MSX and Konami Games Featured in Soviet Films
The fact that MSX was popular in the Soviet Union can be seen from its appearance in children's films. This time, I will introduce two of them.
“Malyavkin i kompaniya (Malyavkin and Company)”
It is said that this film was made in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1986.
Suddenly, there is “Athletic Land”! Furthermore, there is a scene where an elderly female teacher gets hooked on “Antarctic Adventure”. At the end, the friends gather around to play “Road Fighter”. However, please note that since this is a film, it has been composited.
The highlight is the MSX poster on the back of the classroom. My father explained that since the Soviet Union had poor printing technology, it might have been donated by Yamaha. It seems that Japanese color posters were very popular in the Soviet Union.
There is an MSX poster on the back of the classroom.
The production company is “Odesa Film Studio,” a long-established film company founded in Ukraine during the former Soviet era in 1919. It is still active today and has a website. The content of the film is easy to understand because there are English subtitles.
“Davai, davai, go, go!”
The children's voices are cute.Russian version of YAMAHA KUVT/YIS503II and an external FDD, Yamaha FD-05 are used.
The children appearing here should be about the same age as me. I hope they haven't been caught up in the war... 🥺
Next is a children's fantasy musical film,
“Poekhal poezd v Bulzibar (The Train Was Bound for Bulzibar)”
From around 42 minutes and 30 seconds.
It seems it was broadcast on Soviet state television and other channels in 1986. It was produced by a Lithuanian film studio.
Under the teacher's guidance, the children enjoy “Monta-kun no Ichi-ni-Sansu”, “Antarctic Adventure”, “Yie Ar Kung-Fu”, and “Circus Charlie” and others. The opening of Sky Jaguar plays for a moment. MSX users don't miss things like this 😁
Since it was broadcast in 1986, it must have been produced in 1985. This means that MSX games released just after launch were used.
This period was when the Famicom boom began to explode, and MSX games were often mocked as being “shabby” 😭
However, Tetris, which was completed in the same Soviet Union around the same time on June 6, 1984, had a monochrome screen and was created entirely with text characters. Moreover, Tetris was produced at the Computer Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and it was a long time before the general public saw it.
I have posted the original footage, so please compare them.
Its use was limited to research institutions such as universities.
From this, I think you can understand how attractive Konami's MSX games were to Soviet children.
As far as I know, there are almost no scenes in Japan where an MSX appears in a movie either 😁
Finally, as a bonus, a dance by the lovely beautiful girls of the Soviet Union 😻
The red neckerchiefs the girls are wearing are the symbol of the Pioneers, the Soviet Communist youth organization.
A dance by beautiful Soviet girls, this one is the uniform version 😻
The tape deck is a Vesna 306, and the motor is a copy of a Japanese product. At the time, it was the number one item young people in the Soviet Union longed for, and because the standards were the same as in the West, pirated music tapes were widely distributed.
The Iron Curtain was meaningless against the charm of computers, music, and games.
