Techno Police takes place in the futuristic year of 2001 where crime has gotten so out of hand that the cops now use robots instead of guns to fight crime. The movie opens as we meet our hero Ken, at least I think thats his name I can’t actually remember but this is a Japanese movie so I’m sure somebody is named Ken. Ken works as a member of the highway patrol but has just been transfered to the Techno Police in Centinel City. Apparently Centinel City is the most crime ridden city in the world as one of Ken’s fellow officers lets him know that he’s known five other cops who were assigned to Centinel City and he’s been to the funerals of four of them. Anyway we are forced to sit through a really long and annoying opening credit sequence as we watch Ken drive to Centinel City along the way he meets a fellow Techno Police officer. As soon as they arrive in Centinel City they help the Techno Police break up a bank robbery but the two culprits manage to escape. Now the 2 guys from the bank robbery have moved on to hijacking a super tank and the Techno Police eventually stop and arrest them. It turns out the reason it’s a super tank is that it has advanced Artificial Intelligence and the tank keeps going even after the hijackers are caught. The rest of the movie is just a long drawn out chase between the tank and the Techno Police who have to stop the tank because it will self destruct when it runs out of ammo and it just happens to be nuclear powered.

This movie wasn’t very difficult but for some reason we never seemed that motivated to work on it. It was originally intended for NDK 2005 but we dragged our feet on it and decided to just put it off for one year instead debuting it at NDK 2006. The thing that stands out the most about this movie is the dub track, as it sounds like it was dubbed by the same people who dubbed a whole bunch of kung fu movies from the late seventies. Once again we played to a standing room only crowd and I guess people have started to figure out who we are as several of them came up to us afterwards to thanks us or tell us what they thought. Anyways this also seemed to follow the tradition of us thinking about calling it quits with this project until we sat down and watched it with an audience and were re-energized by the audience reaction and appreciation. So I guess we’ll make another one.

When we showed this at Nan Desu Kan we weren’t sure what to expect. It was playing in a video room that sat 540 people. When the movie started to our surprise it was standing room only, unfortunately that number dropped to about 120 within the first ten minutes. There was an audio issue in the video room and that made it very hard to hear what was being said by us over the film. Either way the people who stayed laughed and seemed to really enjoy it. .

This was the first time we ever filmed a movie instead of performing it live and we learned many valuable lessons in the process. First don’t wait till the last minute to figure out all the equipment and cables you will need. This led to John driving to Radio Shack at warp speed ten minutes before it closed to buy $90 worth of cable and connectors. Second the guy at the music store is an idiot, the sales person assured us that the audio mixer could handle 3 microphones well he was wrong and and we had to chain two mixers together to use multiple mics. Third 2 microphones is not enough even with two mixers chained together we were still only able to use 2 mics. If you looks very closely you can see the three of us passing the microphone back and forth. Last never attempt to film at two in the morning both Roger and Murdock were extremely tired and it caused them to miss several lines. This also resulted in one of the most awkward moments as at one point you can see John reach over and point to Murdock’s script after he missed a couple of lines. The movie also features a 12 minute long chase scene which has maybe two lines of dialog throughout the whole scene. With no dialog to rif on many of us were left a little dumb struck as to what exactly say while the scene seemed to run on and on and on. Lensman would also be the last time John would perform in Mystery Anime Theater prefering to work behind the camera.

Of all the movies we’ve done we rate this as the hardest because it was so hard to come up with lines and a lot of it seems forced. During one writing session we checked the time code and realized that after 2 hours we had only watched 10 minutes of the movie because we were struggling so hard coming up with stuff to say. Once again this was originally performed live and this time we managed to get 2 microphones. About 20 minutes into the live performance the sound actually dropped out and we were forced to actually pause the movie and check the A/V connections. The rest of the show went off without a hitch but when it was over one person who sat through the whole thing actually complained that he wanted to see the movie without our added commentary. As someone who has watched the film multiple times it’s not something I recommend.

While the story is quite lame it just doesn’t reek of the awfulness of our later projects. The story is about Gigi a girl from some magical kingdom who lives on earth with her adopted parents. The parents go on a trip then mysteriously vanish so Gigi decides to look for them. She finds them on an island with Peter Pan who has tuned everyone (except the parents) into little children. Peter is determined to stop all the wars and fighting on the planet, but not by doing anything meaningful or constructive just being a bit of a douche.