The opening scene of each old Monkey episode retold the legend of his birth from a stone egg on a mountain-top. “The nature of Monkey,” shrieked the excitable narrator in the British dubbing, “was irrepressible!” That scene will not appear in the remake, nor will the incident in which Monkey achieves immortality by gorging himself on 9,000-year-old peaches.I love it already.
The old Nippon television version, made in 1979 and starring the heart-throb of the day, Masaaki Sakai, had everything: lavish magic effects, jokes that worked on two levels, farce, fighting and an appallingly catchy theme tune — "Monkey Magic."
Thursday, February 16, 2006
"Monkey" Is Back
A bizarre Chinese drama called Monkey -- badly dubbed into English and a cult classic in the UK -- has been remade. No, I'd never heard of it either. Here's a description of the original:
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3 comments:
Surely the perfect gift for your contributor monkeyboy.
Remaking Monkey? That's crazy. (I have a British friend who has the entire show on DVD.) It's trashy, campy fun because it's so goofily dubbed. If they tried to do it "badly," it would be the worst sort of bad attempt to be campy. It would be like trying to remake...um...the Bugaloos or HR Pufnstuf. That stuff only works because the people had no idea how bizarrely odd the show they were creating truly was.
I don['t want to see the remake but it sure makes me want to see an episode of the original.
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