Disaster Report: GENMA WARS TV
This review was commissioned by @zawa113CJ. Thanks!
In the early 2000s, there was a sudden urge within the anime
industry to take stories from the manga world’s most acclaimed creators and
turn them into shiny new anime for a shiny new millennium. During those first few years of the decade,
there were both remakes and new adaptations of works by Osamu Tezuka, Mitsuteru
Yokoyama, and Leiji Matsumoto just to name a few. Also included in that list was the extremely
prolific (and then-recently deceased) mangaka Shotaro Ishinomori.
The decade had started off strongly for Ishinomori fans. In 2000, Kamen Rider Kuuga helped to reboot the franchise that Ishinomori helped create after a 13 year hiatus. 2001 would see animated adaptations of both Cyborg 009 and Android Kikaider, both of which were successful enough to get licensed in America and even air on TV. It’s no surprise that others would want to capitalize on these two trends by producing 2002’s Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology. Unfortunately, this failed in everything it tried to achieve. It failed so hard that it shut down a studio, ended a licensing deal, and arguably helped to bring about an end to the retro anime reboots of the 2000s.
Genma Wars is something of a lesser known franchise within Shotaro Ishinomori’s vast library of works. It began as a 2 volume manga in 1967, a collaboration between him and sci-fi novelist/8-Man creator Kazumasa Hirai. While the two would never work together directly again, they would continue to produce various spinoffs and sequels to the franchise over the next decade or so. The most prominent part of this franchise would be Studio Madhouse’s 1983 feature-length adaptation of the original manga, also sometimes known as Harmagedon. Today the film is largely derided for its nonsensical plot and lousy dub, but Japanese audiences of the day were dazzled by its stunning animation and Katsuhiro Otomo’s character designs. I have no doubt that the producer was hoping that some of that lingering good will would rub off on this show, despite the fact that the show in question was in fact an adaptation of Ishinomori’s much more obscure sequel series from 1979.
He started off stronger than most of these newcomers did. His first two anime were a couple of OVAs
based on manga by Leiji Matsumoto: 1998’s Queen Emeraldas and 2000’s Maetal
Legend. Neither of them had
particularly lavish animation, but they managed to capture the look and feel of
Matsumoto’s works and were modestly successful. Of
course, Akira Tsuburaya wanted more than just modest success. He wanted a big hit TV series, and to make that
dream come true he needed the assistance of the premium Japanese cable channel
AT-X.
AT-X was another product of the post-Evangelion anime boom, a channel founded in 1997 and dedicated to
airing anime 24/7. By 2001 the heads of
the channel wanted to do more than just air older shows from other networks –
they wanted to start producing their own anime.
They reached out to a number of producers, including Akira Tsuburaya. His proven ability to translate
classic manga into modern works combined with his thriftiness and quick
turn-around made him an appealing prospect, and together he and the channel
would launch the “Famous Writers” series of shows in 2001. This initiative would air ten different
series based on lesser-known works by seven different classic creators, all of
which would be produced by Tsuburaya’s production company.
Alas, things began to go awry with the
debut of its first two shows in 2001: Cosmo
Warrior Zero and Babel II. Neither of these shows did brilliantly, as it was
obvious just from looking at them that Tsuburaya was struggling to stretch his OVA-level
budgets into a single cour of anime. It
didn’t help that he tended to farm these shows out to the cheapest animation
studios possible, ones that struggled harder than most with the tight deadlines
and shift to digital animation. As
lackluster as these two shows might have been, they could not compare with what
was to come with Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology.
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To understand everything that went wrong this show, we should begin with the story. Quite plainly, there’s too much story for 13 episodes. That seems like a rather extraordinary claim considering that the Eve of Mythology manga was only 4 volumes long and it was cancelled before Ishinomori could actually write an ending for it. Yet there is so much to establish about this world from the moment it starts and it has absolutely no time to explain anything beyond the basics.
This show also lacks focus. The first half meanders as it follows the brother's separate paths, taking its sweet time in bringing them back together. The second half feels like it's making up for lost time from the first, speeding through important events like the brothers' fight against their father. By the time the boys go to the past, any semblance of coherence is lost as the story becomes a ten-car pile-up of psychics, anarchists, shadowy cabals, skydiving monkey soldiers, hidden demons, blatant corruption, an nuclear apocalypse that they utterly fail to stop, and a final battle where the boys learn that the only way to win is to refuse to fight. Another cour might have given that second half the space it needed to breath and a chance for the writer to bring those later plot developments into focus, but as we'll see the resources for that were simply not available.
Then there’s the matter of our twin protagonists, Loof and
Jin. I can see how Ishinomori was trying
to subvert expectations with these two.
The two boys are separated at birth, with Loof being raised in the Mah
king’s household while Jin struggles to support himself and his mother. You would expect Loof to be the petty tyrant
who must be tamed by his humbler, gentler brother. Yet it is Loof who becomes the gentler of the two, as he learns to
value the lives of others and come to grips with his half-human heritage. Meanwhile, Jin is the bigger bully of the
two, remaining hot-headed and distrustful to the end. Worse still, the story
treats Loof’s gentleness as a weakness while Jin’s paranoia and willingness to
fight is treated as a strength.
Their character arcs may be a subversion from the norm, but it's a poorly done one that teaches the wrong lessons to the viewer.
One of the more old-fashioned qualities about this story is how it treats women. Most of the women we see in this story are schemers and harridans who exist only as obstacles to be obliterated. There are only four exceptions to this rule:
- Non, the mother of Loof and Jin
- Meena, Loof’s human girlfriend
- Rei, the leader of an anarchist gang who falls for Jin
- Nomi, a widow who takes in the boys in the second half of the story.
All of them are saintly to the point of martyrdom, and three out of the four exist only to be killed for the sake of either Loof or Jin. They also suffer from an inordinate amount of sexual assault, save for Nomi. I don't know for certain how much of it was present in the original manga, but most of it seems to exist only to justify this series being on a paid cable channel. After all, one of the selling points for AT-X is that it has looser standards about sex and violence than most Japanese TV stations. Rape is such a prevalent act in Eve of Mythology that even our heroes indulge in it, as Loof's relationship with Meena and the onset of her own psychic powers begins with him raping her. None of these women are allowed to exist as characters in their own right. They serve only as plot devices to be milked for maximum tragedy, but their lack of complexity and blatant use as plot devices undercuts the pathos of their situations.
The story didn't have to be like this, though. The screenwriter, Shozo Uehara, is something of a legend in the tokusatsu sphere, having helped write multiple series for Toei and Tsuburaya. He also had experience with anime, as in the 1970s he helped adapt legendary anime such as Getter Robo, Grenadizer, and the original Captain Harlock series. Sadly, he seems to have peaked as a writer early in his career. In the 1980s, he was reduced to writing on lesser mecha shows like Albegas and Lazerion. He disappeared from the industry for over a decade before coming back for Genma Wars, only to retire for good shortly thereafter. Without having read the source manga, I can’t judge how good the source material was nor can I say how many of the bad story decisions were his fault alone. What is certain is that he was a writer who clearly wasn't adept at handling stories that didn't revolve around monsters of the week and was far too out of step with the times.
The story for Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology may be bad, but it's the visuals that truly make this show so breathtakingly bad. It is so poorly animated that I felt a visceral sense of embarrassment for the animators as I watched it. From the moment the opening starts to the final seconds of the final episode, it cuts every possible corner known to animation in the name of saving time and cash. Frames often go missing, to the point that many an action scene are composed of still frames and awkward digital zooms. The digital effects are especially egregious, as they are both crudely made and poorly integrated onto the animation. Once again, there are simply too many moments to mention, so all I can do is spotlight some of the worst examples in gif form.
This goes far beyond the usual awkwardness and garishness of the era – this is a true disaster to behold. Who could be responsible for this mess? The blame lies with three parties.
First, we have to look towards the show’s director, Tsueno Tominaga. He has directed precisely two
things of value in the entirety of his career: They Were 11 and Cipher: The Video. Whatever talent he may have possessed
as a director did not survive the 1980s, and his direction and storyboarding here are dire, aimless and confusing. This lack of talent at the top was bad enough, but it didn’t
help that he was leading a team at an animation studio that was even
more broke and haphazard than the one he co-founded.
The second responsible party is E&G Films, an obscure animation studio founded in the early 1970s that spent most of its time working as a support unit for larger studios. Their closest brush with success was producing the first three seasons of Slayers, but this success would prove short-lived. The recession of the 1990s hit many Japanese animation studios hard, and E&G was no exception. Worse still, their reputation took a major hit when their sci-fi Slayers knockoff Lost Universe became infamous for an episode featuring so much off-model and half-finished animation that it had to be completely redone for home video. Today this is an all-too-common event, but in the mid 1990s it was as unprecedented as it was shameful. By the early 2000s they were on the verge of bankruptcy, which meant they were cheap and desperate enough to suit Akira Tsuburaya’s purposes.
The final responsible party is Enoki Films. Enoki is
a production company that often serves as a middleman between smaller
production companies and American anime licensors, so it’s no wonder that
they ended up working with Tsuburaya Eizo on all of their Famous Writers shows.
They were also somewhat notorious for editing their properties to make them more
palatable to American audiences, whether that was by licensor request or
not. Thus, they took it upon themselves to take the more audacious instances of rape, nudity, and violence in this show and censor them with black
shadows, cut them out of frame with digital zooms, or sometimes edit them out
entirely. Why would Enoki Films go this
far on this particular show? John Falco
has a theory. He suspects that they were
aware that both Android Kikaider and
the 2001 version of Cyborg 009 were both airing
on Cartoon Network in America. He
believes that they hoped that with some judicious editing, Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology could do the same. Even if this was indeed their motivation, all their actions served to do was take a show that was already bad and confusing and make it even worse.
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Things would not improve for Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology once it hit American shores. It was licensed by Media Blasters in the spring of 2002, right around the time that the
show was concluding its run on AT-X. In
fact, Media Blasters announced that they had picked up every show in the Famous Writers Series thus far – not
just those that had already aired, but those that were still in
production, thanks to their long-standing relationship with Enoki Films. The staff at Media
Blasters must have quickly realized what a mistake this license was because their release of the
show is remarkably slipshod and would get worse with each new volume.
The DVDs for this show are loaded with errors. Translated title cards for the episodes go
missing in the show's second half, and their only solution was to add a quick subtitle
in some later episodes. Typos are a
regular feature in both the subtitles and dub script (which are one
and the same). Not even the staff
credits are free from obvious errors. The most
obvious sign of their neglect is the show’s dub. It was handled by Arvintel Media Production,
an LA-based dubbing studio who worked occasionally with both Enoki Films and
Media Blasters in the 2000s on literal hentai or bottom-of-the-barrel ecchi
titles like Green Green and Eiken.
It may be the worst dub I have watched for this column to date and one
of the worst anime dubs I have ever watched, period.
Much of the blame for this dub goes to its director,
Arvintel’s president and founder Ruben Arvizu.
It’s clear that he was instructed by Media Blasters and/or Enoki Films
to churn this dub out as quickly and cheaply as possible. I’d be shocked if there was ever more than
one take done for any given line. I say
this not just because all of the performances are flat and wooden but also
because mispronunciations and even random breaths are left in the final audio. While there are some notable LA dub actors in
the cast such as Richard Epcar, Wendee Lee, and Mona Marshall, many of the
actors are total nobodies. Many of those
who appear in the back half of the show are not credited at all, and it’s hard
to tell whether this is on purpose or yet another mistake on the part of Media Blasters. Special mention must be made of Brian Moran,
whose performance as Jin is as terrible as it is inescapable. By the last few episodes, it becomes so bad
that it almost loops back around to comedy.
It is little wonder he would only perform in one other dub before
disappearing from the scene forever.
Genma Wars: Eve of
Mythology was part of what was meant to be the first wave of Famous Writer
releases, alongside Cosmo Warrior Zero,
Babel II, and a weird Leiji Matsumoto
western called Gun Frontier. While the Matsumoto shows once again fared
moderately well, both Genma Wars and Babel II were epic bombs. No precise sales numbers are known, but what
is certain is that these shows fared so badly for Media Blasters that they would quietly cancel the releases for the remaining AT-X shows. Most would not see an English language release until Discotek Media released
them over a decade later. They even
managed to rescue some of the shows that were previously released by Media Blasters. Notably, Genma
Wars was not among them.
Things didn't fare much better in Japan. The Famous Writers shows would continue airing
on AT-X well into 2003, but Tsuburaya Eizo’s dedication to penny-pinching and
speed turned the series into a parade of duds such as Demon Lord Dante and Beast Fighter: The Apocalypse. They would work again with E&G Films on two more shows: Wild 7 Another and Barom One. These shows looked and performed just as poorly as Genma Wars did, and E&G Films would end up filing for bankruptcy shortly afterwards. While the Famous Writers initiative was a flop, AT-X was no worse for
wear as a channel and would go on to continued success in the years afterwards. The same would not be true
for Akira Tsuburaya.
Tsuburaya’s career as a big-time anime producer ended almost
as quickly as it began. His final anime
was 2004’s Space Symphony Maetel: Galaxy Express Gaiden, yet another Matsumoto spinoff that came and went with little notice. He would go back to making terrible movies
for a few years, but not before combining Tsuburaya Eizo with the film production
company Art Port to avoid bankruptcy. In
2007 he and his brothers sold Tsuburaya Productions to ad company TYO and Akira
was swiftly elevated to a vice presidency.
As part of the transition, he arranged for the main company to buy out
Tsuburaya Eizo, but this deal quickly came to bite him in the ass. He was sued shortly thereafter by Art Port
for fraud to the tune of 550 million yen, and since the company was now part of
Tsuburaya proper they were liable for the cost.
It’s unclear what happened in this case, but in 2010 Akira was found
legally liable for 78 million yen’s worth of unpaid planning fees on a 2004
reboot of Ultra Q. While he didn't get away completely scot-free, it's unfair that someone so dedicated to hustling others for money in exchange for inferior product got rewarded with a cushy job entirely on the merit of his family name. I guess that's capitalism for you.
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Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology was a show forged in greed and laziness. It exists not to honor a legendary mangaka’s work but instead to milk misplaced nostalgia for maximum profit. It failed at just about every level of anime production and localization possible. It would not only bring about the end of the studio that produced it, but the beginning of the end for its producer’s career. You could even argue that the poor quality and back-to-back production of the Famous Writers initiative exhausted much of the goodwill Japanese audiences had for these sorts of retro reboots. It wasn’t enough to kill the trend outright, as the next two years featured excellent reboots of both Astro Boy and Tetsujin 28, but the overexposure weakend the trend, allowing it to be washed away in the tsunami of self-indulgent moe that would define much of anime that decade.
Save for the poor souls who watched it upon its intial release, Genma Wars: Eve of Mythology has been forgotten alongside the countless other flops of the 2000s anime bubble. I can't say that I'm surprised by this, as watching this left me flabbergasted that a show so broken could have aired on premium television and sold for $40 a volume. If only the producers had the good sense to look at those first few episodes, declare that the whole show was a mistake, and bury it like a cursed object on some forgotten hard drive, never to be seen again. It certainly would have done less damage to everyone involved.
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