Sunday, 08-Nov-2009 07:42:43 CST
History
of Anime in the U.S.
Battle of the Planets
Battle of the Planets, on the other hand,
was made to conform to the perceived US market much more closely
with judicious editing. To be fair, the original probably wouldn't
have been able to run on regular US television at the time without
those cuts as the show itself is quite violent. There is a lot of
punching, kicking and bleeding to death present here, so a few minutes
are added to each one to offset the cuts with the addition of 7-Zark-7
(who many take as a personal insult): he's not in the original Japanese
program at all! The cities are not evacuated before this-weeks-bug-monster
attacks, or are those cities anywhere other than on Earth itself.
 Probably
the biggest change for the US conversion is the fact that the show
DOES have a very definite ending ... one member of the team (who
is dying anyway of an incurable illness) stops the doomsday clock
seconds before the Earth would have been destroyed. The number of
seconds remaining on the face of that doomsday clock is his number
in the Gatchaman team. He then dies happy to have saved everything
and the rest of the team comes apart. Not only that, but Berg Katse
(Zoltar) meets his/her end only minutes before.
The Battle of the Planets adaptation was not as successful as it
should have been (only some of that first season was adapted for
the US market), and there was another attempt some time later when
the show resurfaced as G-Force. While much of the violence was back
in it, the dub itself was generally less satisfactory and the show
again sank to be seen today on cable only. As with Star Blazers,
enough of the original brilliance shows through to give the average
US fan a taste of what this was like, and it influenced many people
on this side of the ocean ... people who were beginning to discover
that they weren't alone when they ran into each other at SF conventions.
From the US fan's perspective, the biggest problem the show really
had at the time was the lack of printed books covering it. Unlike
Yamato, there are only a few difficult to get (even then!) works.
As the years went by, these books became more and more difficult
to obtain until today when they're almost impossible to find for
less than $75 (and they're not all that nice). The reason for these
books not surfacing the way that the Yamato books did was, of course,
that Yamato followed Gatchaman and Yamato revolutionized the way
that anime was perceived in Japan. Don't believe me? Try to find
coverage for Speed Racer (Mach Go-Go-Go!), which also preceded Yamato.
Today, even though the golden age of artbooks has past, some of
the neatest things that one can find on a series, creator, or movie/OVA
is probably a $35 book. Some of these are quite elaborate, and in
one extreme example, is more expensive than a laserdisc of the program
itself (Macross Movie Laserdisc = 7800 Yen, Macross Movie "Gold"
Movie Book = 8800 Yen)! But, I digress.
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