill-seekers who have voluntarily undergone an artificial transformation, lured by promises of eternal life and pleasure. As the plot thickens, it appears that the criminal mastermind creating what Arucard calls the "trash" vampires has two goals: to undermine British society, and to expose the Hellsing Organization to the public and frame it as the culprit. An additional enemy is the Vatican's intolerant rival anti-vampire "secret bureau, Section Thirteen", a.k.a. The Iscariot Organization, which despises Hellsing for working with Arucard and Victoria ("There are no 'good' vampires"). Rome's top vampire slayer, Father Alexander Andersong, makes disposing of Arucard his top priority.

Hellsing raises many intriguing questions, none of which are answered as the series ends with a frustrating "cannot yet be revealed to the public" cliffhanger. Despite this, the story is unique and gripping enough to be enjoyed by all fans of serious vampire/horror movies.

Gigantor is of interest to anime fans, TV history buffs and those into nostalgia. © Rhino Home Video. 2002. All rights reserved.

Gigantor. Part 1, episodes 1-26. Part 2, episodes 27-52.
TV series (52 episodes), 1965-1966. Directors: Yonehiko Watanabe & Tadao Wakabayashi (Japan); Fred Ladd (U.S.). V.1-2, 4 discs/26 episodes/650 minutes. Price & format: DVD English $59.95. Distributor: Rhino Home Video.

Gigantor is laughably old-fashioned by modern animation standards in America or Japan, but it is definitely of historic interest. It was the second significant TV animated series in Japan (as Tetsujin 28-go or Iron Man No. 28), and the first production of Japan's second TV animation studio, TCJ (Television Corporation of Japan). It was an adaptation of one of Japan's most popular juvenile sci-fi manga of the 1950s and '60s, by Mitsuteru Yokoyama. It ran for 83 episodes in Japan (October 20, 1963 through May 27, 1965), but only the last 52 were seen in America; and those were so revised for American broadcasting demands (reduction of violence; removal of cliffhanger endings to convert serials into stand-alone adventures) that many were subsequently shown in Japan as new episodes. The third Japanese TV cartoon series to be syndicated on American TV as just another kid's cartoon (not recognized as "anime" at the time), Gigantor debuted on January 5, 1966 and was popular until around the mid-'70s when all black-&-white TV cartoons were phased out.

The story as revised by American producer-director Fred Ladd is set in the "future year 2000." Jimmy Sparks is a barely-adolescent boy detective who has been entrusted by inventor Bob Brilliant with the controls of Gigantor, a giant robot, to help him fight crime as the assistant of Inspector Ignatz Blooper of Interpol. Inspector Blooper and Jimmy (with Gigantor) travel all over the world (often accompanied by Prof. Brilliant and sometimes by secret agent Dick Strong) to combat would-be world dictators, mad scientists and international crime gangs. Many adventures involve plot variants of the villains trying to steal Gigantor's control box to use for themselves, or trying to steal its blueprints so they could build their own Gigantor (or an army of them) for criminal purposes.

Many producers of the Americanized anime TV series of the 1960s threw out their production elements as their licenses expired. But Fred Ladd bought the rights to Gigantor permanently and kept all the production materials. Rhino's DVD release is from the restored original film negatives. It is aimed equally for the nostalgia market for early American children's TV, and for the anime fan and serious TV historian. The DVD extras include half-hour video interviews with Fred Ladd and "anime historian, Fred Patten from Animation World Magazine, " and a profile of Gigantor creator Mitsuteru Yokoyama. So there is much information about the Japanese origins of Gigantor and how Japanese TV cartoons came to be imported into America in the 1960s, and on the considerable differences between the Japanese and American versions of Gigantor, even if only the Americanized version is presented here.