From: owner-monkey@valinor.eldar.org (Monkey Digest) To: monkey-digest@valinor.eldar.org Subject: Monkey Digest V1 #1265 Reply-To: monkey@valinor.eldar.org Sender: owner-monkey@valinor.eldar.org Errors-To: owner-monkey@valinor.eldar.org Precedence: bulk Monkey Digest Sunday, January 16 2005 Volume 01 : Number 1265 In this issue: Re: [monkey] Monkey in Newsweek Japan magazine! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 15 Jan 2005 12:33:32 +0000 From: "Howell Parry" Subject: Re: [monkey] Monkey in Newsweek Japan magazine! - --- Howell Parry wrote: >Here's a message someone recently posted to the Monkey Message Board: >-- >On the latest issue of Newsweek Japan, Monkey was elected one of the "100 >Japaneses the world respects". with the artcle, I have found that Monkey is >still popular in U.K. >-- Following on from my message above (sent on Tue 19 Oct 2004) about the Monkey article in Newsweek Japan magazine, I now have the full text of the article, from the author, Colin Joyce. There's one error in the article - the author thinks there's 65 episodes of Monkey, when in fact there's only 52 (probably confused because there's 5 DVD boxsets, each containing 13 episodes - the 13 episodes on the last boxset aren't additional to the other 52, they're already included amongst those episodes on boxsets 3 and 4). [Hope you all had a good Xmas, and best wishes for 2005] - ---- MONKEY To a generation of British schoolboys, Friday 6pm meant one thing: Monkey on BBC2. Anyone who missed it risked being excluded from playground conversations about Monkey's latest battle with demons and watching on the sidelines as his friends recreated Masaaki Sakai's screeching faces and acrobatic leaps. We didn't just watch Monkey. We wanted to BE him. British television in the early 1980s had simply never seen anything as energetic, funny and irreverent as Monkey. "I loved the over the top kung fu action and the fantasy story line", says Matt Sephton, who runs a Monkey website. "It was pure escapism for me as a child. And then there was so much to debate: Was Tripitaka a boy or a girl? What exactly was Sandy? (Some kind of fish?) Obviously Monkey is the greatest, but who would win in a fight between Sandy and Pigsy?" Popular opinion handed victory to Pigsy over the morose Sandy, but it wasn't until the growth of the internet that Monkey websites explained Tripitaka was a boy played by an actress (the late Masako Natsume) and that Sandy was "a kind of mischievous water spirit called a Kappa". Of course the story is based on the Chinese classic Journey to the West but the Monkey we loved was the one invented by Japan's NTV and dubbed into English, with gloriously hammed up Oriental accents. All that was left in Japanese Monkey's frequent squeals of pain (itee, ite, tetete), a sound so strange and wonderful that schoolboys mimicked it as gleefully as they imitated the wave and whistle that summoned Monkey's magic cloud. Over twenty years on, all 65 episodes in English are selling briskly on DVD in Britain and Australia (where Monkey was also broadcast). Monkey is now being rebroadcast in the UK, including 13 "lost episodes" previously unseen in Britain and only dubbed last year. But the true magic of Monkey was that he first burst from his egg on that mountain at a time when the Japanese were portrayed in Western media as a race of soulless, corporate nerds. Monkey taught us differently: The Japanese were joyous, inventive, brave, witty and strong. Or at least one of them was. - ---- - -------------------------------------------------------------------- + List guidelines: http://www.monkeyheaven.com/guidelines.html + To unsubscribe, send an email to: majordomo@valinor.eldar.org with 'unsubscribe monkey' in the body of your message + Need help? Send an email to: owner-monkey@valinor.eldar.org - -------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------ End of Monkey Digest V1 #1265 ***************************** ----------------------------------------- List guidelines: http://www.monkeyheaven.com/guidelines.html List archives: http://archive.monkeyheaven.com/ User name: greatsage Password: masaaki To unsubscribe from the Monkey Mailing List digest list, send mail to: majordomo@valinor.eldar.org with the following command in the body of your email message: unsubscribe monkey-digest To send a message to the list, send mail to: monkey-digest@valinor.eldar.org If you have any problems or questions, send mail to: owner-monkey@valinor.eldar.org For lots more information and news about "Monkey", check out the Monkey Heaven web site: http://www.monkeyheaven.com/