Eagle 5 Brothers (Compilation film)

Eagle 5 Brothers (독수리 5 형제, Dokksuri Hyeongje) is a South Korean film adaptation of Gatchaman II, released on July 26th, 1980 in theaters. It was created as an exclusive sequel to the dub of the original series.

Overview

In 1979, the original Science Ninja Team Gatchaman series managed to be released in South Korea, originating the "Eagle 5 Brothers" name. A year later, an unusual, 70-minute compilation film would be created by the company Samjung Planning as a direct sequel. It would heavily lift from the actual Gatchaman II series but act as a compressed summary of key events (and some rather minor moments), and also incorporate new and different elements for a twist.

Samjung Planning was believed to be one of the Korean outsourcing studios that Tatsunoko Production employed for Gatchaman II, likely through one of their subcontractors like Anime Friend (visible in credits for various episodes), and many viewers consider this to be an unauthorized adaptation. Meanwhile, a conflicting account by the director Kyu-hong Lee claimed that Tatsunoko did authorize the creation of the compilation film, while confirming that Samjung had been associated with Gatchaman before.

Since Tatsunoko did not have any recollection of this production, and in fact was shocked when they learned of its existence in the 2000s, it is more likely that it was illegally made and that Samjung had exploited some sort of loophole. The fact that this movie not only remakes several scenes from II, but also includes a remade scene from the original show and one from Gatchaman Fighter, indicates that they had accumulated plenty reference material by the time they created this movie.

Compounding the movie's questionable nature would be the fact that it has not been officially re-released in South Korea since its screening period in theaters and on the channel MBC in the early 1980s, making it hard to find even as a domestic (if illicit) production these days. Thankfully, due to it having been exported to Italy and Spain (see "International Adaptations"), its footage can be verified through those international dubs.

The script by Ungsun Im appeared to go through shortening and edits over the time that it was drafted, likely for time and censorship standards, as the Korean Movie Database holds records of a 130-page draft that was subsequently shorted to 114 pages, and then finally 100. The production of the movie itself appeared to happen through February 1980, until it was finally ready to be approved by the Ministry of Culture and Public Information for its screening period.

The actual Gatchaman II series would later be dubbed as an Eagle 5 Brothers II in 1996, with Fighter to follow as Eagle 5 Brothers F.

Plot Summary

The leader of Alector abducts a young boy named Marco after destroying a cruise liner. He mutates Marco into his new adult sub-leader of Alector, christening him Gel Sadra.

The Eagle 5 Brothers are busy hanging out at Yumi's snack bar the next day, but overhear rude bar patrons insulting their team and get into a fight with them. Soon after, the team is summoned to their secret base and transform, as Alector is attacking the ISO. Gel Sadra manages to escape the team's clutches, though Cheol departs from the Phoenix to try to track him independently and winds up crashing into a mountainous island with a hidden pyramid. After being helped by a young girl named Maria, Cheol spends time playing around on the island with her until her father arrives, and he then returns to the Phoenix.

The Eagle 5 Brothers decide to investigate the island as Maria's father, a scientist named Dr. Stark, demonstrates his "Pyramid Power" to a visiting crowd. The island turns out to be a front for Alector and Gel Sadra, as earthquakes swallow up many civilians in the generated disaster. Dr. Stark manages to escape Gel Sadra, betraying him, and explains his predicament to the team. The Phoenix uses its firebird mode to destroy Alector's pyramid base, and the team then observe the rescue of the island's survivors. Cheol is angered at Dr. Stark for working for Alector and goes to punch him, only to be stopped by a tearful Maria. The Eagle 5 Brothers watch the two depart, with Cheol upset that Maria remains loyal to her father even after his treachery.

Back at the secret base, the Eagle 5 Brothers watch a news report about their popularity, with Cheol being upset that he falls last in the polls. They are then approached by their mentor Dr. Yoo, and told they must meet with Dr. Stark and escort him to the ISO. Around the same time, the Alector leader has rescued Gel Sadra from the pyramid explosion, but berates him for his failure and gives him his next mission.

The team await the arrival of Stark, but are surprised to see that a beautiful woman named Dr. Raquel is the one they'll be escorting instead. Alector troops proceed to attack the truck they are transporting her in, leading to it to go over a cliff and burst into flames. To Gel Sadra and the troop's surprise, the Eagle 5 Brothers and Raquel have survived the explosion due to taking shelter in her personal car, and they drive away.

Upon their return to the base, the team converse with Dr. Yoo and Raquel about Alector. Once she gets a moment to herself, Raquel pulls out a framed photo to mourn her lost son Marco. She flashes back to the strange meteor that struck the cruise ship, while elsewhere Gel Sadra is told he must eliminate the Eagle 5 Brothers and Raquel.

After another attack by Alector, the Eagle 5 Brothers take off to fight the troops, fighting their submarines above water and then underwater. In the meantime, Dr. Raquel receives visions of her son's face and of a possible location he may be alive. She departs the secret base to head out to Alector's own hidden location in a snowy mountainside. Upon sneaking in, she overhears a conversation between the leader and Gel Sada and enters, preparing to shoot them with her gun.

Alec orders Gel Sadra to shoot Raquel, but upon his hesitation, Raquel fires her gun at the leader's screen. She receives a deadly laser through the stomach, crying out her son's name "Marco!", while Gel Sadra departs the room. In her dying breaths, Raquel contacts the Eagle 5 Brothers through her walkie-talkie. Gel Sadra tries to recall where he remembered the name "Marco" from, but finds a secret file among the filing cabinets.

The Phoenix is summoned to the mountains by Raquel's tip, while Gel Sadra tearfully finds that the file is a video of him as a young boy with Dr. Raquel as his mother. He then sees a depiction of himself being forcibly grown into an adult, and realizes that all this tragedy was caused by Alector. He hears his leader demanding him to fight the Eagle 5 Brothers, who have invaded the base, but instead uses his two-headed dragon mecha to break back into the chamber.

Gel Sadra fires missiles at the Alector leader's screen, intending to destroy him once and for all, but is told that the dragon mecha was rigged to explode. Gel Sadra dies in the ensuing explosion, barely able to realize what his boss had planned for his rebellion attempt. However, the Eagle 5 Brothers invade the chamber next, with Dongwook throwing his boomerang and Changsu throwing a feather shuriken. This still isn't enough, with the boss proceeding to electrocute both Cheol and Changsu.

This strange Alector entity demonstrates that the Earth will be destroyed soon due to his Solar Shift plan, but the Eagle 5 Brothers join in a circle and use their Vortex Fighter technique. The maximum force destroys the leader's screen entirely, killing him as well as obliterating the machine he was planning to take out the Earth with.

The team stand in the aftermath and watch the sun rise, remarking that they managed to defeat Alector but that Gel Sadra is dead, and mourning the sacrifice of Dr. Raquel.

Episodes Sourced

• Science Ninja Team Gatchaman episode 67 (Eagle 5 Brothers fighting rude bar guests)
• Gatchaman II episode 1 (Marco's abduction)
• Gatchaman II episode 6 (Pyramid Power plot)
• Gatchaman II episode 14 (character design of Marco)
• Gatchaman II episode 26 (introduction of Dr. Raquel)
• Gatchaman II episodes 50 to 52 (Dr. Raquel's reminiscence of her child, the deaths of Raquel and Gel Sadra, and defeat of the Alector boss)

The popularity poll scene also loosely homages episode 8 of the original series (with the theme of Jinpei falling last in popularity).

The clips in the opening are outright lifted from episodes 1, 52, and 53 of the original series, along with rotoscoped and redrawn parts of the II opening.

Name Changes

• The team members (Dongwook, Changsu, Yumi, Cheol, and Yongmin), Dr. Yoo (Nambu), and Alector (Galactor) have their name changes match that of the first series' dub.
• Dr. Sugata is renamed Dr. Stark.
• Yukari is renamed Maria.
• Dr. Pandora is renamed Dr. Raquel.
• Dr. Raquel's child is a son named Marco, rather than a pointedly gender-ambiguous child named Sammie.

Foreign dubbing

The Italian dub, perhaps to simplify things, only referred to the team members by their Bird Style names (Eagle, Condor, Swan, Swallow, and Owl), and this persisted when it was sourced for the dubbing in Spain. The leader of Alector was also renamed Alec.

Differences in Plot, Footage, and Character Designs

Although various differences can already be seen in the plot summary vs. the episodes of II, there are also notable visual changes to be witnessed in the compilation film.

Design Alterations

• Raquel's missing son Marco is depicted as a brunet and somewhat older than the blond toddler that Sammie Pandora was. This is due to the fact that the appearance of Marco was sourced from Benny Borg from episode 14 of II, with the character design being altered in giving him brown hair. This results in this child appearing to be somewhat taller and older than Sammie was in the original footage, and his transformation is changed accordingly to limit the angles shown of a young boy developing into a grown man.
• Gel Sadra's lips are colored white, rather than there being lipstick. The unmasked Gel Sadra, due to the change above, is shown to be a man with a large square jaw and much shorter blond hair than the original unmasked form. He is made out to be an unambiguous male character, vs. the original Gel Sadra being set to be a "half-yin, half-yang" human being of ambiguous sex and gender presentation. Rather than the default brown eyes one would expect from a Gel Sadra, he has the blue-violet eyes and purple eyeshadow that the original was briefly seen to have in episode 51.
• Maria has her hair colored brown instead of the deep blue hair that Yukari had, and her tunic is turquoise colored instead of pink.
• Dr. Raquel wears a long, low-cut pink dress with slits up the side of the skirt and a cut-out in the back, instead of the corresponding blue dress and cravat Pandora wore in the equivalent scenes. The shades of pink, interestingly enough, bring it in line to the concept art by Akemi Takada of Pandora's spy suit, which was to originally be pink with lighter accents.

Plot Alterations

• A further bait-and-switch element to Dr. Raquel's introduction is added, in which the team search for the Dr. Stark they were sent to escort (and who appeared in the Pyramid Power scheme), only to find out that Raquel came recommended by Stark. Raquel also tells Cheol that Maria sends her regards, getting him happy to hear of the girl again.
• Due to the truncation of the mother and son plot from the last few episodes of II, the Eagle 5 Brothers never find out the connection between Dr. Raquel and Gel Sadra, and Gel Sadra's redemption is limited to him attempting to kill the Alector leader but perishing in the Demon Dragon explosion.
• The plot being incredibly compressed also would mean that Changsu may not be a cyborg in this compilation version, and his own screen-time is limited along with other members like Yumi and Yongmin. This plays a part in the final Alector defeat being changed to lack any attempt of Changsu taking the leader out with a Micro Space-Bomber, and instead it amounting to a full team effort.
• Dr. Yoo's role is also incredibly limited due to this compression, with him mainly serving to get the team to investigate the island with the pyramid power and for them to later escort Dr. Raquel back to their secret base.
• The playtime sequence between Maria and Cheol is extended, to have him taking her for a flight in the sky as well as imagining himself as Peter Pan protecting Maria from Captain Hook. The two also seem to have more of a childish puppy-love dynamic, than how Yukari had seen Jinpei as a "big brother" type.
• Since there is no gender ambiguity intended with Gel Sadra or any special chromosomes setting, such a reference to why the leader of Alector would even select Marco is not present here.
• There is an unusual, isolated moment of Changsu and Yumi winking and flirting at each other during an Alector battle, perhaps as a way for the screenwriter to have hinted at a connection between the two. Otherwise, it remains a random scene that does not have any follow-through.

Production Staff

• Director: Kyu-hong Lee (이규홍)
• Screenplay: Ungsun Im (임 웅순)
• Edited by: Samjung Planning (삼정기획)
• Producer: Seokjoo Yang (양석 주)

Soundtrack

The movie notably plagiarizes some Western music for its soundtrack, with two songs identified:

• The James Bond Theme by Roland Shaw and his Orchestra (1966)
• Bloodsucker by Mandingo (1973)

Audio Drama

Viewers of the movie also can recall an audio drama adaptation that was made of the plot and offered on cassette tape; this media is considered to be even rarer to find.

While the story follows the same beats, the names of Marco/Gel Sadra were changed to Minho/Mintsky.

Manhwa tie-in

A two-volume manhwa adaptation based off the script by Ungsun Im, with illustrations by So-fung Lee , was published in the 1980s as a "full-length cartoon movie manhwa". The cover would highlight Eagle 5 Brothers as being a program not just of TBC, but also of the network AFKN.

As with the compilation film, Gel Sadra is depicted as a man although his hair is now inked in black. Other visual changes follow closely, such as Dr. Raquel's low-cut dress.

International Adaptations

Italy

This film was split down into individual episodes for the 1983 Italian anthology program The Ten Magnificent Heroes, in which the source materials being dubbed were all various South Korean "mockbusters" divided into two or three portions each.

The Eagle 5 Brothers-sourced episodes would air under the title Five Stars. The team in this localization is referred to as the Eagle Squadron, which carries over to the Spanish dub below.

The Eagle 5 Brothers opening theme is kept in the film master, although the theme for The Ten Magnificent Heroes can be heard playing at the end, which also is reflected in the Spanish dub releases. This source dub also added more music, likely in an attempt to assist with sound replacement where voiceless audio wasn't available. These songs were by the Italian band The Balestra Brothers, and included the compositions of "Annamaria" and "Weekend".

One episode of the TV version can be confirmed to have been released on VHS, covering the Pyramid Power part of the film, under the title The Energy of the Atomic Pyramid.

Spain

Shortly after the Italian release, the works making up The Ten Magnificent Heroes would be imported over to Spain but in their original, pre-TV episode length masters.

It was first released under the Five Stars name, as well as an extended name of "The Five Stars of the Eagle" (Las Cinco Estrellas del Aguila), although later VHS and DVD re-releases would offer other alternate titles such as "Space Heroes" (Heroes del Espacio), "Space General Hero", and "The Five Star Combat Group".

Links

• Summary of the "Eagle 5 Brothers" film and screencap comparisons of the Korean rotoscoped footage vs. the Tatsunoko original (Korean).
• Another article explaining the history of the film (Korean).
• "Eagle 5 Brothers" movie documentation at KMDB (Korean)