Fabulous Films, out now

Three fallen angels and a young Buddhist monk set out on a trip to spread enlightenment…

It’s a cult classic, it’s been turned into an opera, and the BBC used the characters for the 2008 Olympic Games – yes, Monkey Magic is back. Very much of its time – and should be looked at in this way – Monkey entranced audiences during its initial airings, and when Fabulous commissioned a dubbing of the “missing” final episodes it found a new audience.

Now it’s been released on Blu-ray and DVD by Fabulous after restoration work – meaning the colours are brighter, and the details much clearer. It doesn’t increase Pigsy’s lust, Sandy’s tendency to spout philosophy or Monkey’s arrogance, but then, there wasn’t really scope for anything broader than the original. The action sequences are as spectacular as before, the disco music as… annoying/delightful*.

The extras include a documentary about the dubbing of the missing episodes – and a chance to see the much missed David Collings – as well as PDFs of David Weir’s scripts for the 39 original episodes prepared for the BBC.

There’s nearly 40 hours of episodes here, so it’s perfect if you’re looking for your next big nostalgia binge watch!

Verdict: It may be less enlightened than its 21st century incarnation, but the original Monkey remains enjoyable nonsense. 7/10

Paul Simpson

*delete as appropriate

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“In the worlds before Monkey, primal chaos reigned… Time and the pure essences of Heaven and the moisture of Earth, the powers of the sun and the moon all worked upon a certain rock, old as creation. And it became magically fertile… Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it then came a stone monkey. The nature of Monkey was irrepressible!”

So says the introduction to each episode (of the first season) of this well-loved series, originally broadcast in Japan between 1978 and 1980. Re-written for its English dub by David Weir (who’d previously similarly adapted The Water Margin) the show became a big hit, its distinct style, humorous asides and action sequences being perfect material for playground imitation. The adaptation itself plays fast and loose with the original. Weir (not a Japanese speaker as far as I’m aware) had access to just brief synopses of each episode, so all the dialogue is original to this version. He and the voice-over cast do an excellent job matching the new dialogue to the original performances, such that much of the time you completely forget it’s dubbed.

Paul Simpson has already covered the technical aspects of this release above, but what of the series itself? The story is based on the 16th century epic usually known as Journey to the West, attributed to the writer Wu Cheng’en, although modern scholarship casts doubt on its authorship. It’s a fictionalised and heavily fantasized account of the pilgrimage of real-life Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang who lived in the 7th Century, which draws on various aspects of Buddhist philosophy and beliefs as well as Chinese folklore and fable. Here he takes the name Tripitaka and undertakes to retrieve sacred scrolls from India, travelling along the Silk Road with a number of protective companions.

Chief among these is of course Monkey himself, self-titled “Great Sage, Equal of Heaven” who is tasked with protecting Tripitaka as recompense for his egotistical behaviour which saw him trapped inside a mountain for 500 years. Alongside them are the continually lustful Pigsy and the cannibalistic sea-monster Sandy, plus their horse, who in the second season takes human form. Each of these characters represent certain aspects of human failings and along the way learn (to some extent at least, the series doesn’t actually get to the end of the story) to overcome their base instincts. Peppered throughout are various Buddhist sayings and aphorisms, some of which I still recall to this day. “The beginning of wisdom is the ability to say ‘I do not know’” for example is a lesson I’m sure we can all learn in these didactic times.

It seems to have rather fallen off our cultural radar, but back in the day there was a huge Western interest in Buddhism, particularly of the relatively accessible Zen variety, having been popularised initially by Alan W. Watts and Beat writers such as Ginsberg and Kerouac. Then in the mid-70s Robert M. Persig’s philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance became a publishing sensation, so it’s safe to say much of the adult audience would have been familiar with many of the concepts here.

That’s not to say this is dry, religious doctrine. It’s designed to be fun, with the Buddhist aspects serving as a framework for the fable-like stories. Once the pilgrims are together, the series tends to follow a fairly fixed format, with stories usually involving villagers terrorised by demons, or said demons attempting to capture our heroes, with our heroes learning a moral lesson at the end. As with much action-adventure TV of the day it’s fair to say that any one episode is much like any other, but watched once a week as intended this isn’t an issue. Some of the humour, especially the baiting fighting talk, is a little off-colour for modern times but it’s all delivered as good-natured fun. Pigsy’s handsiness may raise an eyebrow, but his barely controlled lustful nature is the point of the character. Obviously the show is dated, it’s over forty years old, but its ancient setting means that it doesn’t really matter, and the series presents the characters as illustrative rather than literal anyway (Monkey himself for instance is here essentially a man with fabulous sideburns, rather than an actual monkey as often depicted elsewhere.)

Monkey is played by Masaaki Sakai and voiced by the late David Collings, who made the effort to sound as much as possible like Sakai; this is no generic “oriental” performance even if the decision to cast terribly inappropriate voice actors would be a no-go these days, and his work meshes perfectly with the original performance. Tripitaka himself is played by the stunningly beautiful Masako Natsume (voiced by Maria Warburg), a piece of cross-gender casting that highlights the purity of the character, and I’m sure I’m not the only pre-pubescent who was pleasantly confused by this at the time. Tragically Natsume died just a few years later from leukaemia at just 27. To this day she’s well-remembered in Japan, still the subject of occasional calendars and art books. Her strict, schoolmarmish attitude towards her charges is one of the highlights of the show.

Included in this set are the 39 episodes originally shown by the BBC, plus 13 episodes from season two never included in the original English-language run. These were dubbed in 2004 with many of the original voice-over actors, and are presented here in their correct placement in the running order, matching the original Japanese run rather than being lumped together at the end. In reality it barely matters, but this decision will no doubt please hardcore fans. Sadly there’s no extras other than PDFs of the scripts; I would have liked the undubbed “missing” episodes, previously released on DVD with subtitles, to have been included, at least to see what the original dialogue was like. Speaking of subtitles, this set unfortunately does not include them. I appreciate it costs money to create them but for many they’re a necessity, and for a £70 set I would have expected them.

This is far from the only adaptation of the classic text; for example Netflix currently has two more modern versions, one fairly straight, another a modern-day sitcom inspired by the story. There’s also been a jazz opera and a computer game (Enslaved: Odyssey to the West) and animated versions of the characters were used for the BBC’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It’s safe to say though that this is the version best known and best loved in the West (apart from the USA which seems to have never shown or released it for legal reasons), and despite being something of a period piece I found it as funny, entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking as I did all those years ago. Would this engage a modern ten-year old? Hard to say, I imagine the more thoughtful among them may enjoy the fable-like stories and the action sequences really stand up. But ultimately my answer is “I don’t know”, which as we’ve learned means I’m on the way to Wisdom…

Verdict: For many a piece of fondly-remembered nostalgia that largely holds up all these years later, for others hopefully an accessible introduction to a major work of classic literature. 8/10

Andy Smith