This Christmas I asked for and received the Starman DVD set. For those of you who do not know of which I speak, Starman was a Japanese superhero created in the late 1950s and based on Superman. In Japan, he was known as Supergiant and was the star of several 50-minute serials. In the early 1960s, Walter Manly Enterprises acquired the U.S. right and cut them together into six 75-minute films, dubbed in English for American television consumption.

These were the films I grew up on. I loved Starman — I think I had a pre-teen crush on him. I used to play Starman at recess and pretend that I was a part of the films I watched on the weekend.

Anyway, I watched the first film on the DVD the other day and it totally brought me back. Also included on the DVD was an essay about the films, which is where I gleaned the above information.

Yes, the films are dated and a bit hokey — they were made for children. But they are surprisingly entertaining to this day. Or maybe I’m just a SF geek who like anything with an SF twist.

Nah!

But I must admit that nostalgia does play a fairly big role in why I loved watching that film. I loved the crazy looking aliens from the Emerald planet. I loved the evil look in the alien captain’s face when he’d order someone to kill Starman. I loved the choreographed fight scenes with the mannequins thrown through the air. I even loved the too-long scenes of Starman flying through space and “realizing he would have to risk his life to save the Earth.” What magnanimous creatures those Emerald planet aliens are!

Japanese science fiction, according to Wikipedia, grew out of its technology and mythology. However, it didn’t really get started in a modern sense until the Meiji Restoration, which occurred in the later half of the 19th century, and the importation of Western ideas. Like so many other cultures, it began with the translation of works from Jules Verne.

I remember reading somewhere, and can’t for the life of me find it again, that if you look at where the center of science fiction has been it would follow this path: It got its first big start in the United Kingdom, then in the 1930s moved to the United States, and now, for all intents and purposes, innovative science fiction has moved its base to Japan. I’m really going to have to find that, because I don’t think that is necessarily the case any more, although Japan does have a very vibrant SF sub-culture, most notably in anime and games.

For more information on Japanese Science Fiction and Starman, visit these resources:

Wikipedia: Science fiction in Japan

STARMAN a.k.a SUPERGIANT

Wild Realm Reviews: The Starman Series

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was first published in 1968. You should be able to find a copy of it at your local library, or you can purchase one from Amazon.com.

Blade Runner was directed by Ridley Scott and released in 1982, starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer and Sean Young. You can find more information at IMDB. If you would like to purchase a copy of this movie on DVD, click here to go to Amazon.com.

Some of the names were the same (Deckard, Pris, Roy and Rachel) and some of the ideas were similar (in book John Isadore is a chickenhead who helps Pris, in the movie J. F. Sebastian is a rapidly aging person who helps Pris). But, although the names were the same, sometimes the personalities weren’t. Rachel in the movie was very different from Rachel in the book.

Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies. I like the macabre feel of its mise-en-scene. I like the 1930’s-1940’s detective flick feel. Everything about the film adds to the dream-like surreal mood — the lighting, the camera angles, the music, even the voice over.

The book doesn’t have quite the same feel. The mood is less macabre and more apathetic. Iran, Deckard’s wife, programs their Penfield mood organ to give her a feeling of despair twice a month. People “plug in” to empathy boxes to “become one” with Wilbur Mercer who walks up a hill as unseen tormentors hurl rocks at him. At the end of the book Deckard attempts suicide.

Life in the book’s world is pathetic and depressing. Life in the movie’s world is cluttered, dark and moody.

The movie is more straightforward than the book. The movie follows a relatively linear story where things seem to be, at least mostly, what they appear to be. Almost halfway through the book, however, Blade Runner enters the twilight zone — and stays there for a long time before the reader realizes what is really going on. The whole sequence at the replicated police station run by replicants threw me for a loop. It was very disorienting.

The endings are quite different in mood, as well. The book ends with a hopeless sense of things-are-as-they-are-and-there-is-no-way-to-change-them. The movie ends with a sense that although things are as they are, you can always make the best of what you’ve got and enjoy it while it lasts.

Both the book and the movie approach replicants in a similar manner as well — a way that is different from most imaginings of androids. Replicants are made of flesh — in the book you have to do a special bone marrow assay to tell the difference between real people and replicants. This gives new meaning to the phrase “artificial life.” They are artificial and they are made of the stuff of life — unlike the typical robot, which is made of metal and plastic.

This raises the questions, ìDo we have the right to call replicants less than human? Do we have the right to “retire” them? It almost seems like God destroying its own creation. If something that we create can live a life of its own, do we have the right to take away that life? Instinctively, I’d say no. But that probably stems from my basic reverence for life in general. I don’t condone unnecessary vivisection either.

The book, in a way, looks at these questions. Deckard decides that he can’t retire replicants anymore. He empathizes with them now. The Deckard from the movie ends up falling in love and running away with a replicant. He, too, decides that he can no longer kill replicants.