The Mystery of Mamo
The first Lupin feature took him furthest from home: into science fiction.
Lupin III: The Mystery of Mamo opened on December 16, 1978, directed by Sōji Yoshikawa, the franchise’s first animated feature. Where the television series played crime as comedy, Mamo plays it as a science-fiction fever dream, sending the gang against a would-be immortal and his cloning empire. It remains the strangest of the classic films and, for many overseas viewers of a certain age, the first: its footage, spliced with Cagliostro’s, became the 1983 American arcade game Cliff Hanger.
Mamo also set the pattern for Lupin in English: not one dub but a procession of them across the decades, as successive distributors redid the early films for new formats. The film’s many voices are a collecting subject in themselves.
FIRST FEATURE
1978A year before Miyazaki
Mamo’s success is what made a second feature possible. TMS green-lit Cagliostro on the strength of it; the two films, released a year apart, are the franchise’s twin foundations, one maximalist, one classical.
The Cliff Hanger half
Roughly half of Stern’s 1983 laserdisc game is Mamo footage, re-voiced with the film’s existing Toho/Frontier English dub, while the Cagliostro segments were dubbed fresh by an uncredited cast.