Watanabe, Kurosawa, & Kumagai: 2004's Inadvertent Samurai Trilogy

While the ninja is arguably the most iconic thing to come from Japan when it comes to worldwide pop culture, I think it's more than fair to say that the samurai is a very close second. While the real life samurai that existed for around 700 years between the late 12th century & late 1870s were not always quite like what they are now often portrayed as in modern pop culture, there's no doubt that there's a lot to like in the general (romanticized) concept of the samurai. Stalwart & loyal in fealty to their respective lords, honorable in battle due to them following the ideals of bushido, and kicking all kinds of ass while wearing armor; of course, there's also the inverse concept of the samurai, which can be just as accurate, at points. Naturally, there have been tons of anime that involved samurai in some way or another, and some even feature the word "samurai" in their titles.

The following aren't really all that accurate to what the actual samurai were like, but they were essentially an entire year's primary representation of that concept, at least on TV.

Throughout 2004 three TV anime debuted & aired in Japan that all had titles starting with the word "Samurai"... and all three were not only unique from each other in their conception, but all three also went in wildly different directions. One is today considered an all-time classic (& would otherwise never be covered on this blog), another is still fondly remembered today as a cult-classic (at the very least), and the last is easily the most forgotten of them all yet is a reminder of the early efforts some American anime companies made in becoming more of a direct part of the anime industry itself in Japan. This is, essentially, 2004's Inadvertent Samurai Trilogy. From a personal standpoint, 2004 is the year where I truly went full bore into anime, and that meant that I indulged in both fansubs as well as official releases, but the former was how you had to watch brand new anime as it came out in Japan; simulcasting was nowhere near existing back then, since YouTube didn't even exist yet! In those early days I watched the fansubs for two of these shows as they came out, while the third one (due to its very creation, essentially) wasn't something I saw until it got a physical release in English. Now it's been effectively 20 years since all three of these shows debuted in Japan (& I entered anime fandom), so I'd like to look back at these three "samurai" & see how each one holds up after all this time, as well as how each one befits the concept of a "samurai".

Is the whole "Inadvertent Samurai Trilogy" thing just an excuse to allow me to write about at least one anime that I'd never cover normally here? A little, sure, but I legit just find it neat that there were three TV anime in 2004 whose titles all started with "Samurai", so it's a fun little excuse, at the very least.

Obscusion B-Side: Wading Through the Red Depths of Koei's Crimson Sea Duology

Founded on July 25, 1976, & now existing as the surviving company of the Koei Tecmo Holdings merger from 2009, Koei was mainly known up through the late 90s primarily for two things: In-depth strategy & simulation games based on sports or history & (in Japan only) otome games. In fact, Koei is known for making both some of the earliest acknowledged "JRPGs" (a variety of titles between 1982 & 1983) & the very first otome game (1994's Angelique), as well as even launching Yoko Kanno's musical career, as her first gigs were composing the scores for Romance of the Three Kingdoms & Nobunaga's Ambition back in the mid-80s. In 1996, though, Koei wanted to expand its horizons, founding a fourth division specifically for action-oriented games, leading to the creation of Omega Force, which got its start with 1997's Dynasty Warriors (which was a fighting game for its first entry), the 1998 duo of Destrega (a cult-classic arena fighter) & Enigma (a survival horror-esque action adventure game that stayed in Japan), & 1999's WinBack (a third-person shooter which innovated the idea of a cover system); those latter three would be the only non-Musou games from Omega Force until 2007. However, it's not as though Koei relied solely on Omega Force when it came to non-"standard" video games, as the studio did still have its other divisions develop games outside of the norm, like 1999 RPG Zill O'll, 2002 hack-&-slash game Mystic Heroes/Battle Hoshin, 2007 racing game Fatal Inertia, or 2008 eating game Prey the Stars, with the last two actually coming from Koei Canada. Koei has also worked with third-party developers for other titles, like 1998's Hoshin Engi & 1999's Saiyuki: Journey West (both developed by Fu-Qi), 2001's Gitaroo Man (developed by iNiS, now Leona) & Yanya Caballista: City Skater (developed by Cave), or 2007's Opoona (developed by ArtePiazza). Finally, Koei acted as the publisher for some of Atlus' English releases in Europe during the 00s, namely those developed by Nippon Ichi Software.

Of those "non-standard Koei games that weren't developed by Omega Force" releases, the one that's always had my curiosity is Crimson Sea.

I think this is the only time I've ever seen an
ESRB rating on the title screen itself.

Released on December 12, 2002 in Japan, Kurenai no Umi (not to be confused with the 1961 tokusatsu film of the exact same name from Toho) was far from the only game Koei ever released on the original Xbox, but it was the only one that was 100% exclusive to Microsoft's first console. With that in mind, an international release was always in the cards, as just four days later Crimson Sea would come out in North America, followed by a European release on March 28, 2003. Despite being a game focused on taking on large groups of enemies by hacking, slashing, or shooting them, though, there's no indication that Crimson Sea came from Omega Force, instead simply crediting staff from Koei, in general. For example, most of the planners for the game previously worked on Romance of the Three Kingdoms & Kessen games, not the Dynasty Warriors series. Booting up the game you see it called "A Kou Shibusawa Production", but that's just the stage name of Koei's co-founder, Yoichi Erikawa, & the division/brand named after him wouldn't exist until 2016; I guess maybe Crimson Sea can be assigned to that division in retrospect, though. It would receive generally positive reviews at the time, and it must have sold well enough as a sequel would get put into production. However, oddly enough, Crimson Sea 2 (it would have been funny if Koei just called it "Kurenai no Sora/Crimson Sky", like the 1962 sequel to the Toho film was) would wind up being a PlayStation 2-exclusive, and would even first see release in North America on March 30, 2004, followed by Japan on April 15 & Europe on September 3; critical reception for the sequel was about as positive as the first game was.

Despite that positive reception the series would pretty much disappear into obscurity after the sequel & never receive another entry, with the original Xbox game never getting added to any future Xbox console's backwards compatibility list (yeah, not even Xbox 360!), though the PS2 sequel would see re-release on the PS3 Store as a PS2 Classic on September 3, 2013, but only in North America; as of this piece it's still seemingly available for purchase, but you have to search for it first. As I do own the Xbox game physically & the PS2 Classic re-release of the sequel, I want to go over both & see if I can figure out why Crimson Sea wound up drowning in the vast ocean of video game history, despite both games being considered good titles back in the day.

Roger Corman's Galaxy Express: "Captain Harlock"? All I Know is Captain Warlock, Parnder!

Born on April 5, 1926, Roger Corman would start his career in film working at 20th Century Fox as a simple mail room messenger, before being given the job to read story concepts & give recommendations as to which ones showed the most promise. During that time Corman only ever recommended one, the future The Gunfighter in 1950, which would go on to get nominated for Best Story at the 23rd Academy Awards, but Corman was given no credit for helping get the film into production. The lack of credit resulted in him leaving Fox & deciding to go independent, and over the course of the next 74 years Roger Corman would become one of the most important figures in American moviemaking history... even if it didn't really seem like it, based on the films he made. You see, Corman would eventually be labeled "The King of the Bs" due to his preference for making films fast & cheap, preferring to not spend more than $1 million in total for a film, with the end result often being "lesser" B-movies, to most people's eyes. However, he wound up being the man that countless future legends in film would get their early starts under, including the likes of Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, & William Shatner. Even some ultra-mainstream modern franchises like The Fast & The Furious owe their existence to Roger Corman, in some fashion, due to the literal hundreds of films he directed and/or produced. Corman would pass away on May 9, 2024 at the age of 98, having continued to produce films as late as 2018, often claiming to have never lost money on any film he made, though in reality there was the rare film that did initially lose him money, but likely later made up for it on home video.

Not just that, but Corman also worked hard to distribute foreign films in the United States, including works from the likes of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, & even Akira Kurosawa... and this leads us to the one & only time Roger Corman ever dubbed an anime!

The year 1977 would be possibly the most important one in the career of the late, great Leiji Matsumoto. Space Battleship Yamato, which Matsumoto helped co-create, initially saw a cold reception when it first aired in 1974, but via reruns would find itself a growing fanbase that culminated in the first Yamato movie in 1977 being seen in theaters by 2.3 million people & grossing 2.1 billion yen, over 10x its budget. Meanwhile, on the manga front, Matsumoto would debut two series that year which would go on to become Matsumoto's magnum opuses. Over in the pages of Akita Shoten's Play Comic magazine was Space Pirate Captain Harlock, which completely reimagined characters from 1972 western manga Gun Frontier for a space-faring sci-fi adventure, becoming the de facto form that people would recognize the likes of the titular Harlock & his best friend, Tochiro Oyama. Meanwhile, over in the pages of Shonen Gahosha's Weekly Shonen King was Galaxy Express 999, which took the idea of a space faring train as seen in the Kenji Miyazawa novel Night on the Galactic Railroad & told an epic space opera espousing the value of human life when faced with the possibility of gaining immortality by way of moving over to mechanical bodies. Alongside future works like 1978's Queen Emeraldas & 1980's Queen Millennia these manga would form the basis of what fans have since called the "Leijiverse", a loose continuity between Matsumoto's various space-themed sci-fi stories that have some general feeling of an overall shared timeline but otherwise shouldn't be taken as anything explicitly organized, or even canon. By the way, the "999" is officially pronounced "Three-Nine", similar to how Submarine Super 99 is pronounced "Nine-Nine" & Interstella 5555 is pronounced "Four-Five"; it's just a quirk of Matsumoto's titles, I guess.

Galaxy Express 999 would become an instant hit, resulting in Toei Animation debuting a TV anime adaptation that ran for 113 episodes from 1978 to 1981, ending the same year as the manga did, as well as a handful of TV specials that mainly just recapped specific episodes & stories seen in the TV anime. While the TV anime was airing, though, Toei also would produce a film adaptation of Galaxy Express 999 that told its own version of the story, bringing in Shigeyuki Hayashi, who had first worked with Toei all the way back in 1958 as an in-between animator for the film Hakujaden & had since started using the pseudonym Rintaro, to direct; Rintaro had just finished directing the Captain Harlock TV anime for Toei. The 999 film would be Rintaro's theatrical debut as director, be the highest-grossing domestic film in Japan for 1979, would later win a Japanese Academy Award in 1980, and Toei would follow through with a Rintaro-directed sequel, Adieu Galaxy Express 999, in 1981. The smash success of the first film, though, would catch the eye of Roger Corman, who at the time was running New World Pictures, which he co-founded in 1970. New World would license the film, cut it down from its original 129-minute length to roughly 91 minutes, & dub it into English, resulting in the simpler titled Galaxy Express premiering in America on August 8, 1981. This would be Corman's only time working with anime, though a post-Corman New World would later distribute Manson International's Warriors of the Wind in 1985, a notoriously edited down version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind; I reviewed that film way back in 2013.

Embassy Home Entertainment would then release Galaxy Express on VHS & Betmax in 1984, giving Corman's dub of the film its sole home video release. While the original Japanese film would later see re-release (& an uncut dub, alongside the second film) by Viz on VHS in 1996, followed by both dual-audio DVD & BD releases by Discotek Media in 2011 & 2017 respectively, the original dub is stuck in licensing hell, as ownership of the New World library was sold & resold in the decades since Galaxy Express. Today, that original edited dub may currently be owned by The Walt Disney Corporation, following the purchase of 21st Century Fox in 2019; it wouldn't become standard for dubs to revert back to the Japanese licensor until at least the 00s. However, while there currently does not exist a proper HD recut of Galaxy Express (yet...), the film has been ripped & shared online for years, so let's honor the life & legacy of Roger Corman by checking out how he once handled an iconic anime property like Galaxy Express 999.

The Tezuka Star System Taken to the Extreme? Saint Seiya's Callbacks to Masami Kurumada's Prior Works

If you've read manga for a decent enough amount of time you more than likely have noticed that some mangaka have a habit of re-using certain character design "templates", if you will, and while some may try writing it off as "laziness" the truth of the matter is that there's actually a name for this concept: The Tezuka Star System. Officially titled the Tezuka Manga no Character Ichiran/Tezuka Manga Character List in Japan, the Tezuka Star System was the late Osamu Tezuka's habit of reusing certain characters across his various manga, as though they were actors being cast in multiple roles across numerous productions, with the English name for this concept being a reference to the real world "star system" that Hollywood utilized from the 1920s through the 1960s. For example, iconic characters like Astro/Atom, Black Jack, & Don Dracula have made appearances more or less as themselves (or, at least characters with the same designs & names) across various manga or anime from Tezuka, while characters like Rock Holmes, Ham Egg, Shunsaku Ban, Acetylene Lamp, & many others appear in various productions as essentially the same character they play in other ones. Therefore, Rock is often a "bad boy", Ham Egg is a villain, Shunsaku is a well-meaning good guy, Lamp is conniving, etc., & even Tezuka himself was a part of this, appearing in various series as a mangaka. Tezuka liked to treat his characters as though they were actors, even joking that some received "pay raises" if they performed well, and by reusing these characters readers could instantly get a bead on the kind of character these "actors" were portraying in a work, and sometimes he could even have them "play against type", like how Rock was originally a consistently heroic character before going "bad".

One mangaka that absolutely adheres to the Tezuka Star System is Masami Kurumada.

As you can see in the image above, for his 50th Anniversary art exhibition that was unfortunately cancelled, Masami Kurumada tends to use the same character template for his main characters, with some exceptions, like Okita Souji in Akane-Iro no Kaze, Maya in Evil Crusher Maya, and most notably Rei Kojinyama in Sukeban Arashi, which remains Kurumada's sole female lead. In fact, it's with Kurumada's debut work from 1974 that his form of the Tezuka Star System really got started, as Rei would be "recast" as Kiku Takane in Ring ni Kakero, her love interest Morita would be "recast" as Jun Kenzaki in RnK, & even her rival Shizuka Ayakoji would eventually "return" as Himeko Hojo in Fuma no Kojirou, among some other "recurring actors". Of course, the big one would be Ryuji Takane from Ring ni Kakero, who would become the recurring main character template I previously mentioned, being "recast" for Kojirou in FnK, Jingi Kikukawa in Otoko Zaka, Pegasus Seiya in Saint Seiya, Aoi Tendo in Aoi Tori no Shinwa, Sho in Silent Knight Sho, Teppei Takamiya in B't X, & most recently Pegasus Tenma in Saint Seiya: Next Dimension; it's really no different than how Tim Burton would often cast Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham Carter in many of his films (8 & 7 out of 20, so far, respectively). However, when it came to one specific work, Kurumada seemingly decided to take the Tezuka Star System to its absolute limit.

Upon debuting Saint Seiya in Weekly Shonen Jump Combined Issue #1-2 of 1986 Kurumada had been making manga professionally for nearly 12 whole years, and while there were naturally long-term Jump readers who would continue to read the magazine for as long as they could, there was also now new, younger, generations of readers who might have at least heard of Ring ni Kakero or Fuma no Kojirou, but had only really known of Kurumada by way of Otoko Zaka's failure, at best. Therefore, Kurumada seemingly decided to reutilize many concepts, names, & terminology from his prior two hit works, but mainly from Ring ni Kakero, and repurpose them into new forms, if possible. That way, long-term fans of Kurumada's work would be able to identify the reference & have some bonus fun in that way, while the newer readers would be able to experience it for the very first time, and ideally in a way that's unique for them. In essence, Kurumada took the Tezuka Star System when it came to Saint Seiya & expanded it into more than just characters, and while some might try to argue that it's, once again, "laziness" there's no denying that the concept worked, as Saint Seiya is what people immediately think of first, despite some of its stuff being callbacks to Kurumada's prior works.

While I can't claim that I've collected them all, let's take a look at the ones I picked up on while re-reading Saint Seiya for the recent review of the manga I did.

Saint Seiya (Manga): Selling Out? More Like Bleeding Out (Especially When It's Shiryu)

When Masami Kurumada debuted his fourth serialized manga in Weekly Shonen Jump, Otoko Zaka, in mid-1984 it was with the plan for it to be the true representation of what kind of storyteller he could be, and with it he finally felt comfortable calling himself a proper "mangaka/manga creator" instead of a mere "mangaya/manga drawer". Unfortunately, due to a variety of factors, Otoko Zaka was a massive flop & Kurumada was forced to bring it all to an end in early 1985 after only 30 weekly chapters, though he was at least able to stand defiant & declare that it was "Incomplete" to readers, rather than admit full closure of its story. Still, it was a sense of defeat that Kurumada had not really experienced since the cancellation of his debut serialization, Sukeban Arashi, a decade prior, but whereas Sukeban Arashi was simply a case of a newbie still learning how to adjust to the weekly manga grind Otoko Zaka's cancellation was partially caused by one man: Masami Kurumada himself. While planning out his (intended) magnum opus over the past decade Kurumada wound up altering the landscape of shonen action manga with both Ring ni Kakero & (to a smaller extent) Fuma no Kojirou, so when Otoko Zaka saw Kurumada eschew a lot of the more spectacular elements of RnK & FnK for a (somewhat) more grounded tale that called back to stuff like Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho from the late 60s & early 70s, it was immensely outdated when compared to the likes of Kinnikuman, Fist of the North Star, & later Dragon Ball that were running in Jump at the time, all of which took some influence & inspiration from Ring ni Kakero.

Therefore, Masami Kurumada seemingly came to one conclusion: If the readers didn't want the kind of manga that he wanted to make, then he'd make the kind of manga that he knew readers would love.

Taking the second half of 1985 to conceive of his next work, Kurumada initially thought of making a wrestling manga, before moving over to a karate or judo manga, but after some denials from his editor he went in a different direction. Instead of sports, Kurumada decided to make a more general "nekketsu/hot-blooded" action manga, one with an aspect of "fashion" to it, to contrast with how his prior manga all featured characters garbed in traditional school gakuran or simple sports garb. Specifically, he looked to his fascination with Greek mythology (which he had previously utilized for Team Greece & the 12 Gods of Greece in Ring ni Kakero) & combined that with the idea of constellations, resulting in the idea that his characters would wear personalized armor to battle, which also allowed him to make more explosive & spark-laden combat, which the armor could act as protection for. Originally going with the title "Ginga no Rin/Rin of the Galaxy", Kurumada decided to change the lead's name to "Seiya", initially using the kanji 聖矢/Holy Arrow before deciding on 星矢/Star Arrow, to better match the constellation theme; likewise, one of the first ideas Kurumada had for "Seiya" was a special attack that looked like a meteor shower. Finally, Kurumada would decide to name this new manga Saint Seiya, after both the lead's finalized name & the fact that he was a "Saint", which in this case was the name of the armored warriors who fight for Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom, warfare (specifically strategy & generalship), & handicraft. In the end, Saint Seiya would debut in Combined Issue #1-2 of Weekly Shonen Jump in 1986, and while it initially had a bit of a rough start in its first year, it would eventually go on to find success... and then some.