I don’t do reviews often but when the mood strikes me, it’s usually because something is either tremendously horrible or horrifying fantastic. Lensman thankfully fits into the latter category.

When I received this belated Christmas present from my good friend Mike, the cover was deceptively “low-budget 80’s movie”, and it didn’t help at all that it was a VHS. It’s a form of media I don’t particularly miss and one I’ve only rarely had to deal with after 2003. Of the few remaining VHS in my collection that are mandatory, Special Combat Unit Shinesman and my eternal favourite Genesis Survivor Gaiarth are more or less the only ones remaining. Everything else has either been released on DVD or will be in the near future.

But now I have Lensman, which brings the count up to three. There were two Lensman releases, one which was done by Harmony Gold and omitted large chunks of the story as well as supplying an entirely American soundtrack, and one by Streamline Pictures which kept the entire video intact and left the Japanese music where it should have been. Thankfully I received the latter. Both are dubbed and I’m not sure a subtitled version exists in the Western market, but that’s not really important. It’s perhaps one of the finest dubs from the 80’s to early 90’s I’ve ever heard. There are weak moments, don’t get me wrong, but there’s something incredibly epic about having Kerrigan Mahan voice the main character.

For those left scratching their heads, Mahan played Goldar on Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. That’s right, Goldar, and if that isn’t awesome I don’t know what is.

Keep in mind he doesn’t use the Goldar voice — that much would be unfitting — but he does do an excellent job of bringing the awkwardly-named Kimball Kennison to life. Kim is somewhat of your typical hero, and in fact most of this movie is just that — typical. But where that’d ordinarily make me cringe and throw the movie aside, I can’t help but admire how well it pulls everything off. While most of the parts are working on average, the movie manages to be a kind of gestalt, where the sum is larger than any of its parts.

The basic gist is this: the Boskone Empire (not in fact the Boston Scone Empire) are the bad guys taking over and the Lensman, an agent of the Galactic Patrol is the key to stopping them. Said Lensman narrowly escapes a Boskone pursuit fleet and crash-lands on Kimball’s home planet, where shortly before dying he transfers his “Lens” to the young man and mutters some gabbledegook about “fate” and “destiny”. It’s basically one Merlin away from being an Arthurian legend in space.

Shortly after that the Boskones show up, Kim has to escape with his friend Van Buskirk, and his father Gary Kennison stays behind to hold off the bad guys. In standard space opera flare, the good father goes down fighting, the planet gets destroyed, and Kim and Buskirk are now on the lam from the Boston Scones–err, Boskones.

Add to this the Galactic Patrol’s rather charming Clarissa (a nurse and a pilot in one) and the erratic and hilarious DJ Bill, and you’ve got a pretty well-rounded cast. DJ Bill in particular reminds me of something Akira Toriyama would design in his heyday (prior to the DBZ fiasco of big blonde hair and muscled tumours for arms), and he’s brought to life by Gregory Snegoff, who Golgo 13 fans may recognise as the English dub actor for Duke Togo.

Of course the real surprise came when I realised who voiced Van Buskirk, easily my favourite character in the movie: Michael McConnohie. If you don’t know who Michael McConnohie is, you probably deserve a spanking with a large trout, as he has an outright disgustingly large portfolio of voice work. Everyone from Tao Pei Pei in the third Dragonball movie to Dolf in Planetes and Norris in Gundam 08th MS Team. What I didn’t know until I looked him up again was that he had voiced one of the only characters I really liked in Xenosaga; Margulis. Suffice to say, this man is essentially my favourite dub actor.

I’m going to briefly mention what some people are probably realising I’ve omitted: What Lensman is based upon. If you’re a science-fiction buff, you’ve probably read at least a handful of the classics including the various works by Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov. Lensman is actually much older than any of their works, dating back to World War II. Much of Lensman was released between 1937 and 1948, consisting of four books by the venerable E.E. “Doc” Smith, essentially the father of all space opera everywhere.

How I heard about it was quite different however. You see, I’m not much of a science-fiction buff beyond Star Trek, Star Wars, and Stargate. I tend to find that if it doesn’t have “star” in the title, I’m probably not all that attracted to it. This is by no means an exaggeration, seeing as my first sci-fi movie was The Last Starfighter. I have of course enjoyed other forms of written science-fiction, including-but-not-limited-to Clark’s rather engrossing Rendezvous with Rama and its sequels, as well as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.

It was by reading the Notenki Memoirs by Studio GAINAX’s Yasuhiro Takeda, essentially his autobiography. Somewhere in the early pages he mentions Lensman as an early influence on his liking for science-fiction, and while I would ordinarily brush such things aside and read on, the name somehow stuck. I eventually recommended the Notenki Memoirs to everyone I knew including Mike, who entertained a conversation with me about Lensman itself, quite interested in finding out what it was exactly. Then, having tracked down a VHS copy, he dropped it in my lap, said “Merry Christmas” in the middle of January, and that was that.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because I have no actual material by E.E. “Doc” Smith to compare the movie with, and to be perfectly honest I’m not all that interested. That isn’t to say I don’t want to read Smith’s original material, but it is not ever going to be the bar by which I rate this movie. It’s a bloody good film that does nearly everything right, and if you don’t like it, suck an egg.

The movie’s visuals are outstanding for its time. There’s a healthy amount of 3D used throughout the film, and not the kind you’d find in Space Adventure Cobra (also not a bad movie, but the 3D was rather awful). This is perhaps more comparable to Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future if any of you remember that, but even if you don’t let’s just say it’s good and be done with it. The animation itself is strictly by-the-book mid-80’s movie quality, which if you have any taste, you should know is also a good thing. Long panning camera shots over the detailed bulks of hulking space vessels, slickly designed technological gadgets, and a penchant for the colour silver on anything shiny abound in this production.

The Boskones are decidedly the best of the bunch for their designs, being both alien and imperious, but also just grotesque enough without resorting to the kind of lame fear-mongering a hack like Giger would. Essentially you could imagine the Boskones as people without them needing to be human, and that’s somewhat important. I don’t mean in personality — they are framed as a kind of generically evil, power-mongering society — but in physical stature. They’re actually believable.

Perhaps the only real glaring issue with the movie is the lack of Kimball actually using his Lensman powers. He uses telepathy one or twice in the entire film (at the behest of another Lensman, the death-defying alien Worsel), but it isn’t until the end that Kim actually shows what a Lensman can really do. On the one hand I feel like I’m missing something, but on the other this actually might have been a conscious decision on the part of the writer, considering just how much material is packed into the movie. It might well have been against Kim’s character to use the power willy-nilly and even Worsel doesn’t really pull out his bag of tricks all that often. But somehow I think the lack of telepathic talking in the movie between Kim and Worsel is a bit odd, considering how much of a fuss Worsel makes initially.

Nonetheless, it’s a highly recommended piece of film and one I feel is rather overlooked. I sadly have no captures being that the entire thing is on VHS and I lack the appropriate machinery, but I did manage to appropriate a few from Space Shake, a rather thorough Lensman anime shrine. Many thanks to them! Those are the two you see above.

Now get out there and demand someone re-release this on DVD!