Building a canon: marrying the narrative arc of Gatchaman to Battle of the Planets.

[icarusancalion]

Have been over-commenting in astolat's journal, as she's pretty much the only person to write my first fandom love, Battle of the Planets. As a kid, I loved this show so much, I'd get up--in summer vacation--at 6am to watch

Comments

[tafkarfanfic]

AAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAA! BATTLE OF THE PLANETS!!!!! OMG that was my favorite show when I was a little kid. Now I need to see what the Japanese version was like. Can you expand more on the differences and the narrative arc of Gatchaman?

[icarusancalion]

AAAAAAAAA! AAAAAAAAAA! BATTLE OF THE PLANETS!!!!! OMG that was my favorite show when I was a little kid.

Because it's the greatest!

Can you expand more on the differences and the narrative arc of Gatchaman?

Fasten your seatbelt, here come some posts.

[icarusancalion]

Have you signed up for Yuletide? Because Battle of the Planets is in there, and I'm considering doing my first real Yuletide.

Here's more about the differences in the character arc, especially Mark's.

[tafkarfanfic]

I'm working a lot, like a lot a lot, right now. I'm making time to work on my novel but everything else has to fall by the wayside I'm afraid.

[tiferet]

That hurts my brain just thinking about it. OMG. I was really, really angry when I found out what Battle of the Planets actually was and what they had done to Gatchaman. I have no idea how you'd make that work.

[icarusancalion]

So far it's not a problem. You ignore the silly explanation of Keyop/Jinpai, of course, and dump the 7-Zark-7 robot. And it doesn't really matter if the bad guys are on Earth or from another planet, so I'm brushing over that bit.

Still working it through, but so far, since Battle of the Planets just treated Gatchaman as a mecha-of-the-week and seems to have ignored back stories, I'm using Gatchaman as the back stories for BotP.

The biggest difference is the characterization of Ken/Mark. Gatchaman has a great deal of character development. Ken (Mark) is far more intense, childish, rebellious, and dynamic than his characterization on BotP. But he seems to be slowly maturing into the BotP characterization.

I don't think the BotP characterization's wrong. I think they just did the episodes out of order, and without back stories, so they never knew about the character arc.

So, basically, BotP names, some of the world-building (the bad guys can be off-world, I don't care), and Gatchaman depth.

I'm going to keep a running

[icarusancalion]

However, in terms of the world-building, the series doesn't work with 7-Zark-7. The robot's annoying, I've always hated it with an unreasoning passion -- but it has to go for the sake of the series. You can't have an all-knowing robot tracking everything on the planet and feeding them too much intel.

So 7-Zark-7 is completely erased and replaced with Chief Anderson/Dr. Nambu.

[iibnf]

I was obsessed with this show as a kid. Biggest impact of censorship to me was the Berge Katze - Zoltar character. In the Japanese original, a man and a woman, siblings, merged to create a chaotic, duel nature character, but that was too weird for American kids, so they changed them into a 7 foot tall purple transvestite. To me, Zoltar was totally a trans or at very least gender queer character. Male, with that cool voice, but with loooooooong blonde hair and lashings of purple lipstick. Add the huge purple cat ears and I was in love! Love, I tell you! I just adored Zoltar, and I think my taste for freaky psychos probably all came from that character. As much as the Japanese version is better (kill 7 Zark 7 with fire and acid), I still will always love Zoltar.

(And then, Deslock from Star Blazers/BSY).

[icarusancalion]

I'll get back to you when I finish watching. Just watched ep 68.

OMG, the slash writes itself. And they just finished a string of crackfic eps (rollerskating? Really?).