Battle of the Planets Card Game
As space is so limited around here (kind of like money) I tend to not buy a lot of Battle of the Planets stuff these days, unless it’s a) Cheap and b) features Zoltar or his Spectra goons.
This Japanese card game checked both of those boxes, it’s got my favourite transgendered villain on the box and it only cost me $10.
Inside features the Spectra goons to boot! I kind of want to see all the cards but seeing as I’ll never figure out how to play this came I may just let them remain sealed.
Hi – I'm not an expert but I believe what you have here is a Japanese-vocabulary training card set for young children, to help teach them the Japanese language. A similar set can be seen here:
http://blog.beforemario.com/2013/11/nintendo-iroha-karuta-part-1.html
I'd also just like to point out that I'm not certain Zoltar *strictly* counts as transgendered; in the original "Gatchaman" (spoiler alert!) he could actually change gender at will…!
Yeah, I just don't know what I'd call Zoltar otherwise.
Thanks on the intell, I've seen other versions of these cards but just largely assumed they were a game of sorts.
Heh, Zoltar confused the hell out of me as well when I first saw the infamous episode where his flowing blonde locks are revealed – it was literally decades before I found out the answer to that one!
I think the cards are intended as a game of sorts as well, I guess like modern-day "educational" software…?
Japanese has three seperate alphabets.
Kanji – which are the complex symbols that can mean entire words or concepts
Katakana – which is a phonetic alphabet that is designated for foreign/non-Japanese words only
And Hiragana which is a phonetic alphabet for all Japanese words.
The larger symbols appear to be Katakana, with their Hiragana counterparts in smaller text beside it.
So the upper left card, reads from top to bottom, GaTsuChiYaMaN, or Gatchaman. The Next word is Japanese as it's in Hiragana and reads WaReRaNo, which I'm not sure what it means. Then the third word is IKuZo.
The second lower card reads GiYaRaKuTa, then SeMaRu, then UShiRoNi. These are all Hirigana so they're Japanese words.
Funky Japanese English loan word names (Gatchaman, Go-Lion, et al.) are funny.
I guess you could say "Shogun Warriors" was America doing the same, but "shogun" was already a known word in English, and "warrior" explained all we needed to know.
It would be the same if "Thunder Cats" had been "Kaminari Neko", and nobody particularly cared what that meant.