Hokuto no Ken Episode 23
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Chapter 2 Begins: The Tumultuous Dragon and Tiger! Are Battles All That Await Me!!
-From Rage Quitter 87's Fist of the North Star site


For a detailed overview of this episode, click here.

Kenshiro meets a female village leader called Mamiya, whilst the master of Nanto Suicho Ken hunts down the man with seven scars.
Original broadcast date: March 28th 1985

Contents
1) Synopsis
2) In the manga...
3) Notes
4) Errors





Synopsis

With both Yuria and Shin dead, Kenshiro isn't sure what to do next. He is taking a break with Bat and Lin when Bat sees a large explosion in the distance. They go and check it out and see a group of guys known as the Fang Clan attacking a truck full of food. Ken defeats them and the truck drivers explain how to get back to their village. The village elder meets Ken and gives them a tour of the place, and Ken also meets the leader of the village: Mamiya, a woman who resembles Yuria, much to Ken's surprise.

The Fang clan then attack the village, wanting revenge on Kenshiro for humiliating them earlier. However, Kenshiro defeats them again, and this time kills them. Mamiya asks Ken to stay in the village to help them fight off evil, but Bat wants to make a deal first -he is Ken's manager after all. Outside the village, a Fang Clan member called Kemada has seen that his allies have been slaughtered and promises to avenge them.

Later on, in another village, a woman runs away from a group of punks chasing her. However, this woman turns out to actually be a man called Rei, a master of Nanto Suicho Ken (South Star Waterfowl Fist). He promptly kills the four punks, and takes the food they were carrying, revealing why he lured them out of the village to begin with. As he starts to eat, he thinks about how until he kills the man with seven scars, he would even eat mud to survive.



In the manga...

-A good chunk of this episode is filler, needed to bring the story back in line with the manga. In the manga, the scene with Rei's debut appearance takes place right after the death of Devil Rebirth. After this happens, the next scene shows Ken returning to Johnny's bar, where Bat and Lin tell him about a man who has agreed to look after Toyo's kids in return for him helping them defeat the Fang Clan. This man is the elder of Mamiya's village. He takes them back to his village and Mamiya makes her first appearance to Ken there. In the anime, however, we have a completely different opening scene where Ken meets the Fang clan for the first time, and gets to Mamiya's village thanks to saving those two guys in the truck. Then he gets introduced to the village elder, and then finally he meets Mamiya.

-The village elder looked quite a bit like Obi-Wan Kenobi from the (good) Star Wars movies in the manga, and often has his hood up. He looks a little less like him in the anime, but the resemblance is still there.

-In the anime, there is a kid in the village without a shirt on who helps defend the place. This is Ko, Mamiya's brother. He is never introduced by anyone in the episode, and he doesn't appear in the manga at this point -he gets a proper introduction in both medias later.

-Rei has dark hair in the manga. It was changed to bright green for the anime. This would be the start of Toei Animation's hair color changing tactics, something they'd do to a few other characters.

-The punk with nunchaku tells his men to attack in the manga, whilst telling them to wait in the anime.



Notes

-Chapter 2 episodes have a slightly altered intro sequence. There is a new sequence at the start featuring Ryuken (the previous master of Hokuto Shinken) along with several other edits which involve removing shots of Shin and replacing them with shots of some of the new characters introduced in this chapter.



Errors

-At one point in this episode, there is a first person view of a Fang Clan member dying, with the last thing he sees being Kenshiro. The effect for this seemed to be achieved by the drawing of Kenshiro being moved around the background, it looks awful.

-I wouldn't usually count bad animation as an error, but damn, that is some downright nasty animation when Rei avoids the punk's nunchaku.

-The silhouette of Kenshiro at the end of the episode has only six scars instead of seven.






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