Hi all!
Good ol' Devil Stars, one of the many special squads within the Gallactor organization. I wrote about them in an article on those various groups for the 2005 GatchaCon fanzine. Here's what I said:
Devil Stars
(In Gatchaman episodes 31, 66, 78, and 81, the Gatchaman feature film, and Gatchaman II episodes 13, 16, and 38)
Gallactor's all-female assassination team, they are also known as the Lady Ninjas. The Devil Stars work under orders from either Berg Katse of the Lady Captain. They are used to eliminate people considered dangerous to Gallactor, or Gallactor members who betray the organization. They normally dress in jumpsuits with face masks and wigs, but if their mission requires that they work at night, they have been known to wear dark bodysuits and full-head masks. Their loyalty to Gallactor is absolute, and they will readily sacrifice their lives to complete their mission.
The Devil Stars are trained in infiltration and disguise, as well as in explosives and demolition. While they have training in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, they usually rely on weapons during combat. They regularly carry knives and rifles, as well as Ring Bombs, small but powerful explosives that they carry on their hands like rings. These bombs can be thrown in rapid succession at targets. The weapons they are most noted for are their Rose Bombs, which look like ordinary roses, but have an explosive at the end of their stem. The Devil Stars usually throw these rose bombs at their targets like darts.
Despite their popularity among fans, the Devil Stars actually made very few appearances in the series. Only two of those times, in episode #'s 31 and 66, did they confront the Science Ninja Team. All their remaining appearances were relegated to flashbacks to the death of Joe's parents. Important, to be sure, but if it hadn't been for their connection to Joe, we'd have only seen them twice.
It's probably no great surprise, but they were not a concept that was originally planned for the series, though they did come along not too long after production started. Looking back to the series Planning Establishment, there is mention that the third episode of the series was to be "Dr. Nambu Assassination Plan," in which Nambu's home is destroyed.
When the series went into production, this story idea ended up as the 7th episode in the pipeline. In this scenario draft of the story, the Devil Stars are not referred to as such. Instead, they are referred to only as "Gallactor's beautiful ladies." The only descriptions the scenario has for them are that they are, "...five glamorous ladies wearing ultra-mini hot pants...," and that, "They are beautiful ladies with blond hair, red hair, chestnut hair, black hair, and silver hair."
In that story, the "beautiful ladies," led by the "Blond Lady Captain," made several attempts to kill Nambu, including blowing up his car with a rocket (Which killed a Nambu stand-in instead), trying twice to shoot him with a rifle from a tree outside his home (Killing another stand-in in the first attempt, and being caught by Ken and Jinpei in the second), and planting a powerful explosive inside of Nambu's cat, Elizabeth (The explosion of which destroys Nambu's villa). In the end, all of the beautiful ladies are killed by the Firebird when they attack the God Pheonix.
By the way, that scenario does include the Devil Star, but only as the name of a pair of different sized starfish-shaped mecha. The smaller vehicle, esentially the Devil Star vehicle we're used to seeing in the series, was called the Devil Star S. As a matter of fact, if you look at the model sheets for the Devil Star, you'll notice that they are all labeled "Devil Star S."
In the scenario, the Devil Star S had a much, much larger cousin, described as a "gigantic starfish saucer," called the Devil Star K. The Devil Star K was supposed to be large enough to hold 9 of the Devil Star S, which is what the beautiful ladies were to have used in their fatal attack on the God Phoenix.
As originally intended, the story was interesting, filled with a lot of action, but would have become simply another action story without the depth that came to it later. And using Nambu's cat as the delivery system for an explosive was, in a word, icky.
Obviously the Tatsunoko staff felt the story needed some changes as well, since it got pushed back far enough to become the 31st episode of the series. In the meantime, the notion that Joe's parents had been killed by Gallactor had been added to the mix (Thanks to Joe mentioning this in episode #18), and they obviously decided to expand upon that throwaway line, giving us the connection between Joe and the Devil Stars. The story for episode #31 became much stronger because of it.
James
This post has been edited 3 time(s), it was last edited by tatsunokofan on 28-04-2009 at 01:22.
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