Originally posted by jennytablina+Dec 30 2005, 12:05 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (jennytablina @ Dec 30 2005, 12:05 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>It's this kind of reviewer I have a strong dislike to. So what if a character is a little drunk in the cartoon? It's likely the child wouldnt ever put two and two together and figure this was the case till they were older anyway. Or the parent could discuss the behaviour of the character with them. [/b]
I agree. As a child, I would have thought Daddy Walrus was just very happy about the new year. I'd understand if it happened regularly, but just once in 51 episodes? :huh:
Originally posted by -jennytablina@Dec 30 2005, 12:05 PM
The deaths of some characters in the series are sad but I think part of that is to teach Astro to accept death and sorrow. Plus to depict that both humans (in Denkou's case) make mistakes and so do robots (In DamDam's case), plus Astros own characte never strikes me as dull. In fact his character is the most evolved in the series because he's really innocent in the beginning but as the series progresses he gains a more mature attitude and becomes smarter.
I agree, and Tezuka's world has a balance between good and bad, so the violence doesn't happen without any reason. The message isn't that it's okay to hit people, but that the world could be a lot better if it could be avoided. It's a very peaceful message, that emphasize forgiveness over revenge. While I can see what the reviewer meant by "dull", to me Astro not really having any shortcomings does not make him dull: on the contrary, his purity makes him very moving.
Apparently, it didn't touch the reviewer!
That said, he did note that Astro was supposed to "embody the virtues of selflessness and compassion", so I can't really fault him for the violence warning.
It's worth remembering that many other very well-known characters are built on a similar pattern. Tintin is as pure as Astro, but other characters (especially Haddock) are there to bring the more human side, just like Daddy Walrus or Alvin do. Same with Lucky Luke: how dull is he without the Daltons? Or Astérix without Obélix (haven't read the comics, but that's pretty much what it's like in the movies)? It seems to be a universal recipe.
<!--QuoteBegin--jennytablina@Dec 30 2005, 12:05 PM
BTW Astro Forever, how exactly to they end Denkou and DamDams episodes without killing them in the canadian version? I dont see how you can cover up the deaths of the characters seeing as Astro looks so sad at both episodes end that it seems the most natural thing to assume is that the character did die...[/quote]
I haven't seen the French "Light Ray Robot" since I was a child, but I had asked somebody who had and he told me that the entire scene of Light Ray's destruction was cut, and instead the bomb failed to explode due to a "Christmas miracle". I don't know how exactly they arranged it.
As for Goliath, I've seen it and the episode ends after Astro took out the head off the tank. Elefun asks him what he's doing and he says he has promised Goliath to give him his head back, and he can't break his promise to a friend. So the last scene is the one where Astro flies away with the head in his hands. At least it makes the episode very watchable and still logical.
The worst episode I've seen is "Save the Carolina 3". They were very determined to avoid showing the father being hit in the eyes, and since he had a bandage for the rest of the episode, we're made to believe that the father has been locked in some room instead, and when Astro arrives at the satellite, Gen tells him that there's no time to lose and that he should head for the Carolina 3 right away. So Astro doesn't take even 2 seconds to break the door and the father remains locked and hidden to the viewer's eyes for the rest of the episode, amazingly. At the end, we see Astro heading back to the satellite, supposedly to free the father. It's pretty funny to see how much they tweaked the episode after having seen what it really should have been.
As a child, the concept of censure was totally unknown to me, so nothing ever seemed strange. It was only in my early teens, after having watched again a few episodes, that I started to realize that once in a while, some things didn't make sense... Like how could Bruton transform himself and appear from under a hill in just a few seconds? (he didn't have a suicide bomb, instead they said he had a "transformation device" and thus Bora wasn't Bora but just Bruton's new appearance). Then, when I watched the real thing a few months ago, I first thought "wow, how did I manage to forget that part?" before watching the French version!
I'll never completely understand why some people somewhere felt they had to do that, considering what we said above about violence. I've seen worse in the same time slot at the same channel, like characters losing many of their loved ones, or, in Cat's Eyes, the main characters stealing in every single episode for what is supposed to be a noble cause, even though IMO it looked more like a pretext to generate action. But then that was on the French Canadian channel, and I suspect the cuts were made by the English channel, so maybe that's how we ended up with this version. It's very possible that the "violence tolerance thresold" wasn't the same on both channels.
I don't get it...
