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Knights of the Zodiac - Battle of the Bronze Knights (Vol. 1)
Young men fighting for magical armor so they can defend the world from evil. Calling upon the power of the stars and the elements to vanquish their foes, these warriors battle for right and justice. Sound like an exciting premise for a show? Well, that's the idea behind Knights of the Zodiac, and it is not exciting in the least.
Saint Seiya was a long running anime show that aired in the late 80's in Japan. It is currently airing in the US in an edited and dubbed form under the title Knights of the Zodiac. This DVD is the first volume of four episodes of the edited version.
Seiya, who has trained for six years in Greece, fights an unbeaten champion for the Bronze Cloth of Pegasus. After wining his prize, he heads back to Japan to find his long lost sister. Unfortunately, no one knows where she is, but while searching he is offered a chance to compete in a tournament for a gold cloth. Figuring that this is his best chance to find his sister (the matches are televised and he hopes she will see him in TV) he enters and fights a series of opponents. Other fighters are introduced, and some even have background stories, but most do not. That's about all that happens on this disc.
There was a lot I didn't like about this show. One of the problems I have is that they do not define their terms. You just have to kind of guess what they mean when someone says a bronze knight is fighting for a gold cloth. This lack of precision in the definitions doesn't really ruin the show, but it makes it more annoying. Rather than adding mystery, it just adds aggravation.
There is a lot of fighting in this show, and it is animated rather poorly. The animation is very limited, with as many shots as possible being reused again and again. But worse than that, much of the show isn't animated at all. There are a lot of zooms into a static image, and slow pans across unmoving figures. The fights are often shown in slow motion, and when that is not the case, they put large white blasts over the figures, so you can't see what's happening. Not impressive at all.
One other thing that is bothersome is the way that they edited the show. There is a lot of blood that goes flying during the fights, but to make it more palatable to American audiences, it is colored a bluish green color. Ugh!
The dialog is very simplistic, to say the least. My favorite like is when a sensei, a very short, squat purple man with large ears tells his student to make a waterfall flow backwards. "I'll try my best." the student says. "Do not try your best,' answers the wise old sage, "do your best." Shades of Yoda!
The lame dialogue, inferior animation, and predictable formulistic plot make this a good DVD to pass by.
Note: Just about everything that is described on the back cover of the DVD doesn't occur on this disc. They talk about characters that haven't been introduced in these four episodes and, given the pace of the show, events that won't occur for a good while.
The DVD:
Audio:
The single audio track on this DVD was a stereo English dub. The dub wasn't too bad, but it wasn't great either. The best thing I can say about it was that there were no phony accents. Surprisingly there was some limited use made of the sound stage. The sound quality was about what you'd expect for a children's animated show. It didn't sound full and dynamic, but it wasn't too flat either.
Video:
The show was presented in a 1.33:1 ratio, as it is shown here on TV. There was some digital artifacts present, but nothing that was too bothersome. The print was from the 80's but it looked older. The colors were muted a little making everything look like it was photographed through a very light gauze. There was some grain in the picture, and there were several instances of dirt or spots on the film. Not anything horrible, but not a great print.
The Extras:
The only extra was trailers for other ADV children's shows.
Final Thoughts:
Not a great show. It lacks the humor and pizzazz of Dragon Ball Z, but does have the endless fight scenes. It was a little (okay, a lot) too repetitive and predictable. Unless you are a great fan of the show, you'd probably best skip it.
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