Hokuto no Ken episode 23
Chapter 2 Begins:
The Tumultuous Dragon and Tiger!
Are Battles All
That Await Me!!
-From RQ87's Fist of the North Star site
Hokuto no Ken episode 23 |
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For a detailed overview of this episode, click here.
Kenshiro meets a female village leader called Mamiya, whilst the master of the South Star waterfowl fist hunts down the man with seven scars.
Original broadcast date: March 28th, 1985
Contents
1)
Synopsis
2) Manga differences
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. Kenshiro defeats them, and the truck drivers explain how to get back to their village. The village elder meets Kenshiro and gives them a tour of the place, and Kenshiro also meets the leader of the village: Mamiya, a woman who resembles Yuria, much to Kenshiro'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 Kenshiro to stay in the village to help them fight off the Fang clan, 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.
-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 Kenshiro 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 Kenshiro there. In the anime, however, we have a completely different opening scene where Kenshiro 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 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 forms of media 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.
-This is the first episode of chapter two. The pre-intro sequence has been completely changed. Previously, it talked about the nuclear war, but now, it talks about the North Star divine fist. It also features Ryuken, Kenshiro's master.
-The intro sequence has been changed a bit. It mainly removes some shots of Shin (although one remains in there) and replaces them with some new characters, who'll be introduced in this chapter. Click here for full details of the changes.
-The credits sequence has also been slightly altered -near the end of it, some pictures have been replaced with animations of Yuria falling to her death. Click here for the full details.
-Previously, several different voice actors were used to narrate the next episode preview segments. But from this episode and onwards, Shigeru Chiba narrates them all.
-Some of the clips taken from the previous episode have some differences to what they originally looked like -click here for more details.
-This episode features a lot of reused animation. The most blatant is a shot of Mamiya blasting her flamethrower, which gets used 4 times in 20 seconds! Some of the Fang clan getting hit are seen more than once, and the animations of some of them dying are actually recycled from the first episode.
-This episode is also infamous for two bits of lackluster animation. The first is the final Fang clan guy Kenshiro kills -there is a first person view of him 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. Then later on, near the end, there's this animation of Rei "dodging" the punk's nunchaku. It does not look good.
-During this shot, Mamiya's red sleeves are missing.
-The silhouette of Kenshiro at the end of the episode has only six scars, instead of seven.
