I just saw Lupin III: Legend of the Gold of Babylon

For those who don’t know, Lupin III is an extremely long-running extremely popular japanese multi-media franchise. In the west, its most popular entry is probably The Castle of Cagliostro, a film in the franchise directed by Hayao Miyazaki before Studio Ghibli was formed. The Lupin franchise in Japan is a little bit like the James Bond / 007 franchise in the UK, if James Bond also had the pattern of TV presence of Doctor Who (i.e., constantly in the 70s and 80s, followed by nothing for decades except specials for the super-fans, followed by a return to TV sometime around 2010). Lupin III started out as a manga with a very Mad Magazine style and a very Hunter S. Thomson attitude, and was massaged by Miyazaki for all-ages television into the story of a ‘gentleman thief’.

Anyhow, Legend of the Gold of Babylon is one of the many, MANY Lupin movies. This one came out in 1985. It’s generally not considered a good entry, but my feelings about this are more complicated.

First: this movie is extremely Japan-in-1985.

Japan was in full-on Economic Miracle / Bubble Economy at this point in history, and people were moving to the city in droves, drinking tea with gold flakes to show how bougie they were, doubling and tripling down on the dedication to corporate capitalism already skewered in Japanese movies like *Giants and Toys* in the 50s, listening to the style of pop music we now call City Pop (and associate with vaporwave & futurefunk), and for the first time, living the lives that fashion and lifestyle magazines…