MONKEY first aired on UK TV screens 45 years ago this week. If that makes you feel old, join the club.
Monkey played out through the most formative years of my childhood and its magic still exerts a considerable pull for me today, even if some of the aspects that made it cool at the time feel more than a little dubious in the modern age.
Monkey played out through the formative years of my childhood and its magic still exerts a considerable pull - even if some aspects feel more than a little dubious in the modern age
It was originally broadcast on Japan’s Nippon TV between 1978 and 1980 as Saiyuki and was adapted from Journey To The West, one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature.
Carved up into action-heavy serial segments it introduced us to the title character, the lovable but trouble-making King of the Monkeys (played by Masaaki Sakai), who is imprisoned for offending heaven.
As a penance, he is tasked with accompanying the young Prince Tripitaka (Masako Natsume) on a dangerous journey from China to India to re-capture some important Buddhist scriptures.
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The duo are joined on their travels by a pair of former officers of heaven who have now been turned into monsters for their own crimes. These figures, the greedy pig monster Pigsy (played in season one by Toshiyuki Nishida, who passed away just last month) and the cannibal river monster Sandy (Shiro Kishibe), along with a dragon (Shunji Fujimura) - who can miraculously morph into a horse - provide much of the comic relief as the epic travelogue unfolds.
The 52 original episodes, now re-voiced by Western actors including Andrew Sachs and Miriam Margolyes, arrived on BBC TV screens in 1979 when viewers like me, and what felt like my entire generation, were waiting to lap them up.
It was a bizarre but hugely entertaining series offering a weird and wonderful mix of high-kicking martial arts mayhem, kid-friendly nuggets of Buddhist philosophy and old-school slapstick laughs.
The weekly stories were formulaic but fun, with any number of townships playing host to evil demons that the crew had to expel and suchlike, but the action sequences were fast and furious and Monkey always wielded a mean staff against whatever was thrown at him.
Joyous as much of the series still is, there is one major issue that needs to be addressed. Watching today, it’s hard not to wince at the often openly racist nature of much of the re-dubbed dialogue, as the worst aspects of old fashioned oriental stereotypes are trotted out with depressing regularity.
However, taken purely as an action-heavy product of 1970s TV, Monkey still maintains the power to enthral that it did four-and-a-half decades ago.
For viewers of a certain vintage, it only takes a few moments of that wildly over the top opening sequence, where Monkey is unforgettably born from an exploding egg on a cardboard mountain top, or a few short bars of that none-more-catchy theme tune with its earworm refrain of “Monkey magic!”, to throw them back to the playgrounds of their youth, where turns would be taken to act out the fight sequences from that week’s adventure.
If you ask me, in the miserable world of 2024, that’s no bad thing.
