According to Cartoon Central Australia, ¡Mucha Lucha! will soon be premiering on Channel Nine (Sydney) on Sunday 8th Feb 2004 at 6.30am. This is great: it’s free-to-air television!* 

BUT – Who’s going to be up at this time? And on a Sunday?

Image © WB Animation
from Ep: ‘Nightmare on Lucha Street’ (2nd season)

Programming decisions like these don’t surprise us. Free-to-air networks have a habit of airing animated content at odd times. Like when  Ren and Stimpy premiered in Australia years ago, we used to have to get up at 6.00am to watch it. Or The Powerpuff Girls at 4am. Australian cartoons don’t get much better publicity, or even any consideration at all unless they are pre-school or C-classified product.

With so little support from local broadcasters, is it any wonder that the Australian cartoon industry is a dying breed? Which I guess, is one reason why like so many other Australians, we decided to position ourselves internationally.

* Note: ML has been on Australian cable TV –  Cartoon Network  for the past year. But cable TV isn’t such a mainstraeam concept as it is in the USA. Majority of TV viewers don’t have cable TV.

¡Mucha Lucha! Products

We notice there is a release date for the ML toys at Amazon.com. The date is February 25th. 2004. Most of these can be preordered from the site and there are some excellent close-up photos if you click on each product (HERE is a list of what’s available). There will also be ML apparel, shoes, and bedroom furnishings!

¡Sensacional!

Super Astro sign

The Sensacional! Exhibition was tucked away in a quiet art gallery in Pasadena. Small and quiet as it was, we highly recommend it. As you enter, there is a huge cardboard image of Super Astro (the sign from his cafeteria in Mexico). Walls and corridors of cool street posters, photos, store signage, off-model cartoon characters and a room dedicated to lucha libre posters. Also check out the website – Sensacional de Diseño

Then we went to The Folk Tree (also in Pasadena) which Jorge has described as the “best Mexican folk art store in town”. You will go crazy if you love Day of the Dead dioramas and paper mache animal figurines as we do.

Legend of a Mask
(La Leyenda de Una Mascara)

The Menu-screen on this DVD is the best part. The most dramatic and enthralling scenes of the movie (live-action & animation) are edited together in the short teaser sequence at the beginning, and we were both on the edge of our seats thinking that we were about to see the best lucha film ever made.

 
Death of the ‘Masked Angel’

La Leyenda de Una Mascara is trully a visually-stunning movie with a gripping premise and for these reasons it’s worth seeing. A journalist investigates the true identity of the deceased luchador and we see flashbacks to key moments in the Masked Angel’s life. The opening scene grabs you immediately – it’s the funeral of “Masked Angel”. Several masked wrestlers in suits are carrying his coffin through the street and the fans are weeping. There are documentary-style interviews with “Masked Angel” and references to his cinematic appearances. At moments like these, the film plays clearly as a “semi-fictionalised biography of El Santo“ (as described in one review somewhere)

The look and feel of the film is very pulp-noir. The ring sequences are awesome – they got all El Santo’s moves and holds down so well.  There’s an animated comic-book sequence (showing the Masked Angel fighting monsters) which is very Sensacional! street art style – it’s so badly animated it’s good. There’s a very cool moment when his wife gives birth in hospital… and we see the baby wearing a gold mask. Later on, there’s a sequence where the Masked Angel wrestles his double (who looks exactly the same).

Unfortunately, this could have been the best lucha movie ever, but the ending is kinda lame. The film loses the plot somewhere in the middle with “reality” and “fiction” merging for some apparently significant yet confused reason. In the end, you feel the film is more about the journalist investigating the wrestler than about the wrestler himself.

The definitive lucha libre film is still to be made.