Battle of the Planets (vol. 5 & 6) (1978)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Directed by David E. Hanson

Features:

• 2 bonus episodes of Gatchaman and one bonus G-Force episode
  
• English, Spanish, and Portugese language tracks
  

Doc's Anime Warnings:

• Unnecessary introductions of complications during translation
• Stupid chirping kid
• Annoying little Exposition Robot^TM
• Really lame dialog
• Watered-down action

Rating: NR, suitable for 7+

Anamorphic: N/A

My Advice: Huck #5 for distance, #6 for accuracy

The case against Battle of the Planets has already been made quite eloquently elsewhere in our reviews, so I will let it suffice to say that these two volumes offer no noticeable improvement over the problems with the first two discs. The show is still completely wrecked by its translation into English, including the heinous hack-job performed on the original Gatchaman series by the American importer. The silly little R2-D2 clone is still there spouting off expository material so bleeding obvious that it would insult the intelligence of most savants. Never mind that the show wouldn't need a cheezy Exposition-Bot if they'd left the original show intact and just translated the damned thing.

The really mind-boggling thing about the abuse this show suffered at the hands of its American translators is how absolutely unnecessary and unwarranted most of the changes were. The original material posited an evil villain hiding on Earth - secret bases, submarines, cave complexes, you name it, he had hiding places. His schemes crept up repeatedly to threaten Earth with rampant destruction, and the team put them down, but couldn't track the pesky villain down. In the American version, this villain lives somewhere in the far-flung corners of the galaxy, necessitating some pretty elaborate re-working of plots (moving action from Earth to this other planet that looks, from orbit, very much like Earth, for example) just to explain away a change that makes no sense. Leave things be, and you have less reason to muck about with things.

As a matter of full-disclosure, though, even the original Japanese show is pretty silly. Dialogue is still bad, costumes are still bad, but you do get to ditch the robot. And for some inexplicable reason, the little kid on the team has real lines and dialogue in the Japanese version (and in G-Force), but the American translators apparently thought it would be amusing if he merely chirped and made various gurgling noises, so he gets no dialogue in Battle of the Planets. This serves no apparent function except to give the silly robot more lines that wouldn't be necessary if they hadn't made the original character into a drooling mental case.

So even when trying to judge the translation against the original, I can't help but be distracted by the ridiculously stupid choices made by the translators. Snatch expository scenes and dialogue away from the original characters, forcing themselves to tapdance around and add new scenes to explain what is now a completely incomprehensible mess, and then sitting back and wondering why the show never took off. Go figure.

Back to the DVDs themselves - the picture quality is fairly abyssmal, having seen no real effort at clean-up or restoration before being dusted off and transferred to digital. The sound is likewise spotty, with crackles, hisses, and muffled spots throughout. Of extras there are none, except the matching Japanese episodes and a randomly-selected G-Force episode. Despite this, the nostalgic among you may want to pick these up, and I suspect you'd have little trouble finding them in a discount bin somewhere.

For those of you that remember the show as relatively cool, I understand. The filter of childhood memory makes many things seem cooler than they were (Superfriends, anyone?), but trust me on this - let your memories stay the way they are. Having now watched several episodes, I can't believe I was ever simple enough to enjoy them. If you just want to see the squad in action again, I highly recommend waiting on Alex Ross's comic book adaptation due later this year.