Toei’s Truck Guys series (1975–79): masculine identity and fantasies of utopia

Abstract

The Toei Studio-produced Truck Guys/Torakku yarō (1975–79) is a popular domestic genre film series. Consisting of ten films, it is an action-comedy, loosely structured around a buddy-road film genre framework. While rarely canonised within critical or academic discourses, the series’ lasting popularity is still evidenced by its commercial ‘long-tail’. The aim of this article is primarily to shed light on this critically overlooked series, locating it within specific national and cultural contexts, in particular toward the end of the Japanese studio system. Specifically, this article examines how Toei attempted to revitalise the popular cycles of their genre films facing a decline in both mainstream commercial film production and cinema audiences, highlighting a fiercely pragmatic mode of filmmaking in the 1960s and 1970s where serialisation played an important role. By exploring the films from both textual and contextual perspectives, the article will also attempt to highlight and confirm the significance of intra-serial intertextuality, with particular reference to the first and the final instalments of the series: No One Can Stop Me (1975) and Hometown Express Service (1979). Addressing a practice of popular genre filmmaking in Japan also begins to fill a critical gap in Japanese film studies