Uh… wow.  I really did not know what to expect from this release.  I’d watched and read a lot of Tezuka beforehand, but… well, the thing about Tezuka is that you can’t really expect any one of his works to be like the other.  The man was ridiculously good at a wide variety of genres.

Strangely enough, the Right Stuf video is pretty much just the 1966 NBC episodes of Kimba, quite possibly in original air order since events don’t seem to follow logical order.

The first episode starts off by introducing the setting: “Deepest, Darkest Africa.”

The narrator describes Africa as a land where different kinds of people learned to come together and live in peace.  I laughed my ass off.

In Africa, the king of the jungle is the White Lion, Caesar, who frees captive animals and protects his kingdom from hunters.

Caesar is appropriately a badass, dodging all of the hunters’ traps, disarming one of them, and ACTUALLY USING THE SHOTGUN AGAINST THEM (but not killing them… because children are only okay with unrealistic cartoon violence).

The hunters get sent packing, and Caesar returns to his kingdom.  Then his mate, Snowene, tells him she’s pregnant.

Meanwhile, Viper gets chewed out for his failure.  He was called in because of his reputation, but was unable to “even” capture the White Lion.  Yeah, let’s just downplay how awesome the white lion is.

Caesar arrives to free some animals, but Viper doesn’t try to attack him, instead remaining inside and recording Caesar’s roars.  His plan is to play a recording of Caesar the next day, drawing Caesar’s mate out.  Snowene falls for the trap quite easily.

With Snowene captured, Caesar has no choice but to fall into Viper’s trap in an attempt to rescue her.  As a result, Caesar gets shot, and Snowene is still captured to be sold off.  But hey, it’s a great day for Viper!

While at sea, Snowene gives birth to a son, Kimba, who has a knack for becoming friends with animals around him.

Snowene tells Kimba about his father, Caesar, who was the king of the jungle.  She also tells him that Kimba’s destiny isn’t to follow her into captivity, so she urges him to escape.

Y’know, into the ocean.

Kimba befriends a seagull and some fish who teach him how to swim.  With his newly acquired swimming prowess, Kimba begins paddling his way back to Africa.

Along the way, they are attacked by a sawshark.  Kimba beats the crap out of it, then continues swimming to Africa, apparently guided by the spirit of her mother.

In the next episode, Kimba has not just already made it to Africa, he’s well-known and established as the rightful ruler of the land.  Well, that sure was a seamless transition.

The episode starts out as a familiar morality Aesop fable.  There’s a drought going on, and Kimba is asking the other animals to save up an emergency food pile and not touch it until they really need it.  But then a large pig eats some of the provisions and Kimba and Co. try to keep it a secret… until Polly Cracker, the douchebag parrot, lets it slip, pissing off all the other animals.  They want to start eating the provisions, but Kimba tells them to save it up just in case the drought lasts too long.

But then…

A wildfire starts, burning even more of the provisions, and making Kimba look like a total asshat for making everyone starve for nothing.

Some of the animals suggest leaving the jungle and Kimba’s leadership.  Just one problem:

Turns out, there are hyenas outside the jungle, waiting to pounce on weakened animals trying to flee.

Out of desperation, Kimba decides to take a page out of the humans’ survival handbook and suggests everyone start saving up seeds and starting up a farm to plan for the future.

But then Kimba finds out that there’s a sick boar and starts giving his own share of food to her until she gets well.

Meanwhile, the animals haven’t gathered nearly enough seeds for the farm, and there aren’t any left in the forest.

The sick boar seems even sicker.  Then she admits she’s the one who stole the provisions earlier.  Kimba forgives her, then gives her some of the seeds they saved up because she’s still sick and needs more food.

Naturally, the animals eventually find out and get pissed off at Kimba.  But then they learn that Kimba left the forest to find more seeds for the farm to make up for it.  Moved, the animals all decide to leave the forest to help him and find seeds like they should have done in the first place.  I mean, why didn’t they all leave the forest for seeds?

Oh, right.

The hyenas.

Kimba saves everyone by beating the shit out of ALL the hyenas.

And then it rains.

The third episode was actually a pretty decent episode about a speckled fever spreading throughout the jungle.  In order to cure the sickness, they need an herb that can only be found in a hard-to-climb mountain guarded by flying lizards.  They rely on an old goat named Pop Wooly to retrieve it.  The rest of the animals are cured, but Pop Wooly gets the speckled fever, and there’s no cure left over.

Now, the episode could have ended there, with Kimba learning an important life lesson about sacrifice and being a badass even when you’re old, and it almost then.  But then the ghost of Caesar shows up and admonishes Kimba for not doing everything he can to save the animal that saved everyone else.  Kimba decides to go get more of the cure to save Pop Wooly.

But first, he has to face off against the flying lizards.

Kimba handles them and retrieves the cure, and all is well.

In the final episode of the tape, we are introduced to Samson, a buffalo who was also a friend of Caesar’s.  Which is strange, considering Kimba talked to Samson in the second episode.  Obviously, this was aired out of order.

Samson delivers some human-owned mules to his welcome back party and offers them up as part of a celebratory feast.  Kimba is against it, saying it was wrong, but Samson argues that Caesar himself stole animals from the humans.  Kimba says that Caesar did it to free them, not to eat them, and that eating the human animals will cause the humans to come around and attack the jungle animals.  Samson decides to put it up to a vote, and the jungle animals side with Samson out of intimidation.  Kimba is dejected and leads the mules away, but doesn’t put up a fight against Samson, who thinks he should be the new ruler.

Meanwhile, a new hunter has been called up to kill whatever animals have been freeing human-owned animals.  Some of Kimba’s friends manage to cause some trouble for him though, and along the way, they stumble upon Caesar’s hide and steal it away.

Then they decide they need to cheer Kimba up and tell him to stand up to Samson.

THEY DO THIS BY DRESSING UP IN CAESAR’S HIDE AND PRETEND TO BE CAESAR’S GHOST.

I’m going to end it there because it’s pretty predictable how the rest of the episode goes, but I just HAD to point this craziness out.

Emotion: 2
There were some unexpected feels, but overall it was still pretty much a 60’s anime.  I think I need a new category…

Cuteness: 4
Oh gawd, I think the point of this anime was to be ridiculously adorable.

Pleasure Rating: No Regrets
It was a pretty decent childrens cartoon.  I much prefer Astro Boy, but hey… it is what it is.

Rewatchability: 2
It’s pretty cute and simple and not particularly cringe-worthy.  There’s actually some decent drama going on in there too.  But there isn’t any reason to revisit it either.  Pretty much just take and go.

Music: Catchy Theme Song
A lot of the background music is either silence of low-key 60’s fluff you kind of expect.  But dat jingle:



Marketability: 4
On the one side, you would think having a cast chock full of adorable animals would be a slam dunk… but since they’re all based on real animals, there’s still a limit to how much you can sell, and there just aren’t enough stand-out designs to make characters seem like anything more than a generic animal.  There’s pretty much just Kimba, Kitty, maybe Caesar… hell, Viper Snakely has a fun enough look that makes him a better choice than practically all of the jungle cast.  In fact, I just did a search and I can only find plushies of Kimba, Kitty, Caesar, and… Bucky the gazelle?  Huh.  Never would’ve guessed.  Also, imagine my surprise when Polly Cracker actually gets some love:

Seriously?  This douchebag?

But what really surprised me was what few merchandise I could actually find.

Overall, Kimba isn’t much more than a cute series that almost hangs with some generic Looney Tunes.  Though it has noticeably worse animation.  At least it’s better than Hanna-Barbera animation of the time… but not by much.  The laziness is utterly blatant, especially in the fight scenes, which consist of like three repeated frames of limbs coming out of a cloud of black dust.  It’s also a half-hour program, which seems like asking too much of young children used to 7-minute shorts.  Remember, this actually predates Scooby-Doo.

Actually, the limited animation and rapid-fire dialogue actually reminded me of the Clerks parody more than anything else of the era.  Even more than Speed Racer, honestly.

I’ll probably be taking a break this weekend.  I’m trying to finish up the next episode of Bardass!, plus my backlog is actually pretty short after all these reviews.  I have You’re Under Arrest!, the Ah! My Goddess! movie, .hack//Quantum, and four Pokemon movies left, and only about three live action movies.  I think I’m gonna spread it out.