Saturday Night Showcase: Gatchaman (the remake)

Yesterday, I used the Top Cow remake of Battle of the Planets for the Friday Night Fight. As most anime fans know, BOTP was adapted from a Japanese series, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. In the 90’s, Tatsunuko, the animation company that created the series, went back and remade the series, modernizing it for a new audience. So how successful were they? The three-part OAV (original animation video–in other words, a “direct to video” series) has been uploaded all legal-like to YouTube by Fireworks Channel, so let’s take a look at the new White Shadow (not to be confused with the old basketball series) in action.

I don’t have time today to write a full-on review, so let me go over the highlights.

• The episode is a remake of the first Gatchaman episode (also used as the first episode of Sandy Frank’s Battle of the Planets and Ted Turner’s lackluster G-Force: Guardians of Space), but with a few added elements, such as the G-Force wannabes Spectra–sorry, Galacter has on their team.
• Instead of just having the usual “conquer the Earth” story, we get this added eco-friendly “Mantle Plan” thrown in. It’s been a while since I’ve seen all three episodes, so I forget if the Mantle Plan comes up again, but I’m thinking it does.
• The character costumes are a nice upgrade to the character models, especially Solaris (who will always be “Zoltar” to me). The mechanical designs, not so much. That new Phoenix just looks terrible compared to the original. Also, Dr. Nambu looks a bit more foppish than the original, which doesn’t even fit his personality.
• The CGI used for…whoever the “Illuminous One” of BOTP was supposed to be in the original looks ok, but bears no resemblance to the original whatsoever. That’s kind of disappointing. Even the awful Phoenix bears some resemblance to it’s predecessor.
• Poor Jun. Sure she can kick butt as well as her male counterparts, but she’s oversexualized here. If you look closely during her transformation, you can see her naked boobies. And no, even if I had time to slap the pictures into the article, I wouldn’t be posting them here. Perverts!
• Speaking of the transformations, I wasn’t expecting “transmute” from BOTP, but why does each character have a completely different transformation code? It’s not like it tells us anything about the character.
• One other think I’ve noticed through the other Gatchaman translations (except for Saban’s Eagle Riders), is that the director (as in Nambu’s superior) is named “Anderson”. This is also true for the direct translation of the original series released a few years ago as well as Turner’s. However, in BOTP, Anderson was the name of the G-Force commander. I have to wonder what happened with Sandy Frank’s translation team on that one. Even the subbed copy my friend bought back when Urban Media first released this series had “Anderson” as the director, I believe.
• “Let’s Fly”, the closing credit song, is one of my favorite songs ever, even if the words don’t always make sense. I CAN confirm that the song is in English on the subtitled release as well as the English, so either Urban Media left their own song in, or Tatsunoko put an English song in the credits (as well as the Gatchaman introduction sequence that included Jun and Joe as eye candy (yes, a little something for the ladies, too)), which would explain why the words don’t make sense. 🙂

Overall, despite the ugly vehicles (mostly the Phoenix and G-4’s “falcon tracker”), I enjoyed all three episodes, which I have on VHS. You can catch all three episodes up at YouTube legally, thanks to “Fireworks Channel”, who I assume has the license on the series, since it is hosted on YouTube’s “shows” section. I recommend checking them out.

BONUS VIDEOS:

the trailer for a more recent update I haven’t heard about.

a live action version of same–I want to hear more about this!

Who’s “Smap”?