Curtis Newton Was Right About Everything

Before anime became a genre debate, it was just Saturday morning. Before the discourse—the fanservice arguments, the sub vs. dub wars, the adults explaining that Neon Genesis Evangelion changed their lives—there was a boy in a white jumpsuit piloting a rocket through the solar system, and we were all watching him.

Captain Future is back, now in a remastered HD Blu-Ray release that includes both the German broadcast version and all 52 original Japanese episodes—uncut, in the language they were made in. That second part matters more than it sounds. German state broadcaster ZDF had taken the series in the late seventies and done what broadcasters did back then: trimmed it, rearranged it, and swapped out the score for something more locally palatable. It was still good. But it was a different thing.

The full Japanese version is the version Curtis Newton deserves. He’s a more interesting character when you see him whole—the orphaned prodigy raised by a robot, an android, and a brain in a jar, which sounds like the setup for a dark psychological horror show but somehow plays as warm, optimistic adventure. The Solar System as frontier. Science as something to believe in. The kind of story nobody tells that way anymore.

Mostly this release is for people like me, who want to sit inside something they loved when they were small and see if it holds up. Some of it won’t. The animation creaks in places, the gender politics belong firmly to their era. But the bones are good, and the theme song—the real one, not the ZDF replacement—still does something to the back of my neck that I can’t entirely explain. Some things you just carry.