The Old School Otaku Lounge

Before "Knights Of The Zodiac", Toei produced at least one three-minute English language promotional video for SAINT SEIYA. We found it tacked onto a tape of Seiya episodes rented from Atlanta's Iwase Books in 1989-1990, thereabouts. I copied it onto videotape and promptly lost it, and just now I found it again, and managed to get it up onto the YouTube for everybody to enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgO9so3MS4Y

So there you go. It's narrated in an overblown fashion, which suits the series, and it mentiones "Arless, the Sanctuary's new Pope", which is odd, to say the least. Anyway, enjoy.

Very interesting! Stuff like this is invaluable.

I wonder if a dub was produced at the time...

Wow, I'd never heard of this lost promo before! Thanks for sharing, Dave!

I was inordinately happy to find it again; there was a discussion I was involved with about weird English promo videos, and I mentioned the Seiya video that no one else had ever seen, and so I went looking for it but never could find it. Turned out it was on a VHS tape that was staring me in the face the whole time. Go fig.

I'm not really a big Saint Seiya fan; I enjoyed watching it in the late 80s because it and FOTNS were just about the only action-fighting kinds of things happening, or at least that's how it seemed to me. But it's a Jump series and as such gets repetitive very fast.

I just got a message to the Let's Anime blog the other day trying to promote some kind of Brazilian online petition to get the later Saint Seiya anime translated and released in North/South America - it's a good thing, I guess, but Saint Seiya is a show I've never written about, certainly not at Let's Anime, so why my blog would be a good place to promote their appeal is anybody's guess.

davemerrill wrote:I was inordinately happy to find it again; there was a discussion I was involved with about weird English promo videos, and I mentioned the Seiya video that no one else had ever seen, and so I went looking for it but never could find it. Turned out it was on a VHS tape that was staring me in the face the whole time. Go fig.

I'm not really a big Saint Seiya fan; I enjoyed watching it in the late 80s because it and FOTNS were just about the only action-fighting kinds of things happening, or at least that's how it seemed to me. But it's a Jump series and as such gets repetitive very fast.

I just got a message to the Let's Anime blog the other day trying to promote some kind of Brazilian online petition to get the later Saint Seiya anime translated and released in North/South America - it's a good thing, I guess, but Saint Seiya is a show I've never written about, certainly not at Let's Anime, so why my blog would be a good place to promote their appeal is anybody's guess.

Duh. Because it's old and you like old anime so naturally you should do this thing.

I recall you putting that promo on a tape you sent me. I had assumed it was something Toei had put together for a 'sizzle reel' of shows to sell at MIP-TV or other syndication sales venue.

Fist of the North Star and Saint Seiya occupy a similar niche, what I call 'comfort' anime (as in comfort food). There's enough formula and repetition it can carry you along, a LOT of that being the music and use of 'leitmotif'. In Seiya and Ken you always KNOW when s**t gonna go down, right? Just like the TV series Kung Fu, there's crap that happens to Cain that he just puts up with but when the 3 act starts he ain't gonna do that anymore and the kicking of ass starts. Comfort food.

Conversely that makes both anime series horrible things to power-watch. Think of eating 3 or 4 family-size bags of chips (crisps, for you U.K. readers ) at one sitting. Not good.

Naturally you can apply the 'comfort anime' to just about most of Toei's output. Mazinger Z, Kamen Rider...

Part of the appeal of shows like Seiya, with the martial arts attacks repeated every week, or a super robot show with the same combination-transformation sequence every week ("I'll form the head!"), or the Wave Motion Gun powering up and firing, or a magical girl show with the same magical girl transformation sequence every week, is that kids LOVE seeing this stuff every week. They are blocking off time every Thursday or whatever to watch their show, and part of watching their show is seeing the cool part where our heroes "Volt-in!" or whatever. Because it's the 70s or the 80s, once you watch the show, it's gone. There's something to be said for the comfort-food pleasure of knowing your favorite part is going to happen and then watching it happen; similar to why people watch James Bond or Jackie Chan films or eat at Red Lobster; it's a known quantity.

I reviewed a Sailor Moon series for Anime Jump and boy howdy, the repetition of the same sequences over and over again every episode is almost hypnotic when viewed in a big chunk. It's really obvious that it was a show meant to be viewed once a week, not four or five hours at a time.

davemerrill wrote:I reviewed a Sailor Moon series for Anime Jump and boy howdy, the repetition of the same sequences over and over again every episode is almost hypnotic when viewed in a big chunk.

I will neither confirm nor deny that I would get very upset when Sailor Jupiter's transformation was edited to fit the run time while Sailor Moon's transformation would never receive that sort of treatment.

I'm a big fan of all the commercials used to sell products from these series. While I'm thankful that they're on Youtube, I wish they weren't so pixelated. I (now not so) secretly love the Rod Eye Drop SuperS commercial where Chibiusa literally gets pink eye.

there was a discussion I was involved with about weird English promo videos,

How many times does a discussion like that ever come up?...

To confirm, this promo is on one of the official Japanese VHS tapes released for the TV series; don't remember which one now, but have it around here somewhere.

Daniel wrote:To confirm, this promo is on one of the official Japanese VHS tapes released for the TV series; don't remember which one now, but have it around here somewhere.

Interesting...I wonder why they included an English Language promo on a Japanese VHS release.