EDICOLA NEWS: THE REVIEWS nr. 182
stickers: 252 (1-252) sheets of 4 stickers with the DVDs (63 issues) € 9.90
album with the first release € 2.99
The younger ones will not understand, but those who are olders will understand the pleasure of starting to write this review by looking on youtube for the legendary and unique PLANET O, the historical theme of Lupin III, nothing to do with the classic cartoon themes. , but with that female voice that all of us (without exception!) dreamed of having Fujiko in front of us watching us while she sang it and the refrain that entered our heads over 40 years ago and has never abandoned us again ..
Closed the nostalgic parenthesis, are you ready for the absolute edition of Lupin III? 50 years of Lupin III! 54 if you refer to the manga created by Monkey Punch, half a century if you take into account the first television appearance in Japan.
The Gazzetta dello Sport albums, although very simple, are getting better each time. We find an abyss between those made on Tex comic (for example) and the latter. An album that retraces the path of the television series and DVDs to which it is attached. For the first time, the six TV series all together, starting from 1971 to the last one in 2018.
The difference between the previous products and this is the inside, much more refined, something valid had already been seen in the Holly & Benji album, here we are at a different level. Key captions to understand the stories but also the evolution of the character and the authors who have followed one another in the various series.
The stickers are cartoon “frames”, so it is likely that some suffer from a rather limited quality, we will see with the continuation of the releases, everything has a very 80s flavor and is a blast for the writer!
Although the first series is from 1971, it arrived in Italy in 1979 and was a real television earthquake, despite not having the best schedules of others such as Grendizer or Mazinger Z, on Rai Tv and at perfect times (if before it was finished doing my homework ..)
First pages therefore dedicated to the first legendary series and so on with the following ones, under each sticker we find the note to which episode it refers, a not insignificant detail that takes the product to a higher level, we do not want the younger ones but it is It is clear that the target to which the editors are aiming is that of the “boys of the past” and the world of collectors. Alongside the stickers, the aforementioned captions explain the events and the stylistic path of the series. Another nice detail are the famous phrases of the various characters, reported in quotation marks.
In addition to presenting the various series in chronological order, we find specific pages on Lupin, Jigen, Goemon, Fujiko and the legendary Inspector Zenigata. Not only that, the pages on all Lupin’s cars and jackets are amazing, if we were meticulous we would also have seen a page with all Fujiko’s clothes, which in Italy we knew as Margot.
Speaking of Italy, Jamato Video also does an excellent job of characterizing the album with respect to the television history in our country. It should be noted that the Fourth Series (actually the Fifth, taking into account the separate series called Fujiko) is set in Italy, Lupin and friends around the beautiful country!
If interested in the sticker album alone, the expense is really high, if interested in the product as a whole, a double pleasure. Also taking into account that in reality in Italy, in terms of stickers, Lupin did not have much luck, only an album in 1996 by Merlin (now Topps), very little for one of the cult characters of Japanese cartoons, always present on television with the various series that have followed over the years.
As mentioned, the stickers are quite simple, we would have avoided the doubles, fortunately few, given the not exactly perfect cuts (at the time of the Tex albums we saw real horrors), in general an album that is not wrong to define encyclopedic of the saga of our beloved thief in a jacket and Cinquecento.
“do nothing, just listen to your heartbeat” (Fujiko)
(EN)