The Japanese toy powerhouse known as Bandai has made billions off of the Power Rangers alone, but there are far more to its holdings. The company also carries toy licenses for Astro Boy, Kamen Rider, Ultraman, Super Sentai, and much, much more. Basically if you are a kid growing up in Japan or a nerd living in America, Bandai has all your money. At some point the company began distributing anime and put out hundreds of titles, including Call Me Tonight. Of course, they also produced the toys associated with them. My brother still has his Mobile Suit Gundam anime on VHS and the accompanying models from the 80s.
I tell you this only because I’m still waiting for my Call Me Tonight action figure of a slimy green monster with giant teeth and a writhing, tentacled body that has another head with giant teeth right where its dick would be. Give the people what they want!
Suuko is a phone sex line worker but also an armchair therapist “familiar with Freud.” She fields a call from Sugiura who explains, “When I masturbate I see lights and birds and stuff.” He then passes out and wakes up with his clothes shredded and his room trashed. Every time Sugiura gets aroused, a beast gets unleashed. And I’m not talking about his johnson here. He turns into an actual monster with razor-sharp teeth that lays waste to home décor. When he finally meets sex-charged Suuko, the monster gets, uh, bigger. What is happening to him and how will their budding romance survive?
Obviously Call Me Tonight is about teenage libidos going into literal beast-mode, sexual frustration, and bodies changing (rather violently) during puberty. I’ve never been a teenage boy, but based on what I’ve learned from Call Me Tonight and 80s panty-chaser comedies, no thank you. Having a dick at sixteen seems like an exhausting, relentless nightmare, one where you look at the world through dick-colored glasses. I do not want to be controlled by any of my organs, though the Supreme Court would certainly like to control my uterus. Thanks for that.
At any rate, Call Me Tonight teaches two important life lessons:
- If you are horny, bad things will happen, such as torrential nosebleeds. Someone will come after you with a bazooka. So try not to be horny.
- If you masturbate, then you will unleash evil onto the world. So try not to masturbate.
Sexual repression aside, the monster transformations in Call Me Tonight are utterly grotesque and a creative feat in animation. It boggles my mind that artists can rearrange body parts in so many different ways and in so many different angles. What’s even more impressive is that Sugiura transforms into completely different monsters—I suppose based on horniness. It’s typical in traditional animation to reuse complex sequences, or at least portions of it, to save time and money, but Call Me Tonight decided to do the opposite, and the artists created several completely distinct jaw-dropping beast transitions. They also rendered plenty of boobs and panties: bras are torn asunder, underwear is tossed aside, skirts seem to get shorter with every scene, and someone gets dry humped in a diner. As with any adult anime, it takes a second to mentally process sexual content presented in an artform we heavily associate with children and Disney. But only a second.
