Kurt Angle
First Grade
- Messages
- 9,730
if you ever see the origins of "battle of the planets" you'll come to realise that sandy frank massacred a truely fantastic cartoon.
The version seen in Australia was never "G-force", just "battle of the planets". G-force was the ficticious name of the organisation of the five orphans.
The origin comes from a Japanese cartoon called "space ninja gatchaman", hence the "G" on the chest. Sandy Frank got the syndication rights shortly after star wars hit cinemas and decided to water it down for kiddies, stripping out all so-called violent content which in some cases was 55% of an episode and introducing an absurd R2-D2 clone in 7-zark-7 (which worked well filling in the gaps created by chopping out reams of Japanese content).
The original gatchaman had themes owing heavily to environmental themes (similar I suppose to the same generation that created space battlecruiser yamato, or starblazers as seen in Australia, and it Hiroshima-esque themes) and they rarely left earth orbit.
Viewing episodes of battle of the planets recently I see the glaring holes left by Sandy Franks editting.
Overall though gatchaman was groundbreaking in terms of what we now call "Manga". The first was kimba the white lion followed by astroboy. Both themed on orphans and quite gentle storylines. Next game gatchaman and SBC Yamato. All appear to be shaped by a post-WWII, post-Hiroshima Japanese generation.
Where gatchaman differs is the quality of it's animation and (relatively) embedded maturity of it's storylines
The version seen in Australia was never "G-force", just "battle of the planets". G-force was the ficticious name of the organisation of the five orphans.
The origin comes from a Japanese cartoon called "space ninja gatchaman", hence the "G" on the chest. Sandy Frank got the syndication rights shortly after star wars hit cinemas and decided to water it down for kiddies, stripping out all so-called violent content which in some cases was 55% of an episode and introducing an absurd R2-D2 clone in 7-zark-7 (which worked well filling in the gaps created by chopping out reams of Japanese content).
The original gatchaman had themes owing heavily to environmental themes (similar I suppose to the same generation that created space battlecruiser yamato, or starblazers as seen in Australia, and it Hiroshima-esque themes) and they rarely left earth orbit.
Viewing episodes of battle of the planets recently I see the glaring holes left by Sandy Franks editting.
Overall though gatchaman was groundbreaking in terms of what we now call "Manga". The first was kimba the white lion followed by astroboy. Both themed on orphans and quite gentle storylines. Next game gatchaman and SBC Yamato. All appear to be shaped by a post-WWII, post-Hiroshima Japanese generation.
Where gatchaman differs is the quality of it's animation and (relatively) embedded maturity of it's storylines
