Ultra-Nostalgia: Thunder Sub
Aug. 14th, 2011 09:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIn the summer of 1985, my family bought a VCR. It wasn't long before we were recording programs from the handful of channels our antenna picked up out where we lived, and that came in handy as autumn arrived. One of the local stations had long shown cartoons at noon, but now, instead of waiting for rainy lunch hours and obliging teachers providing a rare treat for a classroom of students stuck inside, I just had to hope my parents had remembered to set the timer. In keeping with the times, the cartoons the channel showed were shifting from two decade-old reruns to the phantasmagoria of mid-1980s syndication, and that season they showed a different program every day of the week. Right in the middle on Wednesdays, after Transformers and The Lone Ranger (I looked forward to the former a bit more than the latter) and before The Charlie Brown and Snoopy Show and the "He-Man-like" Blackstar (again, I liked the first more than the second), there was a show called Thunder Sub. It started off in a peaceful future rudely interrupted by the "Death Force," arriving on board "Terror Star" from "the dead planet Gotham," and Earth's last hope was the enormous and eponymous submarine. Something about the show caught my attention, and part of that might have been the actual continuing plot, even if that was tricky to follow when we didn't happen to have recorded the episode that week. However, there was a larger snag...
I suppose I must have been almost the ideal audience member back then: in the right kind of dire circumstances, I could be absolutely convinced this or that particular TV episode would be fatal for the good guys. The reason I wasn't perfectly ideal, though, was that in those cases I'd usually just flee the room, not wanting to see it happening. As Thunder Sub, converted from submarine into spaceship just like the opening credits promised every week, challenged Terror Star and the Death Force officer who'd become revenge-crazed through having kept surviving prepared to head out in response, the fear that he'd surprise the heroes and kill them all kicked in and I left. My younger brother, bolder than me, kept watching, but before I happened to think to ask him for reassurance about what he'd seen we'd taped over that episode. As the fall of 1986 arrived and I was a little annoyed to see the channel change its noon programming to The Jetsons five days a week, I was left with some episodes of Thunder Sub on the tapes we hadn't reused and a nagging sense of having missed out on the conclusion.
Where I had even fewer episodes taped of another show I was interested in, Robotech (one, actually: we took our VCR to my grandmother's, who had cable, one memorable Thanksgiving long weekend in 1987), Robotech did have novelizations and other ancillary material to tell me what had happened in it. I'm mentioning this because Thunder Sub and Robotech seemed similar; for one thing, both of them were bold enough to admit people were actually getting killed in their war stories. As well, I did have sort of a feeling there was a resemblance between some characters in each show. Eventually, I learned why. Just as Robotech had started as three anime series from Japan, so too had Thunder Sub once been an anime series named "Blue Noah." (That explained at last why "BLUE NOAH" was in big letters at the back of the bridge, although Thunder Sub's captain was named "Captain Noah.") However, where people remembered Robotech (one way or another), Thunder Sub had apparently been in very limited release and what references I did find to Blue Noah more or less dismissed it as an unsuccessful imitation of Space Battleship Yamato (adapted into the popular Star Blazers, a show before my time), if made by the less popular people on Yamato's production staff. Nobody seemed interested enough in Blue Noah to "fansub" it; my brother once found videos of what I can only guess was either a Spanish or Italian dub of it, but somehow I never quite got around to watching the file of the last episode to at least see what had happened.
Then, one day, I happened on a file-sharing link to the English-dubbed episodes of Thunder Sub. It took me a while to get around to watching them, but when I did get under way it was easy to develop warm nostalgic feelings. From there, though, I did have to see one reason why people might not be impressed with the show: an awful lot of the time, Thunder Sub seemed able to knock down the Death Force fighters and ships like clay pigeons. Too, a lot of the characters did seem well-adjusted enough to be bland; while it's almost a cliche that those who cling to older anime enthuse about the "burning passion" of its characters, the general mood here seemed more just determined resolve. One exception, though, was what might be called the "token female," Anna, who just happened to be the captain's daughter. (She was never called "Anna Noah," though...) Winding up as a weapons officer on the smaller, more conventional-looking submarine that could dock underneath Thunder Sub seemed an unconventional sort of job for a "token female," and she could disagree with people, to the extent of stowing away on dangerous missions (and not winding up in situations she had to be rescued from for her trouble). While I suppose there were still things about her role that could be criticised, she did stand out.
One previous time when I did find a reference to Thunder Sub had been as a "dub that time forgot," but while a certain sense of caution tends to make me default to the Japanese language track when watching bilingual anime DVDs, somehow Thunder Sub's dub soon seemed acceptable. At times, I was even struck by how it lacked the constant infilling of narration, voiceover, and plain interjection (the infamous "Huh?"s) that have been poked at in Robotech's dub over the years. Perhaps my thought on that matter amounts to that, in adapting Macross, Robotech aimed higher than Thunder Sub in adapting Blue Noah and in the process succeeded to the point of getting into wide syndication and being remembered, but this greater reach may have opened it up for criticism in the eyes of some. At the end of it all, though, I got to the end of the series at last, but I had to realise the joke had been on me for years: the episode I had ducked out on had been not the final but the penultimate one.
In an age where the slightest breath of "localization," or indeed any attempt at translating something to how it might be said by an ordinary English speaker rather than leaving it for an appendix or just plain looking it up on your own, can be a scandal for rather vocal anime and manga fans, I suppose a dub where all the names are changed to inoffensive North American ones (and there's one amusing moment where a map clearly identifies Blue Noah's home country as Japan but the English dialogue is mentioning Hawaii) might be a bit much to get into for somebody not laden down with nostalgia. Even so, I don't regret the experience and "knowing what happened" at last. I suppose I wouldn't turn down a fully subtitled Blue Noah too, but perhaps a dream or two should always remain.
I suppose I must have been almost the ideal audience member back then: in the right kind of dire circumstances, I could be absolutely convinced this or that particular TV episode would be fatal for the good guys. The reason I wasn't perfectly ideal, though, was that in those cases I'd usually just flee the room, not wanting to see it happening. As Thunder Sub, converted from submarine into spaceship just like the opening credits promised every week, challenged Terror Star and the Death Force officer who'd become revenge-crazed through having kept surviving prepared to head out in response, the fear that he'd surprise the heroes and kill them all kicked in and I left. My younger brother, bolder than me, kept watching, but before I happened to think to ask him for reassurance about what he'd seen we'd taped over that episode. As the fall of 1986 arrived and I was a little annoyed to see the channel change its noon programming to The Jetsons five days a week, I was left with some episodes of Thunder Sub on the tapes we hadn't reused and a nagging sense of having missed out on the conclusion.
Where I had even fewer episodes taped of another show I was interested in, Robotech (one, actually: we took our VCR to my grandmother's, who had cable, one memorable Thanksgiving long weekend in 1987), Robotech did have novelizations and other ancillary material to tell me what had happened in it. I'm mentioning this because Thunder Sub and Robotech seemed similar; for one thing, both of them were bold enough to admit people were actually getting killed in their war stories. As well, I did have sort of a feeling there was a resemblance between some characters in each show. Eventually, I learned why. Just as Robotech had started as three anime series from Japan, so too had Thunder Sub once been an anime series named "Blue Noah." (That explained at last why "BLUE NOAH" was in big letters at the back of the bridge, although Thunder Sub's captain was named "Captain Noah.") However, where people remembered Robotech (one way or another), Thunder Sub had apparently been in very limited release and what references I did find to Blue Noah more or less dismissed it as an unsuccessful imitation of Space Battleship Yamato (adapted into the popular Star Blazers, a show before my time), if made by the less popular people on Yamato's production staff. Nobody seemed interested enough in Blue Noah to "fansub" it; my brother once found videos of what I can only guess was either a Spanish or Italian dub of it, but somehow I never quite got around to watching the file of the last episode to at least see what had happened.
Then, one day, I happened on a file-sharing link to the English-dubbed episodes of Thunder Sub. It took me a while to get around to watching them, but when I did get under way it was easy to develop warm nostalgic feelings. From there, though, I did have to see one reason why people might not be impressed with the show: an awful lot of the time, Thunder Sub seemed able to knock down the Death Force fighters and ships like clay pigeons. Too, a lot of the characters did seem well-adjusted enough to be bland; while it's almost a cliche that those who cling to older anime enthuse about the "burning passion" of its characters, the general mood here seemed more just determined resolve. One exception, though, was what might be called the "token female," Anna, who just happened to be the captain's daughter. (She was never called "Anna Noah," though...) Winding up as a weapons officer on the smaller, more conventional-looking submarine that could dock underneath Thunder Sub seemed an unconventional sort of job for a "token female," and she could disagree with people, to the extent of stowing away on dangerous missions (and not winding up in situations she had to be rescued from for her trouble). While I suppose there were still things about her role that could be criticised, she did stand out.
One previous time when I did find a reference to Thunder Sub had been as a "dub that time forgot," but while a certain sense of caution tends to make me default to the Japanese language track when watching bilingual anime DVDs, somehow Thunder Sub's dub soon seemed acceptable. At times, I was even struck by how it lacked the constant infilling of narration, voiceover, and plain interjection (the infamous "Huh?"s) that have been poked at in Robotech's dub over the years. Perhaps my thought on that matter amounts to that, in adapting Macross, Robotech aimed higher than Thunder Sub in adapting Blue Noah and in the process succeeded to the point of getting into wide syndication and being remembered, but this greater reach may have opened it up for criticism in the eyes of some. At the end of it all, though, I got to the end of the series at last, but I had to realise the joke had been on me for years: the episode I had ducked out on had been not the final but the penultimate one.
In an age where the slightest breath of "localization," or indeed any attempt at translating something to how it might be said by an ordinary English speaker rather than leaving it for an appendix or just plain looking it up on your own, can be a scandal for rather vocal anime and manga fans, I suppose a dub where all the names are changed to inoffensive North American ones (and there's one amusing moment where a map clearly identifies Blue Noah's home country as Japan but the English dialogue is mentioning Hawaii) might be a bit much to get into for somebody not laden down with nostalgia. Even so, I don't regret the experience and "knowing what happened" at last. I suppose I wouldn't turn down a fully subtitled Blue Noah too, but perhaps a dream or two should always remain.