--- "David A. Tatum" <desaix@sysnet.net> wrote:
Hmm...
Actually, I've been hoping a topic like this would
come up one day. There
IS a classic (?) out there that I recall REALLY
enjoying, but I never saw
very much of it, and I don't remember the title. I
THINK it was broadcast
on Nickelodion... oh, I guess a decade or more ago,
considering where I was
when I saw it (the oldest house my grandmother lived
in which I remember,
which she moved out of in '90, so I gotta figure it
was before then). Like
I said, I don't remember the title- something like
the 'lost cities of
gold' or something like that. What I remember of it
includes things like a
solar-powered trireme, a lot of incans, pirates...
some other things like
that. If anyone could remember the title for me,
I'd be very greatful.
"The Mysterious Cities Of Gold" (original Japanese
title: "Esteban and the Lost City of Gold") was one of
the first-ever animes released to English-speaking TV,
and was dubbed and first broadcast in the early
eighties. (First broadcast here in Australia was, I
believe, the winter of 1982.) It follows the
adventures of a young boy, Esteban, who journeys from
Spain, where he has grown up, to South America, after
meeting a young Incan girl who identifies his pendant
(a legacy from his father in the New World) as an
Incan religious symbol. Esteban goes on his journey,
taking his new friend with him, in order to find his
father and answer a lot of puzzling questions on the
way.
The series introduces a lot of fantastic elements and
takes an extreme left turn in the final episodes to
explain a few things (but I suppose that any
explanation is better than none, and the series is so
unbelievable at that point that the resolution had to
be unbelievable also to fit in). There's a lot of
humour in the series, and it does something I'm
surprised any American sensor let pass at that point
of time: showing the invasion of the Conquistadors
from the Incan point of view. It contains a very great
deal of accurate history lessons mixed up with the
entertainment, and I've found since that a lot of the
portrayed Incan culture is also accurate (such as
knotted strings actually being a coded form of
communication, being used for records and
communications that were meant to be known only to a
select group).
It has never been released to video. People who
actually have copies recorded from TV are in a
minority, and there are several petitions circling
around, asking the production company to consider a
video release. In the meantime, if you encounter one
of theose lucky people who *did* record it when it was
broadcast, don't be afraid to ask for copies. It was
an extremely good production for its time, a great
series, and those people are holding the anime
equivalent of Bluebeard's hoard.
Raye
=====
raye_j@yahoo.com
Member of the Shoujo Anime Proliferation Project Ynstitute
(SAPPY)
If your mind is pure,
perhaps your brain has been washed.
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