Gatchaman Crowds: contact point
July 11, 2015 5:34 AM - Season 2, Episode 1 - Subscribe

An alien ship crash lands in a rural area near the house of a young girl called Tsubasa Misudachi. Hajime and the other Gatchaman arrive to handle the situation. J.J. makes Tsubasa the newest Gatchaman. (NOTE: Episode 0 "inbound" should be watched before viewing this episode - it will make things a bit less confusing.)
posted by needled (6 comments total)
 
I've seen this show has turned up a couple of times on Twitter lately. Apparently though it is night and day different from "classic" Gatchaman, known in the US variously as "Battle Of The Planets" and "G-Force."
posted by JHarris at 6:23 AM on July 11, 2015


Season 1 aired in 2013 - I'm surprised people are still commenting now when Season 2 is airing that it's not like the old Gatchaman.

I liked the old Gatchaman when I was a kid, and I like the current Gatchaman Crowds. Gatchaman Crowds is its own thing, more an homage to the old Gatchaman series than a remake, and I applaud Tatsunoko Production for taking this direction. I just can't see how a straight-up remake would have worked (*cough* Sailor Moon).

I am enjoying Gatchaman Crowds for its distinctive art style, the music, and the world building, especially its incorporation of social media use into the storyline. And Hajime's love of stationery!
posted by needled at 11:58 AM on July 11, 2015


I just found out about it, needled, it showed up on my radar like a couple of days ago. Some of us don't track anime with great fervor.
posted by JHarris at 3:16 PM on July 11, 2015


Oh, I thought the comments about the difference from the classic Gatchaman were on Twitter, and my surprise was aimed at them.

Gatchaman Crowds Season 1 was a love it or hate it series, and it looks like Season 2 is heading that way, too. The show has great ambitions, and not always the ability to match these ambitions, but the show remains interesting through its artistic successes and failures. I think that contributes to some people's dismay at it not being like the old Gatchaman, as it's a far more experimental series and doesn't adhere to the more typical superhero action anime tropes.
posted by needled at 3:59 PM on July 11, 2015


Like I remarked in the FanFare anime talk thread, it's a show that you sometimes have to just let wash over you. I found the first series interesting because it's a superhero or sentai type show, but it plays against a lot of the usual expectations that people (in the west, at least) have regarding anime.

Is there interest in a rewatch of the first season of Crowds? Probably at a pace of two episodes a week; I'm too busy to be able to schedule them more frequently than that. Although if somebody else wants to lead it at their own pace, they have my blessing.
posted by ardgedee at 4:17 PM on July 11, 2015


What I think is most interesting is how they're building out the world constructed over the course of the first season. The Gatchaman Crowds universe is a parallel world in which civic responsibility is stylish and there's a casual earnestness among people that's both unreal but realistic. Despite this the show lacks the usual affect of pod people-ness that these sorts of environments tend to display.

It's refreshing to see and I thought the first season played off this premise well: The villains were not the strange and bizarre, they were the seductively cynical.
posted by ardgedee at 4:35 PM on July 11, 2015


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