Saber Riders on PSN
Last week, the first episode of Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs were offered up for free on the PlayStation Network. It originally aired in the United States back in 1987, presumably to cash in on the growing popularity of shows like Voltron. It’s not until these 12 years later that I’d even heard of the show, but that comes as little surprise since it is not any good.
Saber Riders is a localized version of the Japanese Star Musketeer Bismark, another drop in the bucket full of sentai shows. It’s the usual formula: Aliens invade, costumed superheroes go to work, form giant robot, monster-of-the-week explodes…hooray!
What strikes me about this show is how the theme of the characters’ archetypes were changed in the localization process. In the United States version, we identify with the characters by their occupation: The knight, the race car driver, the cowboy, and the girl.
However, in the original Japanese, they’re identified by nationality. In fact, you’ll notice that each character’s costume bears the flag of their nation of origin. So Japanese audiences recognized the characters as the British guy, the Japanese guy, the American, and the girl (oh, she’s French). And of course, the Japanese character was the leader, where the Brit lead the charges for the Western audiences.
Oh, Japan… It’s one thing that we have to water down a cartoon so that it’s less violent for American children to digest. But it’s sours the ordeal just that much more when we have to make the cartoon appear less racist. Luckily that filter has been much more forgiving for more comical cases of racial stereotype, as seen in Punch-Out! and G Gundam.
