ROJ Episode 8 Notes

RETURN OF JETMAN

"Lost Souls"
(Episode 8)
Production Notes
by Christopher Elam
© 2003-2010 Christopher Elam

 

These notes are based on material originally posted on July 22, 2003 on the now-defunct OWARI Message Board (formerly http://pub14.ezboard.com/bowari, currently http://owari.yuku.com/).

Episode 8 - "Lost Souls" wrapped principal writing on December 22, 2002. Upon reading it a couple of hours later, my sister Amy (ROJ's #1 fan) turned to me and said, "Chris, you're an ass." This gave me hope that this story accomplishes exactly what I want from it.

The working title for this story was "And One Shall Surely Die", which I ripped off from the comic book ALPHA FLIGHT. Obviously, I couldn't use that as the REAL title, as it was a dead giveaway of the twist ending. I later dubbed it "Island of Lost Souls", after the 1932 film version of H.G. Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU. This was shortened to simply "Lost Souls", a title that refers to virtually every character in the story.

This story is pretty much entirely mine, from concept down to final product. It is the first to incorporate elements from my proposed UCHU SENTAI GALAXYMAN series (more on that later). It is also the story that takes the series off into several wild directions, none of which were part of the original ROJ plan long ago. And it all springs from a basic plot which was purposefully meant to not sound very promising.

The story itself might be a little convoluted, in that it has a lot of plot threads vying for attention. In a more proper context, each of these would have had space to grow and breathe on their own. But you have to play the hand you're dealt, and I felt I couldn't afford to spend too much time on any of my subplots. In a way, this might benefit the story. It is definitely quite the example of misdirection. All I can say is that I tried to have it unfold in a logical way.

• Six months have passed since the end of Episode 7. I wanted to give ROJ a lengthy continuity, but also didn't want to try to write enough stories to fill in an entire year on a weekly basis. So I fudged it a little. This allowed me the opportunity to spring ahead in the Gai/Kei relationship established in 6 and set up one of the main points of the story.
  
  
  
• Shishigone was mentioned in 6, but not seen in 7. Here we learn the fate of this monster and see that being a good guy hasn't changed Green Wyvern all that much. Shishi is Japanese for "lion" and Gone (pronounced "Go-Nay") is apparently used to describe a demon, or some such. It got considerable usage in the series JUMBORG ACE, anyway. I was later informed that a monster named "Shishigon" is in ULTRAMAN ACE, but this is just a coincidence.
  
  
  
• The sequence with Ken and Etsuko was exceptionally complex to write, for a lot of reasons. I had felt that their relationship couldn't possibly be smooth sailing, but I had to come up with something significant to screw up the works. I also wanted something that would allow BOTH characters to be responsible. I didn't want to let either of them off the hook.
  

  "3:00 A.M." was a throwaway that was indeed inspired by the Matchbox 20 song of the same name. "The Black Condor Home Page" came from the fact that many sentai actors have launched their own websites, so why not a sentai character as well?
  

  "Kitty Sugoi" and the nude modeling bit came from the fact that a LOT more Japanese superhero show actresses than I would have expected have posed nude. This is something that you could probably never explore tastefully on TV. Frankly, I expected to catch some heat over this subplot, but I never did. It's worth noting that this development was first hinted at in Ep. 2, then more strongly in Ep. 4 - including the "Kabuki-cho district" reference (because a lot of that sort of thing happens there).
  

  The name "Kitty Sugoi" is just a silly little James Bond style pun. Sugoi means "awesome" and the "kitty" part - well, I think you can figure it out.
  
  
  

• The main plot - children being abducted by the villains for sinister purposes - is an old standby for this genre. That was why I used it. Please note the callback to the Michiru Oshima subplot explored in Episode 7 (or 6 months earlier to the cast).
  

  "Roku-san" and "Goro" are both based exactly on characters from the movie GODZILLA VS. MEGALON (1973). I was a little surprised that some readers didn't get the "put on the red light" gag. This was a reference to the song "Roxanne" (sounds like "Roku-san") by the Police. I admit that MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000 made this connection first, but I think mine is better!
  
  
  

• The Etsuko/Reiko and Ken/Gohan scenes are meant to parallel. In them, we learn that the Reiko/Gohan friendship has taken a not-unexpected turn. We also learn a tad more about Reiko than we may have needed. This was done mainly to contrast who she is with the image she presents.
  

  On a completely trivial but amusing note, Ken's sarcastic term "Fun Fun Central" led me to name my late lamented Livejournal "Captain Satellite's Fun Fun Central".
  
  
  

• The Ogasawara island chain, most famously seen in Toho's DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968), is indeed also known as the "Bonin Islands". That is exactly the kind of pun Ken would never resist.
  
  
  
• The "Aqua Mode" Jet Fighters and Reiko's pitch perfect "quick change" (a very common sentai heroine trope) were two bits of whimsy that I included chiefly because they entertained me.
  
  
  
• I don't know why, but the idea of the Garo with ordinary rifles just amuses me, too.
  
  
  
• Toranza is back, showing an almost disturbing amount of self-awareness of his lot in life as a sentai villain. He even trashes the Roku-san robot! (By the way, I like the character of Roku-san. No editorializing here).
  
  
  
• Miira's "revelation" to Black Condor was something even I didn't see coming. Need I tell you this will be important later?
  
  
  
• Y'know, Red Hawk wasn't always meant to die. When Lewis and I plotted out the original ending, he was a major component of it. Come on, he was the big hero! Of course he was going to win the day.
  
  

  Flash forward to 2002 and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with ROJ if I'm going to revive it. I do know that I don't want to just tell a standard "good guys vs. bad guys" tale. I mean, why bother? Then, I thought back to GALAXYMAN.
  
  

  Remember GALAXYMAN? The keys to this never-written proposal were a couple of aspects that I felt were rather remarkable :
  

  
  1) a Caucasian member of the otherwise Japanese team. I obviously couldn't work this into the mix, but the idea was to do the KAKURANGER Ninja Black angle a bit more radically. I'm fairly positive it would have been "Galaxy Pink".
  
  
  2) a member died midway through and was replaced. Of course, what I didn't know when I cooked this up was that this had been done in sentai as far back as the very first sentai series GORANGER! Ah, to be naive again...
  

  But it didn't matter that it wasn't as mold-breaking as I'd thought in the 1990s. Number 2 was it. Someone would die. But who? The more I looked at the characters and how they related to each other, it became clear whose death would have the most profound effect on the story : Red Hawk Gai Tendo.
  
  

  After all, members have died before. In SUN VULCAN, the leader was replaced. But a leader has never died - ever.
  
  

  So I began work on the series with the idea in mind that Gai was eventually going to die. I wrote him with this thought always in the background, and you might be able to detect it in hindsight. At first, Gai was the least interesting character to me. As time went on, he grew on me more and more as I began to discover the human side of this upstanding hero type. When it came time to write his final scene (which I feel is quite poignant and bittersweet), I was genuinely sad to see him go. Part of me wanted to change things, but ultimately, there would have been little else to say without Gai's death. So Gai is gone and no one mourned him more than me.
  
  

  I will say this much : I was very gratified by the reaction to the story. It was intentionally written to deceive the reader into thinking it was heading in one direction when in fact it was leading up to a cruel sucker punch of an ending. The fact that many readers expressed sadness or anger at this story meant that I may indeed have accomplished what I set out to do. I made them care about the characters on their own terms.
  

 

© Christopher Elam.