Tapes Said to No Longer Exist Turned Up in a Warehouse

In the world of film and TV scoring, the sentence "the tapes no longer exist" often functions as a final verdict. That is doubly true for shows broadcast half a century ago. Master tapes drift from one broadcaster's or production company's storeroom to the next, recording formats fall out of use, the people who were there retire, and eventually all that survives is hearsay: "they were probably disposed of." The score stays glued to the episodes, never to be heard on its own again. For a long time, the music of the 1973 tokusatsu series Super Robot Red Baron sat firmly on that side of the line.

Then, on August 27 of this year, a release announcement from Soundtrack Laboratory quietly overturned the verdict. Music tapes for Super Robot Red Baron — tapes that had been said to be lost and no longer extant — had been found in a warehouse. On the strength of that discovery, the label will issue a two-disc CD, Super Robot Red Baron Original Soundtrack (STLC-066–067, 4,400 yen incl. tax), on September 30, 2026. Fifty-three years after the show first aired, this is the first time its music has been commercially released in any comprehensive form.

The phrase "first commercial release" carries real weight here. A popular franchise accumulates a paper trail: a record at the time of broadcast, a CD reissue in the 1990s, a remaster in the 2000s. Red Baron had none of that. This disc is therefore not a reissue or an expanded edition — it is the primary source for this score. A half-century of silence, and then a definitive edition arrives all at once. That is a rare sequence of events.

Brass Rock for a Giant Robot, Vintage 1973

Super Robot Red Baron ran for 39 episodes on Nippon Television from July 4, 1973 to March 27, 1974, produced by Senkosha. Its premise: after the Iron Mask Party steals giant robots from an international robot exposition, a young man named Ken Kurenai pilots Red Baron, the machine his brother left behind, against them. Ratings struggled early on but had turned around by roughly September 1973; even so, sponsor troubles brought the series to a close in March 1974 — a tightrope year of the kind robot tokusatsu often walked.

Bob Sakuma is the man who scored that year. The keyword the label is leading with for this release is "cool brass rock sound," and given the date, that makes complete sense. 1973 falls in the stretch when Japanese scoring stages were rapidly refining a way of writing that locked studio horn sections and a rock rhythm section into the same chart. A giant robot was an ideal target for that idiom. Short brass stabs supply the weight of steel; drums and bass set the stride. Before the music sings a melody, it renders the sensation of something moving.

And this sort of writing often transforms once you lift it off the picture. Horn ensembles that sat under sound effects and dialogue in the episodes turn out, heard alone, to be close to instrumental funk — something soundtrack excavations of Showa-era tokusatsu have demonstrated again and again. With roughly 60 BGM cues laid out in sequence, this release makes that test possible for the first time.

Bob Sakuma, a Composer Who Kept Crossing Borders

Sakuma's career refuses to fit under the single label of "screen composer." He began violin and piano at four, served as a concertmaster with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and then moved into playing piano in clubs. In 1972 his song "Koi no Dobunezumi" drew attention at the first Tokyo Music Festival, launching him in earnest as a composer and arranger. From 1977 to 1985 he studied in Hollywood; after returning to Japan he built up a body of television and vocal-arranging work — program music for shows such as Quiz Derby and Bakushou On Air Battle, arrangements for Hideki Saijo and Shonentai — and from 1995 to 2012 served as music director and conductor of the Nagoya Philharmonic Pops Orchestra. He kept one foot inside the orchestra and the other on the pop and television stage.

On the anime and tokusatsu side, he is known for Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Tekkaman: The Space Knight. Red Baron dates from roughly the same period as Gatchaman, which means the music just recovered is a record of the years when he was running hardest through Japanese television. What happens when someone who knows the inside of an orchestra writes brass rock? That question is the heart of this disc.

Two Discs, About 60 Cues, and Interviews in the Booklet

  • Title: Super Robot Red Baron Original Soundtrack (STLC-066–067)
  • Release: September 30, 2026, 4,400 yen incl. tax
  • Contents: Two CDs. Roughly 60 BGM cues, plus theme and insert songs in multiple versions including TV size, record size and karaoke
  • Vocals: Kotaro Asa, Shinya Dan, Musical Academy
  • Booklet: 28 pages, with interviews with the series' planner/originator and Bob Sakuma, track commentary, and a BGM list

The inclusion of a BGM list matters as documentation. Showa-era scores frequently circulated without any official accounting of cue titles or where each one was used, leaving fans to reconstruct the picture from their ears and their notes. This time, that information goes into print as a primary source.

Ahead of the release, a pre-sale event takes place on September 25, 2026 at Tokyo Culture Culture in Shibuya, Tokyo. Merchandise, a signing session and an exhibition of original artwork fill the first half; the second half is set to include soundtrack commentary, episode screenings and a talk looking back at the production. Chances to hear recovered music alongside the words of the people who made it do not come along often.

Archiving a score begins only when somebody opens the warehouse. That the tapes inside turned out to be in good condition is, by rights, close to a lottery win. After 53 years of silence, roughly 60 cues are about to serve as direct evidence of just how bold Japanese television sounded in 1973.