I have a serious soft spot for huge, unwieldy franchises. Worlds that live on past five or six films. That have TV spinoffs or canonical book and comic book tie-ins. That just keep going for decades. For one reason or another, these stories have staying power.

But even the most popular franchises have some… oddities that pop up. I’m not talking about the unfortunate sequel or lackluster spinoff that people pretend to forget. I’m talking about the installments that were legitimately forgotten. Films, shows, or books that flew so far under the radar that only diehard fans know about them.

Welcome to Franchise Oddities. 

When it comes to film franchises, one of the oldest (maybe the oldest?) and most successful has certainly been the Universal Monsters. Technically, the franchise began in the 1920s with The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925), both starring Lon Chaney.

But it wasn’t until 1931 and the arrival of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff on the Universal lot that things really took off. Dracula and Frankenstein both came out that year, followed quickly by The Mummy (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and several Dracula and Frankenstein sequels.

The Wolf Man (1941), Phantom of the Opera (1943), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) all eventually joined Universal’s rogues gallery and completed the “classic” Universal Monsters lineup. (But there were oodles of other Universal horror films released from the 20s through the 50s.)

As an umbrella, the Universal Monsters is one of horror’s best-known franchises. (This complete 30-film set demands a spot in any fan’s collection.)  But each individual monster also spawned its own sub-franchise.

And even though The Invisible Man is only barely “horror,” there were still six installments at Universal from 1933 through 1951. Most of these are well known. The original, based on the classic H.G. Wells novel, starring Claude Rains, and directed by James Whale, is clearly the best.

The sequels and spinoffs have their charms, though. The Invisible Man Returns (1940) stars Vincent Price in his first horror role, The Invisible Woman (1940) is a screwball comedy with Virginia Bruce in the title role (alongside the great John Barrymore), Invisible Agent (1942) finds the Invisible Man as a hero fighting Nazis (which is all kinds of awesome), and The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944) returns to horror and completes the original run of films.

Not even counting films and stories that simply play with invisibility as a theme, there have been plenty of other films connected to the Wells novel and character. Most notably Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and Leigh Wannell’s excellent reboot/reimagining of the franchise with Elisabeth Moss in 2020.

But I promised you franchise oddities, which we’re getting to now. In the first few years of postwar Japan, that country saw an influx of American entertainment from the previous decade for the first time. And even though the Universal Monsters films of the 30s and early 40s were old hat in the States by the late 40s, they became huge in Japan.

So it was only natural that Japanese filmmakers would dip their toes in the genre and create their own versions… which resulted in, among many other things, The Invisible Man Appears (1949) and The Invisible Man vs The Human Fly (1957).

Over the years, these films sadly became forgotten parts of the Invisible Man franchise, mostly since they’ve so rarely been seen. Well, that all changes now. Arrow Video just released both films on Blu-ray, which is the first time they’ve ever been released outside Japan.

The films are unique for any number of reasons. The Invisible Man Appears is the earliest surviving Japanese science fiction film and thus the progenitor of all tokusatsu films that followed. The special effects were also created by Eiji Tsuburaya, who would go on to have a major hand in creating the Godzilla and Ultraman franchises. And both films were produced by the legendary Daiei Studios, which also blessed us with Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece Rashomon and the Gamera and Zatoichi franchises.

Even though the films are based on the H.G. Wells character and certainly inspired by the Universal series, they have a flavor all their own. Whereas the American films mostly followed a standard template (i.e., mad scientist brews up an invisibility potion, drinks said potion, and then gets up to wily shenanigans), the Japanese films stray from that model considerably.

The Invisible Man Appears (written and directed by Nobuo Adachi) is essentially a jewel heist whodunit, and The Invisible Man vs The Human Fly (directed by Mitsuo Murayama) is a “locked-room” murder mystery.

Although the titles promise more, both simply use invisibility and special effects as a sci-fi veneer over somewhat straightforward crime dramas. The two are also standalone films; the latter isn’t a direct sequel to the first. In fact, they’re barely related to each other at all, besides the obvious gimmick.

Still, despite the crudity of the SFX and thin connection to Universal’s Invisible Man, both films are solid entries in the franchise. They each have well-written stories (by 1950s monster movie standards), decent acting, and stray enough from the established template as to be engaging – and not mere carbon copies of the Hollywood films.

The new release from Arrow also presents the films in the best possible light. The HD masters (delivered by Kadokawa Pictures) were created using the best surviving film materials, which in both cases were 16mm exhibition prints. As a result, the technical quality of the films each betray their age and relative neglect. Watching the Blu-ray, you won’t mistake either of these films for being made last year, but the quality never dips so low as to be distracting (except for the opening title sequence of The Invisible Man Appears).

The disc is relatively light on special features (a rarity for Arrow), but included are the following:

• Transparent Terrors: a new interview (from 2019 and 2020) with film critic Kim Newman on the history of the Invisible Man character in films
• 43-page booklet, featuring three essays: “Invisible Man in Japan” (by Keith Allison), “Invisible Men: Ghosts of the Post-War Era” (by Hayley Scanlon), and “Eiji Tsuburaya: The Special Effects Man Appears” (by Tom Vincent)
• theatrical trailer for The Invisible Man Appears
• image galleries for both films
• original lossless Japanese mono audio on both films
• 1080p transfers of both films