blast from the past

I’ve been avoiding watching Saint Seiya, er Knights of the Zodiac on the Cartoon Network.

When I was 13 and the only way I had of watching anime was hanging out with the local university anime club, and getting new episodes meant waiting for the guy who knew another guy who knew some people who were part of a fansub group to mail us a videotape, I thought Saint Seiya was the coolest show ever. Where else could you get references to astronomy, greek mythology, and death matches?

I swear, kids today with their cartoon network, anime network, dvds, and their P2P methods of fileswapping digital fansubs have no idea how hard it was to get your hands on anime in the ’80s! I also had to walk 5 miles uphill barefoot in the snow to get to my anime club every week.

Seiya hasn’t aged all that well, but it isn’t too bad for a show that was originally animated in the mid 80s . I guess it was necessary to replace the original japanese 80’s metal theme song with a bad Bowling for Soup cover of Flock of Seagulls “I Ran” to make it more palatable for today’s audience?

I think that the version on the Cartoon Network has been highly edited, with much less violence than the original show. I’ve heard that they’ve retouched all blood to make it blue instead of red, but I didn’t get a chance to check that out, there was no blood at all in the show I watched last night.