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.