Superhero Media: Goku Midnight Eye

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, if we wanted to watch anime that wasn't Ghost In The Shell, Pokemon or Neon Genesis Evangelion being repeated yet again, we had to brave the back of dusty video stores for cassettes that had no English writing other than the title and then try and sneak them past the person at the desk because we didn't have proof of age. One of the staples of my friendship group was Goku Midnight Eye, a two-part OVA (Original Video Animation) about a cyberpunk private detective in future Tokyo with plenty of blood, boobs and laughable translations to keep our juvenile minds entertained. Being vintage 1980s anime, Goku Midnight Eye was made off the whiff of an oily rag, and it shows just how cheap it was in plenty of sequences where only one element on-screen is animated, one of the most notorious being a scene where the water is rising in a corridor. Now that I'm more than twice as old as when I first saw it, however, I have to say, Goku Midnight Eye is actually pretty fun. 

Let's get it straight, "fun" doesn't mean "good", and Goku Midnight Eye is wall-to-wall cheese and camp machismo with barely a plot to be had, so if your tolerance for such is low, maybe give it a miss. After getting involved with a case surrounding a Corporate Tech Zillionaire suspected of being an arms dealer, Goku is almost killed by a bionic hypnotist peacock woman and is abducted by aliens who replace his wounded eye with the greatest supercomputer ever devised. Returned to Earth, Goku discovers that he can hack any device by thinking about it and sets about taking down the antagonist and his bodyguard of animalistic cyber-women, one of whom is a stripper and a motorcycle because that his how this anime rolls. In the second adventure, Goku has to track an experimental military grade cyborg, who basically has telekinesis, but we're told can shoot plasma from his skin. This second outing is a little better animated and Goku actually uses his powers more than once, but don't go in expecting something on the level of Akira. 

For people that have only seen more modern anime, or just the classics, Goku Midnight Eye is worth tracking down for the experience alone, you can find it on YouTube most of the time and the DVD is obscenely cheap from most outlets that stock weird shit. Watching this film again was a matter of gearing up for Reality's Edge and Cyberpunk 2020 for me, rather than an outright superhero bent, but, honestly, Goku could slide into Batman Beyond, Marvel 2099 or even Judge Dredd with little trouble. The shaggy hair, slim suit, tie and no shirt are pure '80s peak cyberpunk goodness and you know you want a slice of that in your life, even for just the 90 odd minutes the whole mess runs for. If you can make it through everything silly, sexist and backwards about Goku Midnight Eye, you may at least get a few laughs and some cool design aesthetic out of the experience. I know I'll be mining this for my next Cyberpunk 2020 campaign.