Monkey (TV series)


3=Saiyūki,, is a Japanese television drama based on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en. Filmed in Northwest China and Inner Mongolia, the show was produced by Nippon Television and and was broadcast from 1978 to 1980 on NTV and its affiliates.

Plot summary

Cast and characters

Broadcast history

Two 26-episode seasons ran in Japan: the first season ran from October 1978 to April 1979, and the second one from November 1979 to May 1980, with screenwriters including Mamoru Sasaki, Isao Okishima, Tetsurō Abe, Kei Tasaka, James Miki, Motomu Furuta, Hiroichi Fuse, Yū Tagami, and Fumio Ishimori.
Saiyūki was dubbed into English from 1979, with dialogue written by David Weir. The dubbed version was broadcast under the name Monkey and broadcast in the United Kingdom by the British Broadcasting Corporation, in New Zealand by Television New Zealand and in Australia by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Only 39 of the original 52 episodes were originally dubbed and broadcast by the BBC: all 26 of series 1 and 13 of series 2. In 2004, the remaining 13 episodes were dubbed by Fabulous Films Ltd using the original voice acting cast, following a successful release of the English-dubbed series on VHS and DVD; later, these newly dubbed episodes were broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK.
A Spanish-dubbed version of Monkey aired in Mexico, Costa Rica, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic in the early 1980s. While the BBC-dubbed Monkey never received a broadcast in the United States, the original Japanese-language version, Saiyūki, was shown on local Japanese-language television stations in California and Hawaii in the early 1980s. It once aired in China, but it was cancelled after the third episode due to it being criticized for straying too far from the original source material.

Episode list

  1. Monkey Goes Wild About Heaven
  2. Monkey Turns Nursemaid
  3. The Great Journey Begins
  4. Monkey Swallows the Universe
  5. The Power of Youth
  6. Even Monsters Can Be People
  7. The Beginning of Wisdom
  8. Pigsy Woos A Widow
  9. What Monkey Calls The Dog-Woman
  10. Pigsy's in The Well
  11. The Difference Between Night And Day
  12. Pearls Before Swine
  13. The Minx and the Slug
  14. Catfish, Saint and the Shape-Changer
  15. Monkey Meets The Demon Digger
  16. The Most Monstrous Monster
  17. Truth and the Grey Gloves Devil
  18. Land for the Locusts
  19. Vampire Master
  20. Outrageous Coincidences
  21. Pigsy, King and God
  22. Village of the Undead
  23. Two Little Blessings
  24. The Fires of Jealousy
  25. The Country of Nightmares
  26. The End of The Way
  27. Pigsy's Ten Thousand Ladies
  28. The Dogs of Death
  29. The Foolish Philosopher
  30. Who Am I?
  31. What is Wisdom?
  32. The Fountain of Youth
  33. A Shadow So Huge
  34. Keep on Dancing
  35. Give and Take
  36. Such A Nice Monster
  37. Pretty As a Picture
  38. Mothers
  39. At the Top of The Mountain
Half of series 2 was not originally dubbed into English, but was dubbed later in 2004 with as much of the original cast as possible. The translation and voicing of the subsequent English voice dub is less erudite and humorous than the original effort; and includes some swear words that feel out-of-place in the context of the original. The voice of Pigsy is slurred in parts — perhaps reflecting the age and health of the voice actor decades later.

Soundtrack

The songs in the series were performed by the five-piece Japanese band Godiego. In Japan, the first series' ending theme "Gandhara, which was named after the ancient kingdom of Gandhara, was released by Columbia Music Entertainment on 1 October 1978, backed with "Celebration". This was followed by the release of the opening theme "Monkey Magic" on 25 December 1978, with "A Fool" on the B-side. Godiego also released the soundtrack album Magic Monkey on 25 October 1978, comprising all of the songs that the band had composed for the first series.
The album became one of the group's highest-charting releases, staying at #1 on the Oricon chart for a total of eight weeks from January through March 1979, and it was ultimately the #1 LP for 1979. For the second series, the ending theme of "Gandhara" was replaced with "Holy and Bright", which was released on 1 October 1979.
In the UK, BBC Records released "Gandhara" as a single in 1979, with both "The Birth of the Odyssey" and "Monkey Magic" on the B-side. The single reached #56 on the UK Singles Chart, eventually spending a total of seven weeks on the chart. A second BBC single was released in 1980, this time featuring an edited version of "Monkey Magic", along with "Gandhara" and "Thank You Baby", but this single failed to chart. The BBC releases of "Gandhara" have one verse sung in Japanese and the other in English. BBC Records also released the Magic Monkey album under the simplified title of Monkey in 1980 but it failed to chart.
Masaaki Sakai, who plays Monkey in the series, also performed several of the songs for the series: "SONGOKU", "Ima de wa Oso Sugiru", "Kono Michi no Hatemademo", a Japanese version of Godiego's "Thank You Baby", and "20 Oku Nen no Kurayami".

Legacy

Monkey is considered a cult classic in countries where it has been shown, reaching as far as South America. Among the features that have contributed to its cult appeal are the theme song, the dubbed dialogue spoken in a variety of over-the-top "oriental" accents, the reasonably good synchronization of dubbing to the actors' original dialogue, the memorable battles which were for many Western youngsters their first exposure to Asian-style fantasy action sequences, and the fact that the young male priest Tripitaka is played by a woman.
In 1981, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation debuted the BBC-dubbed Monkey at 6pm on week-nights. Since then, the show has been frequently repeated on the ABC, notably during the contemporary youth TV show Recovery which aired episodes of Monkey weekly from 1996 to 2000. When Recovery was put on hiatus, it was replaced with three hours of Monkey. The radio station Triple J often made references to Monkey and interviewed the original BBC voice actors on several occasions.
The British indie-pop band Monkey Swallows the Universe took their name from an episode of Monkey.
Starting from the 21st of September, 2024, the then recently-launched Freeview channel Rewind TV started airing repeats of Monkey.