We now return to Force Five

As promised, this is part two of the gallery of Krypton Force video covers. You can see part one with a simple click here, but if you can't be bothered, these are 1980s collections of American translations of Japanese cartoons from the 1970s, with wonderful artwork by the maestro "Marc". Without further ado, let's begin the show:

This is the one I just acquired recently - volume one of Krypton Force's Videotoons series, with lots of KF's hallmarks on it. There's the baffling tendency to describe Bugs Bunny as "the double B", the guesswork as to what the cartoons' titles should be ("The Chemist" is the classic "Bottles"), and of course an unusually atmospheric Marc cover, in which he has a creditable stab at drawing Bugs and Daffy but doesn't quite make them recognisable.


This is volume 1 of "The Protectors", which was Krypton Force's name for GaiKing. And, probably by coincidence, it contains the first two episodes of the series. Krypton Force's approach to volume numbers was delightfully random, as you'll see if you have the patience to read through this entry, so it was probably just by luck that it worked out like this. The cover features a particularly bad Marc rendition of the GaiKing robot - look how misshapen the lion mask chest piece is, in particular (there are plenty of screenshots to be found on the internet for comparison). And Darius (the red-faced bad guy) has his mouth (it's on his forehead, because he's an alien) drawn much too small, so it just looks like a little blemish of some kind. The futuristic city in the background is probably stolen from somewhere else, I doubt it's Marc's own work.


One thing I'd forgotten, with my brother having all three of the Protectors tapes in our joint collection, was that they have a sort of link-fence background pattern instead of the usual Krypton Force hexagons. Also of interest on this one is the first screenshot on the back cover - it's the head of the GaiKing robot, upside-down. They haven't actually stuck the picture on the box the wrong way up, it's a freeze-frame of a moment where the robot loops-the-loop and flies towards the camera that way up. It's still a strange choice for a picture, though, as are the others - a frame of annoying kid sidekick Bobby drinking a glass of juice, and a close-up of the baddie's head. Couldn't they have used a scene from one of the big robot fights or explosions? The first episode on this tape also contains the truly wonderful line "Our enemy has applied the reverse space cross theory to some sort of space bazooka." I admire the actor who had to deliver that statement in a fake Scottish accent, with a straight face.


One more Protectors tape (this is volume 3, but the sequence of KF volumes bears no relation to the order the episodes were originally broadcast. A Marc cover with fewer disembodied heads than usual, and a pretty decent stab at the Skylar robot and dinosaur.


Part one of "Sci-Bots the movie", as described in my previous post. The front cover is a classic Marc collage of poses swiped from the episode and stuck together with no regard for scale. And on the back, we have two more exciting scenes cut from a Ladybird Transformers book. The white flash you can see of the one of Galvatron actually contained the title of the story it illustrated. The blurb on the back also demonstrates the first of two spellings of the name of the first bad guy the Spaceketeers encounter - he's Tri-Ax-Con on this one, but Tryax Khan on other video boxes.


Back to the full-length episodes of Sci-Bots/Spaceketeers here. You've got to love the way they title the video "Snark & The Diamonds" and then write on the back cover about "Dr Snork".


The packaging doesn't mention it, but this tape is described onscreen as Sci-Bots volume 6. Sci-Bots, unlike the other series, has long continuing storylines, so you can follow the heroes' adventures from one tape to the next, as long as you're not watching them in Krypton Force's sequence. The story in this one continues into volume 3, and then the next part is volume 9. Tryax/Tri-Ax is the big blue and white furry guy on this cover, by the way. Check out his hand - I think that's swiped by Marc from a different source, possibly a Transformers comic, because Tryax wears black gloves in the cartoon and they're not shaped like that.


The decision to write the back cover in pink lettering on a purple background was a slightly strange one - it makes this very difficult to read. But just to take a break from poking fun at Krypton Force's packaging (I think it's great really, as I'm sure you know), this tape contains a good example of the American translators' occasional attempts to make the Japanese originals a bit more child-friendly, usually by pretending that nobody dies. The big purple leopard man shown on the cover here collapses at one point, Porkos checks for a pulse, shakes his head and says "He'll be okay." And that's the last we see of him. The 'movie' version of the saga is a lot less inclined to do this kind of thing, interestingly enough, but this scene is one of the many chopped out of the movie entirely.


The last Sci-Bots, and I've exhausted everything I can say on the subject. But what does "No surrender no return" mean?


You may recall me saying that I'd only ever seen one Orion Quest/Grandizer tape. Turns out I was lying - I'd forgotten all about this one, which if memory serves I actually bought for my brother years ago. More flying-saucer-based fun and excitement, yay. Actually, for one reason or another, this is the Force Five series I'm least in to. It might be the bad voice acting by the American cast as much as anything else - it's set in a rural area, so the characters have sort of yokel accents which get on the nerves a little bit.


On to the Formators or Starvengers, and isn't this a classic Marc picture? I think he preferred heads to bodies, and he's especially unwilling to draw legs, as this cover clearly shows.


Quite a few of Marc's earlier cover pictures don't take account of the caption flash in the top right corner. Although it's difficult to put them into date order, the kind of problem we see here does seem to have been avoided in the later works. Also, that dog is a darn good drawing. Did Marc really do that? The colour scheme is wrong and it seems a bit hairier than the dogs in the episode - possibly it was stolen from somewhere else and had a horn drawn on its head (all the bad guys have horns in Starvengers, even their dogs).


Now this is a classic. To add to the excitement value of the cover, we have, up in the top left corner, two Transformers, copied from the comic (Highbrow and another one whose name escapes me at the moment), and down in the bottom right another stolen comic scene, with Divebomb lying on the floor and Grimlock towering over him with rock in hand - but the top half of Grimlock's body has been replaced by an approximation of the robot from this tape's contents. Cut and paste some explosions and clouds, add a few of those famous floating heads in the air, and you've got the Marc formula for a great cover!


And this one's possibly even better. It's the box art for the Transformer Hun-Grr, expertly traced by Marc without the aid of a ruler, and the Dragon formation Starvenger robot's head drawn on top. The robot on the video looks nothing like the one drawn here, obviously. And yes, this is Formators volume 2, but it contains the first episodes in the series. Volume 1 was the final episodes of another series entirely - see my first post on this fascinating subject.

This one comes in two parts, because it's a cheap cardboard cover rather than a plastic one with removable paper inlay. Not so easy to photocopy. It's also the only Danguard Ace episodes I've ever seen with the Krypton Force label, and the first two episodes in the series. I suspect this was the last Force Five series they turned their attention to, and only started releasing it when they'd almost entirely run out of money. But maybe I'm wrong - the exact details of KF's business is something I'm completely ignorant of, much as I'd like to know what they were all about. The comic-strip approach to the back cover is also something unique in my experience, but the front cover, although unsigned, is classic Marc.

And that's that. I would love to find some more Krypton Force tapes out there, but as I said before, it's years since I came across a new one. I have it on good authority that there are at least a few more of them out there somewhere, so you never know.