Those of you who remember Samurai Pizza Cats from their childhood will be wondering how this show applies as foreign entertainment. Please bear with me, it is going to get complicated. Samurai Pizza Cats, as it was famous in US and other parts of the Western nations, is a quirky and fun cartoon series about super duper cats who save the world, or Tokyo city at best. But what most of us (and by this I refer to those few who were not initiated into the SPC die-hard fan club) didn't know was this twisted little fact. That this show was a reenactment of a Japanese cartoon series.
Let me explain. SPC was actually a dubbed-over Japanese cartoon show (Kyatto Ninden Teyandee) from the early 1990s. Yes, it was a much loved show about three cats working in a pizza parlor. Their life was not all Anchovy and Cheese by the way; as I mentioned earlier, they made it a habit to save their city (Tokyo) from the evil cross-dressing Prime Minister. But here's where everyone lost the plot, so to speak. Apparently when Saban Entertainment nabbed the means of bringing this show forward to the American audiences, they went a tad creative. As the actual transcripts of the show was not included in series package, no one in the production company had a clue what the characters were going on about. So someone in the company said “Hey, we got the visuals, let's go wild with the audio”.
And yes, that would be long and short of it. The dubbed version of SPC that Western audiences grew up with ... had absolutely no similarity to the original cartoon! This was not a remake or anything of that sort. This was a production company editing out bits of the cartoon and dubbing over a cartoon with their own story lines. How bizarre can it get?
SPC was to its tiny fans what Twin Peaks was to viewers thirsting for a crazy plot line. In fact, many people credit SPC as the very show that got them hooked onto the colorful wonder that is anime. And so, this is one of the few instances, since Frankenstein got the good doctor's name, that a concept was able to breakaway from its very roots and create a niche for itself.
By the way, for those who are interested, check out the two different introductions here and here. The American SPC opening had an up-beat, I-just-had-my-cereal-and-I-need-my-cartoon-fix feel. Admittedly, the Japanese opening is also rather catchy, especially if you listened to it three to four times just to catch a glimpse of any alteration. However, its calmer flow makes you stop and wonder if this show is really about some super half-robot feline heroes. It's hard to explain but the concept of hero-work is my other job seeps through from this intro.