"Interestingly, the staff listed as 'writers' on Battle Of The Planets were not all actual scriptwriters. Showing once again what a unique situation the series provided, about half of the people listed as series writers actually had the job of sitting in front of a Telecine machine and watching the event that took place in the Japanese films (Gatchaman). They would write down the action they were viewing, and also jot down the length in seconds of each piece of spoken dialogue they heard. The film viewers did not understand or translate the Japanese, they merely made note of the timing of the words. Once this was done, these transcripts were given to the actual writers of the show in order to come up with a finished script."
-G-Force: Animated: The Official Battle Of The Planets Guidebook, Jason Hofius and George Khoury, (p.24)-
The quote struck me as funny since unknowingly I had approached viewing Gatchaman on Japanese import in a similar vein long before it was released officially here in the United States with subtitles via the nifty new Sentai Filmworks release. You can read about that experience here.
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Oh man, that's classic. I wonder if a similar technique was used on "Speed Racer" or "Ultraman". Some of the dialogue in those series was always suspect to me. It seemed more concerned with matching lip flaps at all cost. Sometimes the cost was bizarre lines.
ReplyDeleteBut yeah, I love how it sounds so close to your experience of watching "Gatchaman" in the raw. ;)
Ha. I thought it was really interesting to when I read it.
ReplyDeleteIt's like, this isn't rocket science. But it completely makes sense.
Anyway, glad you got what I was attempting to put together and it definitely echoed my experience with no English or subtitles.
My roadmap was entirely wide open to interpretation based entirely on visuals. Cheers Roman.