NEW 12 “Who’s the Last One to Laugh?” & 13 “Beware the Time
Jun 26, 2015 8:26:24 GMT -5
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Post by Jean Luc de Lemur on Jun 26, 2015 8:26:24 GMT -5
12 Who’s the Last One to Laugh?
Despite the confidence of “When the Seventh Bridge Falls,” there’s still some tension between Lupin’s source material and Miyazaki-and-Takahata’s approach. That tension makes “Who’s the Last One to Laugh?,” oddly enough, one of the most uncomfortable episodes of the series.
Although I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy, my understanding of Lupin’s character in the comics is that it's a lot rougher—much more like an actual con artist than the gentleman-cambrioleur of the shows, and what might merely be “problematic” in a Bond film became an unambiguous problem, at least for the modern reader. Despite the first half of the Lupin series having a reputation as rougher and more adult, Masaaki Ōsumi did a lot to make the show more palatable for television, most notably by promoting Fujiko to Lupin’s equal rather than his dupe. Looking back through the early episodes, in fact, it’s hard to why she doesn’t have the appellation of world’s greatest thief, and by introducing an ambiguous dynamic of competition, mutual respect and frustrated lust into their stories.
Miyazaki and Takahata were, reportedly, uncomfortable with the character’s development under Masaaki and thought of Fujiko fell into too many negative stereotypes of women—dangerous to men, conflicted about her passions, covetous, and just too much of a sex object for a family show. To some extent that’s all true—Fujiko does check a lot of those boxes—but she’s also depicted as supremely competent and, with her flaws, probably the most well rounded character of the bunch. Even though Fujiko was usually tasked with being the sole woman in the show, she never really felt like an amalgam of misogynist stereotypes.
By getting rid of her duplicitousness, Miyazaki and Takahata make Fujiko seem less intelligent. While eliminating her sex drive while keeping Lupin’s, they’ve unintentionally made their Fujiko—ostensibly with the problematic aspects of her character repaired—seem more out of date than Masaaki’s femme fatale.
Masaaki, in other words, made her cool, and that excuses a lot in the earlier episodes. The setting feels a bit more like an abandoned Scooby-Doo village than the moody forest retreats of episodes like “Introducing Goemon XIII” or “An Assassin Sings the Blues.” It doesn’t help that Lupin’s Connery-as-Bond edge has been sanded away since the first episode—his roué smirk in that episode feels a little dangerous in a good way, but the more laid back, slightly goofy Lupin he evolved into can’t pull of a louche grin in this one; it’s the gap between Miyazaki and Takahata’s generally nicer approach and the action on the screen that makes it hard to accept these characters acting so badly.
And Lupin is at his most louche in this one—amazingly, Ōsumi’s run never pulled the “Lupin tries to climb into Fujiko’s bed” slapstick routine—in the filmed versions it always ends with physical harm to Lupin, of course, but it’s still a creepy routine. He manages to one-up it by putting out a fire in an attempt to get Fujiko to crawl into bed with him later on. Sure, Lupin ends up sleeping on a cold floor, but it takes one out of the story. And these instances are pretty much the only moments Fujiko has the upper hand against Lupin—most of it is Lupin duping her, seemingly in total control of the situation. There’s none of the back-and-forth—in terms of their heists or feelings—that made their previous competitions such fun.
We get a series of last-minute reversals, but they feel tacked on, like an apology for what came before (and, while we deserve an apology, it’s not enough). The main loot is destroyed, Fujiko ends up getting the map to a gold mine instead of Lupin, but it turns out that Fujiko has a fake and the village elder retains the secret of its location. Crime doesn’t pay, kids.
Stray Observations
• There’s a new, vaguely Latin “Lupin” song playing on the radio, of all things—get used to it, we’ll be hearing it a lot more.
• We get another appearance of Lupin the agent of chaos/arsonist at the end. It’s not very interesting.
Recommended?
An unambiguous no: there’s nothing new, nothing weird, and lots wrong with this episode. It’s not even well made trash, and is very laggy and never that exciting.
13 Beware the Time Machine!
“I have no idea what he’s going on about; I’m only Lupin III” Lupin says in the preview to this episode, and it has one of the more unusual premises—Mamou Kyouske, a man from the 29th century, goes back in time to kill off Lupin III because his descendent (Lupin XIII) is an annoyance. The audience shares Lupin’s early skepticism that it’s just a trick—after all, we met the “magician” Pycal in the second episode—but Mamou is indeed a time traveler, and Lupin’s task is to save himself from erasure from history.
We’ve slipped from “family-oriented” to kids-oriented. Although this episode is generally well remembered in Lupin fandom—Mamou Kyouske came back for a special in 2007—I am not that fond of it. It’s less a matter of concept, for me (the Lupin franchise dips into the explicitly science-fictional—and occult, which Mamou seems in his first appearance—fairly often) but one of execution. Mamou, to repeat an earlier complaint, looks like a Scooby-Doo villain. And while there are competently produced moments—Lupin’s skepticism and mounting realization about Mamou’s capabilities are done excellently—it’s just not put together very well.
The episode is clearly stretched out. While some waiting and thinking builds tension, there’s enough in this episode that Miyazaki and Takahata started using it as an excuse for formal experimentation, shooting a couple of long scenes through an aquarium. It is an appropriate image for much of the episode.
It also requires leaps in logic, aside from the time travel, which is fairly easy to take in comparison. The usual Lupin “unusual effectiveness of disguises” is in full play here. Jigen dresses us as a maid, keeping his chinstrap beard but perfectly imitating a female voice. If it weren’t for the beard you’d think Fujiko was helping in the episode’s first, foiled heist, probably because it’s clearly her actress—who knew that Jigen had such a convincing falsetto. The dénouement also relies on disguising a landscape—Lupin and co. achieve rather expert tromp-l’œil effects on a grand scale and extremely short schedule. The time traveling I can take—turning a 1972 village into an Edo one in the blink of an eye I cannot.
Worst of all, though, is the continued debasement of Fujiko’s character. Lupin—trying to assure there actually is a Lupin XIII, makes an offer of marriage to Fujiko who accepts and goes into full bridal regalia (oddly, considering how explicitly Buddhist “One Chance for a Prison Break” was, it’s a clearly Christian church and ceremony). And Fujiko’s spends the rest of the episode trying to goad Lupin into marrying her. No wonder Miyazaki and Takahata temporarily dropped Fujiko from the series after this one—they clearly haven’t a clue of what to do with her.
Fujiko and Lupin’s scenes are also clearly a kids’ version of marriage, too. There’s none of the sexual tension of earlier episodes, it’s explicitly focused of rearing children, and Fujiko wants to cover Lupin with gross kisses and cooties as such, as girls do. Although the show does recover and offers more all-ages fun, in “Beware the Time Machine!” Miyazaki and Takahata’s mandate to make the show more kid-friendly is obvious. It feels like it’s for kids, but worse it feels like it’s by kids.
Stray Observations
• The exclamation point is part of the episode’s title: “Beware the Time MACHINE!”
• What is it about the 29th century that generates so many time-traveling jerks?
• This is also one of the few moments when a specific present-day is mentioned for the adventure of the week: 1972, when the episode actually aired.
• Although the most commonly-accepted version of Lupin’s ancestry is that his father is the French Lupin II and his mother is Japanese, in Lupin’s ruse he’s descended not from the famous gentleman-cambrioleur but a random Japanese peasant and a French woman who came over in the Edo era. I think it’s best to take this as just part of the ruse, not canon (to the extent that any sort of canon exists with Lupin).
• Mamou is not to be confused with Mamo, another recurring Lupin villain.
• For the first time Goemon seems to be an ordinary member of Lupin’s gang.
• We see Lupin driving a Lotus Eclat for the only time at the beginning of the episode—he switches back to his Mercedes later.
Recommended?
No, though it is certainly a more watchable train wreck than the previous installment.
Next week we get hints a new femme fatale (“Don’t be fooled by her looks, she’s strong and gives us a lot of trouble” says the preview) as they search for “The Emerald’s Secret,” and vacation is at hand in “Let’s Catch Lupin and Go to Europe!”
Despite the confidence of “When the Seventh Bridge Falls,” there’s still some tension between Lupin’s source material and Miyazaki-and-Takahata’s approach. That tension makes “Who’s the Last One to Laugh?,” oddly enough, one of the most uncomfortable episodes of the series.
Although I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy, my understanding of Lupin’s character in the comics is that it's a lot rougher—much more like an actual con artist than the gentleman-cambrioleur of the shows, and what might merely be “problematic” in a Bond film became an unambiguous problem, at least for the modern reader. Despite the first half of the Lupin series having a reputation as rougher and more adult, Masaaki Ōsumi did a lot to make the show more palatable for television, most notably by promoting Fujiko to Lupin’s equal rather than his dupe. Looking back through the early episodes, in fact, it’s hard to why she doesn’t have the appellation of world’s greatest thief, and by introducing an ambiguous dynamic of competition, mutual respect and frustrated lust into their stories.
Miyazaki and Takahata were, reportedly, uncomfortable with the character’s development under Masaaki and thought of Fujiko fell into too many negative stereotypes of women—dangerous to men, conflicted about her passions, covetous, and just too much of a sex object for a family show. To some extent that’s all true—Fujiko does check a lot of those boxes—but she’s also depicted as supremely competent and, with her flaws, probably the most well rounded character of the bunch. Even though Fujiko was usually tasked with being the sole woman in the show, she never really felt like an amalgam of misogynist stereotypes.
By getting rid of her duplicitousness, Miyazaki and Takahata make Fujiko seem less intelligent. While eliminating her sex drive while keeping Lupin’s, they’ve unintentionally made their Fujiko—ostensibly with the problematic aspects of her character repaired—seem more out of date than Masaaki’s femme fatale.
Masaaki, in other words, made her cool, and that excuses a lot in the earlier episodes. The setting feels a bit more like an abandoned Scooby-Doo village than the moody forest retreats of episodes like “Introducing Goemon XIII” or “An Assassin Sings the Blues.” It doesn’t help that Lupin’s Connery-as-Bond edge has been sanded away since the first episode—his roué smirk in that episode feels a little dangerous in a good way, but the more laid back, slightly goofy Lupin he evolved into can’t pull of a louche grin in this one; it’s the gap between Miyazaki and Takahata’s generally nicer approach and the action on the screen that makes it hard to accept these characters acting so badly.
And Lupin is at his most louche in this one—amazingly, Ōsumi’s run never pulled the “Lupin tries to climb into Fujiko’s bed” slapstick routine—in the filmed versions it always ends with physical harm to Lupin, of course, but it’s still a creepy routine. He manages to one-up it by putting out a fire in an attempt to get Fujiko to crawl into bed with him later on. Sure, Lupin ends up sleeping on a cold floor, but it takes one out of the story. And these instances are pretty much the only moments Fujiko has the upper hand against Lupin—most of it is Lupin duping her, seemingly in total control of the situation. There’s none of the back-and-forth—in terms of their heists or feelings—that made their previous competitions such fun.
We get a series of last-minute reversals, but they feel tacked on, like an apology for what came before (and, while we deserve an apology, it’s not enough). The main loot is destroyed, Fujiko ends up getting the map to a gold mine instead of Lupin, but it turns out that Fujiko has a fake and the village elder retains the secret of its location. Crime doesn’t pay, kids.
Stray Observations
• There’s a new, vaguely Latin “Lupin” song playing on the radio, of all things—get used to it, we’ll be hearing it a lot more.
• We get another appearance of Lupin the agent of chaos/arsonist at the end. It’s not very interesting.
Recommended?
An unambiguous no: there’s nothing new, nothing weird, and lots wrong with this episode. It’s not even well made trash, and is very laggy and never that exciting.
13 Beware the Time Machine!
“I have no idea what he’s going on about; I’m only Lupin III” Lupin says in the preview to this episode, and it has one of the more unusual premises—Mamou Kyouske, a man from the 29th century, goes back in time to kill off Lupin III because his descendent (Lupin XIII) is an annoyance. The audience shares Lupin’s early skepticism that it’s just a trick—after all, we met the “magician” Pycal in the second episode—but Mamou is indeed a time traveler, and Lupin’s task is to save himself from erasure from history.
We’ve slipped from “family-oriented” to kids-oriented. Although this episode is generally well remembered in Lupin fandom—Mamou Kyouske came back for a special in 2007—I am not that fond of it. It’s less a matter of concept, for me (the Lupin franchise dips into the explicitly science-fictional—and occult, which Mamou seems in his first appearance—fairly often) but one of execution. Mamou, to repeat an earlier complaint, looks like a Scooby-Doo villain. And while there are competently produced moments—Lupin’s skepticism and mounting realization about Mamou’s capabilities are done excellently—it’s just not put together very well.
The episode is clearly stretched out. While some waiting and thinking builds tension, there’s enough in this episode that Miyazaki and Takahata started using it as an excuse for formal experimentation, shooting a couple of long scenes through an aquarium. It is an appropriate image for much of the episode.
It also requires leaps in logic, aside from the time travel, which is fairly easy to take in comparison. The usual Lupin “unusual effectiveness of disguises” is in full play here. Jigen dresses us as a maid, keeping his chinstrap beard but perfectly imitating a female voice. If it weren’t for the beard you’d think Fujiko was helping in the episode’s first, foiled heist, probably because it’s clearly her actress—who knew that Jigen had such a convincing falsetto. The dénouement also relies on disguising a landscape—Lupin and co. achieve rather expert tromp-l’œil effects on a grand scale and extremely short schedule. The time traveling I can take—turning a 1972 village into an Edo one in the blink of an eye I cannot.
Worst of all, though, is the continued debasement of Fujiko’s character. Lupin—trying to assure there actually is a Lupin XIII, makes an offer of marriage to Fujiko who accepts and goes into full bridal regalia (oddly, considering how explicitly Buddhist “One Chance for a Prison Break” was, it’s a clearly Christian church and ceremony). And Fujiko’s spends the rest of the episode trying to goad Lupin into marrying her. No wonder Miyazaki and Takahata temporarily dropped Fujiko from the series after this one—they clearly haven’t a clue of what to do with her.
Fujiko and Lupin’s scenes are also clearly a kids’ version of marriage, too. There’s none of the sexual tension of earlier episodes, it’s explicitly focused of rearing children, and Fujiko wants to cover Lupin with gross kisses and cooties as such, as girls do. Although the show does recover and offers more all-ages fun, in “Beware the Time Machine!” Miyazaki and Takahata’s mandate to make the show more kid-friendly is obvious. It feels like it’s for kids, but worse it feels like it’s by kids.
Stray Observations
• The exclamation point is part of the episode’s title: “Beware the Time MACHINE!”
• What is it about the 29th century that generates so many time-traveling jerks?
• This is also one of the few moments when a specific present-day is mentioned for the adventure of the week: 1972, when the episode actually aired.
• Although the most commonly-accepted version of Lupin’s ancestry is that his father is the French Lupin II and his mother is Japanese, in Lupin’s ruse he’s descended not from the famous gentleman-cambrioleur but a random Japanese peasant and a French woman who came over in the Edo era. I think it’s best to take this as just part of the ruse, not canon (to the extent that any sort of canon exists with Lupin).
• Mamou is not to be confused with Mamo, another recurring Lupin villain.
• For the first time Goemon seems to be an ordinary member of Lupin’s gang.
• We see Lupin driving a Lotus Eclat for the only time at the beginning of the episode—he switches back to his Mercedes later.
Recommended?
No, though it is certainly a more watchable train wreck than the previous installment.
Next week we get hints a new femme fatale (“Don’t be fooled by her looks, she’s strong and gives us a lot of trouble” says the preview) as they search for “The Emerald’s Secret,” and vacation is at hand in “Let’s Catch Lupin and Go to Europe!”
