A piece of nostalgia at a decent price by Tyler Hill (All reviews)
6/01/2002
I have to admit right of the bat, I'm a bit of a fanboy when it comes to Battle of the Planets. I grew up watching this cartoon, among others, and it had a significant influence upon my moldable imagination. Having wanted the release of the series for some time now, I find myself grinning with glee at the pleasure of watching these programs once again.
If you are unfamiliar with the Battle of the Planets series, here follows a brief explanation. A cartoon by the name Gatchaman was purchased for distribution by Sandy Frank out of the United States in the late '70's. The content was deemed a bit too violent and some of the subject matter a bit too complex for the average viewer. Thus arose their decision to highly edit the content of Gatchaman. In doing so, they had to make up time in the program to fill the edited holes. The Creation of a new character, 7-Zark-7, was to supply the needed time filler and allow for a bit plot manipulation through the use of him as the narrator. Gatchaman had 105 half hour episodes that were cut down to make 85 Battle of the Planets episodes. Turner Entertainment created a new version of the show called G-Force around the late eighties. G-Force uses mostly the same episodes as BofPs with a few exceptions.
"Battle of the Planets: Volume Five" follows the same content format as the previous volumes of the Battle of the Planets DVD series. There are two Battle of the Planets episodes as well as their original Gatchaman counterparts. A single bonus G-Force episode gives yet again a re-tooled version of an original Gatchaman episode in English, Spanish and Portuguese with different character names but maintains closer plot ties to the original.
Volume Five contains the episodes, "The Jupiter Moon Menace" episode 9 and "A Swarm of Robot Ants" episode 10. The Gatchaman episodes are entitled, "A Demon from the Moon" (eps.9) and "The Big Battle of the underground Monsters" (eps. 10). The G-Force episode is "Phantom Fleet" originally found as a BotP episode in Volume three named "Ghost Ship of Planet Mir" (eps. 5) and The Gatchaman episode "The Ghost Fleet From Hell" (eps. 5)
Video
The prerequisite disclaimer can once again be found on the reverse of the DVD case explaining that "This DVD contains technical anomalies inherent in historic footage". This is a broad disclaimer to cover the fact that some of the footage may appear darker than usual, water marks may exist, or harsh edits may have been used to skip over a problem areas. That said, I haven't found any problems so glaring as to upset me. I'm sure they had a hard time getting the footage to a presentable form in the first place. A visible difference can be seen between the Gatchaman original and the BotP episodes with the BotP appearing a bit darker. Before the advent of digital media, a bit of generation loss is a natural result to a reproduced version of a show. The quality being archival in nature calls for significant relaxing of our usual standards of the DVD format. The fact that a digital copy can now sit on your shelf for viewing at anytime should be enough to excuse some flaws.
Audio
The standard audio format for the volumes applies here once again. The BotP audio exist in two formats; a 5.1 surround and a mono signal. The DVD case states a 2.0 English but the menu in the audio selection states mono. So in this case it is a dual mono, as opposed to a stereo 2.0. The Gatchaman are in Japanese with the option of English subtitles. The G-Force comes with three audio selections English, Spanish, or Portuguese of Brazilian dialect.
As far as I'm concerned, the decision to go with the two BotP and two Gatchaman episodes makes the series worth collecting. A previous Gatchaman release had me question whether I would collect the original series to see what was taken out, or would I collect the BotP episodes for the 7-Zark-7 segments and the voices. Of course this was answered for me as I can collect both at once. The dilemma now being once the BotP series has finished there are more episodes of Gatchaman to be had. The Inclusion of The G-Force episode is nice, if not only round out the DVD, but I'm sure not very much extra material exists this long after their original release. Since there is only one G-Force episode per release, the episode does not match any of the others on the disc. That is nice benefit if you only plan to purchase certain volumes.
Summary
As a fan of the series I love the inclusion of the original Gatchaman episodes along side the BotP episodes. We can finally get a chance to see what was edited and how the story was manipulated to cater to us fragile Westerners. A must for any fan of the series, in any form, from either side of the Pacific.
