![microman map microman map](https://media.indiedb.com/images/members/1/213/212181/Destiny_WIP_33a.png)
I'm not calling it a ripoff, but rather, they're cool and fun in the same way. Compare the Microman music to Eruption, side 1, track 1 from ELP's 1971 album, Tarkus. The first thing I thought of when I heard the music in that commercial was Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Google translate was able to shed a little light on how that may work, but maybe there's someone out there who actually understands Japanese that can straighten it all out in the comments?Īnyway. It looks like, for the last word at the bottom "team", they switched back to standard Japanese Hiragana. Here's the Katakana chart they use to pronounce stuff like, for example, English phrases like "Microman", or "mee-kokh-ru-man". Well, we do know that the Japanese use a special alphabet to allow them to phonetically spell out anything that otherwise won't work in their natively pictographic written language. So what's the logo at the end of the commercial? I can't read Japanese, but it probably says Microman. At the end of each commercial in this clip, it ends with the logo and and a gravely-voice guy singing "Mee-koh-ru-MANNN!" Bad. It's also the perfect weirdo music for a freaky line of space toys like Microman. What the hell is this? It sounds like a Mini-Moog and a drummer who uses cocaine as non-dairy creamer. In the above clip, shortly after the guy shouts "STRONG BREAK!!! ROBOTO-MAN!!!!", the music starts. And guess what? Their commercials were way, way better. Turns out I wasn't crazy! Here's a commercial from the American market that launched the line.īut in their native Japan, Micronauts were called "Microman". A few weeks ago, I trolled FaceTube to see if I imagined them, or if they actually existed. So, Micronauts were the trippy alternative to Star Wars. The bad guys were always comparatively huge, and looked like they were built from other robots. You could also take them apart and combine them in different ways. Knees, elbows, wrists, ankles, and head all moved, and lots of the articulation points were ball joints. Joe, with a central elastic band holding all their limbs on. Also, while Star Wars figures only had four joints (shoulders and knees), Micronauts were articulated like G.I. Since nobody does crazy like Japan does it, Micronauts were surreal and very disco.Įverybody had chrome heads and bodies made of translucent colored plastic, but some had diecast metal parts. Star Wars was gritty and, uuh, "realistic". They could not have been more different from the Star Wars toys. Hugely upstaged by the Star Wars toys were a weird line of toys imported from Japan, called (in the U.S.) "Micronauts". So, when I was a kid, like a thousand years ago, Star Wars was, as they say, The Shit.