Have you ever felt your cosmos?

Title: Saint Seiya

Source: Analog, CD, LD (no R2 DVDs yet L )

Notes: Movies Complete! Based off translations by Ming and Seiya Otaku. Working on TV series and CD soundtracks, dramas, and manga.

Saint Seiya is one of my favorite series. Sublimely cool, it one of the most successful and phenomenal series of the 80s and also all-time. These are the 4 movies, which do not take place in the Saint Seiya storyline (of the manga and anime) but are awesome nonetheless. You do not need to have seen the TV series or read the manga to enjoy the movies (although the 3^rd movie has spoilers to the first TV season). We are also subtitling: all 114 episodes of the TV series, the CD dramas, and the CD soundtracks and their booklets, and all 28 manga volumes (the last 10 of which, the Hades Chapter, never got animated!)

As you might expect, this is the kind of project that will probably take 3-4 years to complete, however, I want to do it so badly. If I can share with you a tenth of how passionately I feel about Saint Seiya, then it will all be worth it.

Basic Plot: Saint Seiya is a fighting shounen anime based heavily on carefully-researched Greek mythology (and Norse and Christian mythlogy in Asgard and the 4^th movie. When the world is overrun with evil, the holy fighters, the Saints of Hope, will appear. The Goddess of Wisdom and War, Athena, has been reincarnated the modern era as Kido Saori. Together, Athena and her Saints have sworn to evil and to protect this world.

The series revolves around five main Saints: Seiya the Pegasus, Hyouga the Cygnus, Shiryuu the Dragon, Shun the Andromeda, and Ikki the Pheonix, and their battles against other gods and those gods’ Saints. But what makes Saint Seiya fascinating (aside from beautiful boys as far as the eye can see, totally awesome music, and brutal hand-to-hand fighting J) is that the enemy Saints have their own motivations, back stories, and are equally as interesting as our five heroes. There is also a lot of drama and character development.

Saint Seiya has had phenomenal success in Japan as well as every country where it has been released. It has been released in Asia under the title “Saint Seiya,” as well as Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal,) under the title “Knights of the Zodaics” and is also extremely popular in Brazil and Mexico. I think it would be unlikely that Saint Seiya would ever be released in America due to its age and length, but you never know – FUNimation will finish Dragon Ball and Yuu Yuu Hakusho someday and will need new fighting anime… JL The French fans keep pushing for an animated version of the Hades Chapter (if you see a “preview” for it online, that was produced by French fans as an attempt to motivate a release), but maybe if Saint Seiya got licensed in America and became the next Dragon Ball Z, FUNimation could convince Toei to make animate the Hades Chapter. Hell, maybe Kurumada would create the Heaven Chapter! (more on Hades and Heaven below).

Series Info: Saint Seiya started as an extremely successful manga series created by Kurumada Masami and ran in Weekly Shounen Jump (published by Shueisha) from 1986 to 1991 and was collected in 28 volumes. Volumes 1-13 is the Sanctuary Chapter, Volumes 14-18 is the Poseidon Chapter, and Volumes 19-28 is the Hades Chapter. I think the artwork of the manga can be best summarized as a cross of Shounen Jump with Ribon. The series is a fighting shounen anime, but it also looks pretty like a lot of shoujo anime. And of course, there are beautiful boys everywhere J The Hades Chapter was not supposed to be the end of Saint Seiya, but Shounen Jump was pessuring Kurumada to finish up the series because it wasn’t getting the readership it used to (a real shame, as the Hades Chapter was the BEST part of Saint Seiya). Shounen Jump wanted Kurumada to start a new series to get more readership. His result was Silent Knight Syow, which did not do very well and ended after only 2 volumes. After a couple more failed projects, Shounen Jump was about to pull Kurumada entirely, a deep insult since Saint Seiya (and works such as Fuuma no Kojirou) dramatically had increased Shounen Jump’s general readership. However, a new rival shounen manga magazine called Shounen Ace (published by Kadokawa Shouten) was started and they wanted Kurumada to help jumpstart their publication. Kurumada dropped Shounen Jump, and started publishing his new series, B’tx, which became very succesful – it was collected in 16 volumes, had a 25-episode TV series in 1996 and a 13-part OVA series.

By the way, the final part of Saint Seiya was supposed to be the Heaven Chapter and while few details are known about it, it was supposed to be about the final battle of Seiya and the other Saints against Zeus and the other gods at Olympus.

Saint Seiya the anime was produced by the famous Toei Animation Company and ran on Fuji TV from September 14^th 1986 to April 1^st 1989. There were 114 TV episodes and 4 full-length animated features. The animated series was originally only supposed to cover up to the end of the Sanctuary Chapter and last 52 episodes, but due to its unexpected and extreme popularity, the Sanctuary Chapter turned out to be 73 episodes. The TV series has three seasons: 1-73: Sanctuary Chapter, 74-99: Asgard Chapter, and 100-114: Poseidon Chapter. The Asgard Chapter is based on Norse mythology and was inspired by a manga side-story written by Kurumada about Hyouga. Toei came up with the idea, and tested out the general conception by screening the second Saint Seiya movie: The Heated Battle of the Gods at their spring animation festival in 1988. The audience loved it, so they decided to make an Asgard TV season. The reason for its creation is that by the end episode 73 had finished, the anime had caught up to the manga and Kurumada needed more time to come up with new stories. While many fans consider the Asgard Chapter the best season of the anime, it actually had the lowest ratings of the entire series. The Poseidon Chapter was able to draw back some fans who had stopped watching Saint Seiya because of the “filler” episodes of Asgard, but the Poseidon Chapter only lasted 15 episodes. Saint Seiya had lost a lot of its ratings from the high days of the Sanctuary Chapter (which itself kinda waxed and waned in ratings) and Bandai could simply not sell the action figures anymore. (Saint Seiya merchandise was pretty much limited to action figures of the Saints, CDs, manga, artbooks, two famicon video games [which sucked L] and trading cards – it was not very aggressively commericalized unlike series like Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon.) Thus, it was decided to end the anime series. There was talk between Bandai and Toei about making an OVA series covering the Hades Chapter, but Toei didn’t want to finance it and Bandai only wanted to sell the toys. Thus, Saint Seiya ended, like all series must eventually. However, years later, a Hades Chapter Image CD was released with drama tracks featuring stories from the Hades Chapter. In 1997, a CD called 1997 Shounen Ki (Boy Narrative) was released, which contained a 27 minute drama taking place after the end of the Hades Chapter.

All of Saint Seiya was released on VHS after the conlusion of the TV series on 22 volumes (well, actually Vol 1 was released 11/25/1988). Volumes 1-12 contain the 73 Sanctuary episodes, 13-19 contain the Asgard Chapter, and the last 3 contain the Poseidon Chapter. The tapes were extra long (Sanctuary tapes held on average 6 episodes per tape, some 7) and cost a lot of money ( about 9,600-10,200 yen per volume.) The movies were also released on VHS, and on Laserdisc in the early 90s. There were also several “best collection” videos printed as well. There is currently no Japanese DVD release of Saint Seiya TV, but it is the 6^th most demanded title according to www.toei.co.jp.

A special message to people who have read all the manga (spoilers) scroll down:

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OK. I bet you’re taken aback by the sudden ending. FEAR NOT. Seiya isn’t dead. While true, his cosmos has dropped to zero, he is still alive. Kurumada was going to write the Heaven Chapter, but no one wants to publish it. You will see with the 1997 drama CD that Seiya is alive and well. Personally, I did think the ending was rather abrupt for a series that had lasted 28 volumes, but it was interesting that Seiya didn’t end up saving everybody’s ass at the end.

Best wishes,

Jonathan

SAINT SEIYA FOREVER!!!