As a fan of silent films, I was excited to hear that an ultra-rare silent movie is going to be shown in Rochester, NY this fall – the 1912 version of Robin Hood. The earliest surviving Robin Hood film, although there were several before the famous ones.
And speaking of famous Robin Hood films, I see they are also showing the 1922 Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood with a newly-reconstructed score played by a live orchestra.
Silent films play better on the big screen — and with a live orchestra. This should be quite a treat.
I see it’s connected to a Robin Hood conference with much discussion about the outlaw, and it also features live musical performances. And a display with rare books, stills and even Douglas Fairbanks Sr.’s boots.
It’s odd to think of how much Robin Hood material is getting published these days. New books – including a few like Adam Thorpe’s Hodd with a “dark Robin Hood” take – and new comics, and of course, next year’s Russell Crowe film. Mind you, the third series of the BBC Robin Hood TV show with Jonas Armstrong appeared to crash and burn in the ratings.
The legend of Robin Hood has changed dramatically over the years, and I wonder if the new Robin Hood books and films will bring anything new to the legend.
I don’t think it’s just interest in the upcoming film. There’s something in the air that makes this time appropriate for Robin Hood. I’m not sure what that is. Reaction to the Bush years?
Anyway, here’s a good link if you want to review the changes in the legend of the greenwood archer.
It also has a fair bit on Robin Hood in comic books. It always seems like Robin Hood’s successors have done better in that medium. Green Arrow is the obvious one, and Robin the Boy Wonder was first billed as “the laughing young Robin Hood of today”.
But some of Robin Hood comics and graphic novels have come out this year. Tim Beedle’s Muppet Robin Hood series is a fun Muppetized look at the story. More impressive is Tony Lee and Sam Hart’s Outlaw – The Legend of Robin Hood. It’s a very good retelling of the modern Robin Hood legend (as adapted by films and children’s books) with some novel twists. And Artur Fujita’s colours just pop off the page. Highly recommended. Writer Paul Storrie and artist Rob Davis are revising the 1990s Caliber Comics series Robyn of Sherwood (about Robin’s daughter) as a graphic novel. I gather that it doesn’t have a publisher yet. But the original Robyn series was very well-received, and smart publishers might want to take a look at this project.
Around 1979 – 1980, in the height of Battle of the Planets mania, I saw a cartoon series about heroes setting off for a long voyage in an outer space battleship. It was Star Blazers — a series that helped define North American anime. But then, before I knew it, it was gone. I’d see it again in a few years, and by then I’d realize that the characters big wide eyes meant the show orginated in Japan. And I’ll talk about Star Blazers aka Space Cruiser Yamato aka Space Battleship Yamato aka Uchu Senkan Yamato) in my next installment.
But first, the series that really made me aware of Japanese animation was a show called Force Five that aired in the mornings on Toronto’s “Channel 47” (nowadays it’s called Omni 1). Actually, Force Five was a compilation of five different anime series. I know in some markets, each weekday featured a different series. But I’m not certain if that’s how Channel 47 showed it back in the early 1980s. I got the impression that they went through one series before going onto the next one.
The credit sequences announced that Force Five was from Jim Terry Productions — complete with American Eagle logo — and the writing and direction credits featured very Anglo-Saxon names. But the credits also prominently noted that the animation came from Toei in Japan. That’s still the name that comes to mind when I think of Japanese animation studios. Also, the credits mentioned the Japanese creators of the shows – folks like Leiji (or Reiji, depending on the romanization of his name) Matsumoto and Go Nagai.
Looking at those credits, I realized that cartoons with that large-eyed characters, ongoing storylines, interesting characters and giant robots likely originated in Japan.
The Force Five shows … in the order I remember them .. are:
Starvengers
Starvengers (aka Getter Robo G) created by Go Nagai was actually a sequel to a series never translated. It features three planes that can combine in different ways to form three different robots – Star Dragon, Star Arrow and Star Poseidon. It was a bit weird to see a first episode of the series where they were discussing unseen defeated enemies and the death of a colleague. (Although not in the video compilation, I think.) The episodes weren’t as strongly linked as some Japanese series, but I do remember a decisive ending.
The Pandemonium Empire had one very notable enemy: Captain (or Colonel, depending on whether it was the actual series or the video compilation) Fuehrer. Really, I have to share a clip.
Still that’s slightly more subtle than the Japanese name for the character: Captain Hitler.
Danguard Ace
Created by Leiji/Reiji Matsumoto, the humans were travelling to the distant planet Promete. Several episodes passed before the robot was completed and the pilot was ready. Mainly I remember it for the similiarity in names between Windstar in this series and Wildstar in StarBlazers (while the shows were created by the same person, the names were created by different “translators”), the cranky mentor Captain Mask and the horrible theme tune.
Spaceketeers:
Titled Starzinger in Japan (and Sci-Bots in the UK), this was originally a science fiction retelling of the Monkey King story. Jim Terry Productions felt that the Japanese classic would have little meaning for North Americans, and so the “translated” character names resembled the names of Dumas’s Three Musketeers.
There are no giant robots in Spaceketeers which makes it unique among the Force Five shows. The plot about the heroes travelling great distances to heal the galaxy is close to the plot of Space Battleship Yamato / Star Blazers, and not surprising, the shows had the same creator.
At the time, I think this was my favourite Force Five series. It wasn’t as playground cool as Starvengers or Grandizer, but I liked the whole quest storyline and the slow introduction of the lead heroes. As a teenager, one of my few attempts at fan fiction was to rewrite and adapt this series (make it better).
Oh, and isn’t weird how beserker hero Jesse Dart (close to D’Artagnan’s name, I guess) has the same hairdo as the comic book beserker Wolverine? (Well, if the opening didn’t hide his hair in that space helmet.)
Grandizer
Another Go Nagai creation, UFO Robot Grendizer was a pretty exciting giant robot show. I remember the hero was an alien named Orion Quest who masqueraded as a farm-hand/cowboy named Johnny. I remember in the later episodes, the saucer that connected to Grandizer changed somewhat. And I think the heroes finally defeated the villains.
Maybe I’m wrong but I think like Voltron, Grandizer had one infalliable weapon to defeat the enemy, but he never used it until the end of the episode.
Gaiking:
This is the Force Five series I remember least well. An uncreated creation of Go Nagai, in this show, the heroes flew around in fortress called the Great Space Dragon which launched a giant robot defender — Gaiking. As I recall, they travelled the globe investigating alien involvement in Easter Island and such places. I guess it was a super-charged X-Files.
Coming right at the end of my playground days — and really, far past the time that any rational kid had got into sports — Force Five was excellent fare for child’s play. In all the Force Five series, the heroes and villains would shout out the name of the weapon before they used it. Militarily stupid, but it worked as a kids’ game. We called out the name of the giant robot we wanted to play and the names of weapons at each other (“Space thunder!” “Hatchet boomerang!”) As I recall, yelling “Spaceketeers!” granted you access to the weapons of all three heroes in that show. (Only sporting as they weren’t giant robots.)
Speaking of playtime, a few years before Force Five, toys from most of these shows (and other untranslated anime) came to North America under the Shogun Warriors brand. Danguard Ace had a prominent role (with no connection to the continuity of the anime or any of the other robots’ anime) in the tie-in Shogun Warriors comic by Marvel. One friend had a Star Dragon (Dragun) figure. Another friend had a miniature Grandizer. I was jealous.
Looking back, Force Five has not aged well. Even at the time, I probably thought it was cheesy. Certainly the voices are generally silly. But still, it got me interested in anime.
So, “Journey’s End”, the finale of the revived Doctor Who’s fourth season aired tonight in the UK. (Or season thirty, if you include the original 26 seasons, but don’t count the Paul McGann TV movie, the 8th Doctor novels or audio adventures as seasons.) Of course, it doesn’t air in the US for a couple of weeks or in Canada for a couple of months, but I’m sure the impatient and tech saavy can find a way to see it sooner.
Oh look, it’s on YouTube already.
There’s the link if you want to go looking for the other parts.
It’s a funny thing — spoilers. I avoided the message boards today and wikipedia and YouTube. I avoided all things Doctor Who until I had seen the episode. But really, I wasn’t protected from spoilers. Reading the Doctor Who Forum from what was once Outpost Gallifrey, I had already read months of posts from Dr Who fans with a passion and curiosity shared by political bloggers although not most mainstream reports already.
Set reports from Bad Wolf Bay filming suggested there would be two 10th Doctors — one in brown and the other in blue. Either script leaks or just fine fannish guessing suggested that the Doctor’s hand was involved in the duplication. And people had reported on some filming outside the Nobles’ house where the Doctor told Wilf he could never tell Donna … It wasn’t hard (for anyone who’s seen 2nd Doctor story “The War Games” or Superman II to hazard a guess at what may have happened.)
But still, there was a lot that I didn’t know. And certainly some of my own suspicions about where the season may have been heading were wrong.
Hmmmm… the duplicated Doctors wasn’t as bad as I dreaded. I mean, yes it was sheer technobabble relying on scraps of old continuity. And it was fairly silly. But then, so was the magical floaty Doctor last year or well … the resolution to other stories written by Russell T. Davies. His episodes don’t have the diamond hard plotting of Steven Moffat’s gems. The plot resolutions often feel well… like they were pulled out of the story’s rear, not truly organic.
But the double Doctors didn’t bother me, because RTD excels at big emotional moments. Not just giving Rose a shipper’s happy ending so to speak. I am thinking more about giving the half-human Doctor that terrible responsibility of wiping out the Daleks. (Of course, Rose did the exact same thing … but well, “logic is a wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.”) And the idea that the Doctor can remain weaponless by militarizing those around him. And especially the real horror of Donna’s fate.
No, I don’t mean that she won’t travel with the Doctor anymore. Or even that she’s lost her memories. She’s lost all the character growth. Once again, she’s back to the shouty temp of limited ambitions. Like if Rose turned back into the shop girl of the first episode, but even more so.
It’s interesting that this doesn’t quite the same comic book crossover feel as “The Stolen Earth”. Maybe it’s just because it’s not quite the novelty to see Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures characters together. It’s still daft, mad, cameo-happy and winking at fannish continuity – such as Rose and the Doctor realizing that Gwen is from an “old Cardiff family” — just like a classic comic book crossover. And it was cool to see Davros recognize Sarah Jane Smith.
I don’t think it’s the best story RTD’s ever done. But it’s certainly a capstone to his era. (Like acknowledging how Rose made the Doctor better.)
A few weeks ago, a friend was expressing her retro-crush with Battle of the Planets (which being a child of the 70s myself, I completely share and understand). And that got me thinking about my former love for anime or Japanese animation or Japanimation as it was often called in the 1980s.
When I was into anime and manga (Japanese comic books), it was still largely a cult thing. Certainly a growing cult, but not like today where manga and anime just dominate shelves of mainstream book and video stores. I seem to have drifted away from the genre, just as it achieved mainstream acceptance. Weird.
Anyway, my personal history with Japanese animation.
I was born a little too late to really get into the earliest Japanese cartoons to hit North America: Gigantor (aka Tetsuijin #28 or Iron Man #28), Astro Boy (aka Tetsuwan Atomo or Mighty Atom) and Speed Racer (aka Mach Go-Go-Go.). I think Astro Boy was the only one I had any real experience with, and even that I think was just the later 1980s incarnation.
No, the first real Japanese (not that I knew it at the time, of course) cartoon to make a real impression on me was something called Battle of the Planets. I — and a lot of my classmates — would race home from school to catch this on Global Television, channel 3.
We used to play “G-Force” as the team was called in the playground. I was usually stuck playing the overweight pilot Tiny or worse, the annoying robot Keyop. But boy, I could sympathize with Tiny’s common complaint “Aww, I’ll get to do is pilot the Phoenix.” The playground Phoenix was a swing-set, of course. And in childlike imagination, the ultra-cool Fiery Phoenix mode could be achieved by just swinging really hard and fast.
What I wouldn’t know for several years is that Battle of the Planets was translated from the Japanese series Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. Nor would I realize just how heavily edited it was.
As kids, we all spotted the animation in the 7-Zark-7, a robot with R2-D2’s body and Threepio’s personality, scenes didn’t match the rest of the animation. What we didn’t know is that Zark was just added by the Americans to make up time for all the violence cut from the American versions and also to reassure us that all cities were dutifully evacuated, that all exploding ships were robot planes and that despite all visual evidence to the contrary Mark’s father hadn’t really died in an exploding plane and father and son were now reunited — off-screen, of course.
Seeing many episodes again in my early 20s, it became absurdly easy to spot what was cut. G-Force would enter a room where the bad guys were lying in wait, a hero called out the villainous organization’s name “Spectra!”. Then suddenly the screen cut to an image of a Spectra mask falling to the floor. The mask had a bullet hole in it. Then back to a hero saying “Boy, they sure ran away fast when we showed up.”
Sure, the bad guys ran away so fast they just dropped their mask with a bullet hole in it. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
Looking at it now, it seems like virtually all the violence was hacked out. I can’t imagine what our parents were so bothered about. It also takes a bit of imagination to see why the 9-12 year old me liked it so much. That damn robot never seems to shut up and let interesting things happen.
Still, heavily edited as it was, it was far, far more exciting than the early seasons of Super Friends. Speaking of which, the composer of the American Battle of the Planets theme, Hoyt Curtain, is the same guy who composed the Super Friends theme. And boy are they similar.
Also, the animation of Battle of the Planets / G-Force (the team name in BotP and the title of a less-censored but less-loved 1980s translation) / Gatchaman was a cut above most cartoons. Also, the characters had a little more personality than Aquaman or the Saturday morning version of Batman. And occasionally, Battle of the Planets had traces of ongoing storylines – although somewhat weakly resolved / swept under the carpet in the kid-friendly version.
The excitement, the superior animation, the characterization and the ongoing storylines are things I’d find in other cartoons. Cartoons that I was old enough to realize originated in Japan.
To be continued…. with Star Blazers, Force Five and Robotech….
Fun Battle of the Planets Trivia:
The voice of Mark in Battle of the Planets is Casem Kasem. He also played Robin the Boy Wonder on Super Friends and most famously Shaggy on Scooby-Doo. I think Mark would have been a more fun guy if he had a few Scooby Snacks and said “Zoinks!” on occasion. Mark wasn’t anyone’s first choice on the playground. Even wanted to be Jason. For much the same reason that Luke Skywalker was no one’s first playground choice. (The same tomboy always seemed to force her way into playing Han Solo or Jason.)
My friend’s band name is Science Ninja Big Ten. A double Battle of the Planets reference. The Science Ninja comes from the show’s original Japanese title and “Big Ten” is was G-Force slang for “Roger” or “Ten Four”. When I remarked on the band’s name, Chris replied “You’re the only other person in the bar who’d get the reference.” Sad but true. That’s probably why I don’t hang around bars much.
If you’re not up to speed with the most recent UK episodes of Doctor Who, you might want to skip this post now. Spoilers are likely to follow.
Or you could just visit YouTube:
And follow this link for the rest of “The Stolen Earth”:
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So, at this point, if you don’t know that “The Stolen Earth” features a crossover between Doctor Who and its spinoffs Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures, it’s your own fault.
I’m sure on measured, considered reflection, this wasn’t the best Doctor Who episode ever. It’s not quite the well-plotted gem of a Steven Moffat episode. Nor does it have the emotional depth of some. A lot of it is just big set pieces.
And yet – the Doctor, Donna, Rose, Martha, Sarah Jane, Luke Smith, Mr. Smith, Capt. Jack, Gwen Cooper, Ianto Jones, Harriet Jones, Daleks, Davros, UNIT, the Judoon and Richard “Darwin’s Rottweiler and I’m married to a Time Lord” Dawkins …. all in one episode! How fun is that? It’s big old smiley fun to see Captain Jack hit on Sarah Jane Smith! Or Ianto’s jealousy over Jack’s encounter with a UNIT soldier? Or the big “Facebook” chat between everyone! And Davros in all his glory.
There is something just fun about diverse characters meeting up. That’s the charm of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the comic book, of course — crossover charm couldn’t save the movie version) and Lost Girls. And of course, there’s the big superhero comic book crossovers. The most recent being Secret Invasion (from Marvel) and Final Crisis from DC.
All the company’s great heroes in one epic battle. They should be as fun as Doctor Who’s “The Stolen Earth” was. And yet, they usually aren’t. Not anymore. Each issue of both Secret Invasion and Final Crisis has fractured little scenes that have some enjoyment, but the big “Wow — look at all the heroes!” factor isn’t making the story fun and its not masking the corporate hollowness of the stories.
That’s because familiarity does breed contempt.
Crisis on Infinite Earths was fun. So was Secret Wars. That was back in the 1980s when big company-wide crossovers were new and strange. Even guest appearances were a big event. Nowadays, it’s like every mainstream comic book is guest-starring another hero. And not some fleeting glimpse like what linked the early Marvel Comics together. I mean that folks like Batman and Wolverine are everywhere. It’s not special nor rare anymore.
Even the big “and the kitchen sink” stories aren’t rarities in superhero comics. Every year seems to bring a new universe-spanning event. We expect to see the Avengers, X-Men and Fantastic Four team-up. It’s not a treat these days.
There’s something really dangerous in thinking that “how can I top this” means “how many more characters and explosions and kisses to the past can I throw in?” It’s time for comics to think “how can I tell a story that’s emotionally relevant”. Something perhaps with character and theme. Something that’s mythic without Gotterdammerung happening every issue.
I hope Doctor Who doesn’t fall into this trap. Until “The Stolen Earth”, most crossover references or guest appearances were small, subtle and often sly. (Like Jack on Torchwood saying “the right kind of Doctor” instead of “The Doctor”.) And that’s what makes “The Stolen Earth” so special and fun.
But if they were to do this every week, it would be both boring and inaccessible. TV shows and comics can get hung up on their own mythology. It makes Smallville and late-X-Files just unwatchable to the casual viewer. Not because there’s a history. I think casual viewers can appreciate shows with a past. It’s that once a show becomes solely dependent on its mythology, there’s no emotional resonance except in reference to previous stories. It’s not that casual viewers are incapable of following the plot. They are just not given any incentive to actually care about what happens — because “big stuff happens” is assumed to be enough. That’s what I felt when I caught an episode of Lost for the first time in ages — completely apathetic.
But those ruminations aside … Daleks invade the Torchwood Hub! (Probably Davros just summoned the ones hanging out at the Doctor Who exhibition also in Cardiff Bay.) Cool!
A Hobgoblin's HoBohemia 