I'm making a post about this series because it just sounds really interesting to me. I would love to be able to watch some of it someday.
The Hangman was a crime show produced by Shochiku that followed the activities of a clandestine organization named "Hangman", whose purpose is to capture and execute criminals under the supervision of a leader who calls himself "God"¹. It was intended to be a modern adaptation of the Hissatsu series, a massively popular jidaigeki drama about assassins which ran for a whopping 30+ series and spawned spinoff movies, comics, books, games, and, yes, pachinko machines. The twist is that "execution" in The Hangman does not refer to actual capital punishment, but instead a complicated series of traps and set-ups that lead to the criminals being exposed to the public, which is referred to as a "hanging".
The hour-long show began airing in November of 1980 and would run for seven series until 1987. The first series ran for roughly a year and 51 episodes, while the second series ran for 28 episodes from June to December of 1982. After that it was followed by New Hangman (新ハングマン, Shin Hangman), which ran for 26 episodes from July of 1983 to February of 1984. This is what we're going to be looking at today.
Multiple well-known older actors played God, often in a voice-only role, including Sō Yamamura, Frankie Sakai, and, in New Hangman, Shigeru Amachi, although Amachi only appeared in the first episode. New Hangman was in general a departure from the previous format of the series, and all of the Hangman operatives were in disguise as travel agents. Instead of God appearing directly, his orders were relayed to Hangman throughout the series by his butler, Sonoyama, played by Akihiko Hirata².
As per some YouTube comments, this series has been (perhaps is?) sporadically rebroadcast as re-runs, and the whole thing was re-aired on Family Theater in 1999. The first series was released to DVD in 2004, and the subsequent series were planned to be released as well, but they were put on hold indefinitely for unknown reasons, so, you know, that's just great. The first episode of New Hangman was actually given away as a freebie with an issue of COMIC Deka, which is, uh, an erotic manga magazine, I guess? But that's the extent of its home media release.
New Hangman's internet presence amounts to a handful of clips of less than two minutes in runtime. It's been difficult to turn up any photos of Hirata in his Sonoyama role, and previously the only thing I'd been able to find was this...
...computer, enhance!
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| You can also see his name in the credits here. |
Which I think you'll agree is not very satisfying. I combed Twitter, though, and have been able to find a few more pictures:
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| See more here, here, and here. |
It does seem like the show has been re-aired at least once (otherwise we wouldn't have the above pictures), but it's sorely lacking a home media release. Hopefully at some point someone will give it a release in the form of an actual DVD box set and not a single disc stuck in a nudie manga magazine.
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¹ I was fully expecting this to just be Google Translate rendering the word "kami" into English, but looking at the Wiki article in the original Japanese, it is actually, literally "God" in katakana.
² He also had a guest role in episode 7 of the first Hangman series, but this episode is similarly unavailable unless you have the (out of print) DVD.
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