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So, this being a Dragon Quest Guild with it's fair share of music nuts, I thought I would share a discovery I made about Koichi Sugiyama's early career a while back, especially now that I actually have a soundtrack to point to.

I am not an anime or manga fan on the whole, but there are a few series that I really like. One of my absolute favorite series is Cyborg 009, a series that was created in the 60's by Osamu Tezuka's protege, Shotaro Ishimori, who also created Kamen Rider, among other things. Cyborg 009 is credited as Japan's first super team, and combined with Kamen Rider and Himitsu Sentai Goranger, Ishimori is credited with the creation of the Super Sentai genre. Cyborg 009 has seen quite a few movies and anime adaptions over the last half-century, being the influential Japanese cult classic that it is. I watched the 2001 adaption every day when I was a preteen, and I like to think it influenced some of my tastes a bit, including giving birth to my love of retro anime styles. And now that I am older and the internet is now the information goldmine that it is, I have become fascinated with the series' history and influence, in addition to just being a fan.

Now where does Sugiyama come into the picture? Well, you may know that before he began to work on Dragon Quest, Sugiyama produced commercial jingles. And one of his earlier jobs just so happened to be composing the opening for the 1979 anime version of Cyborg 009 (the second anime adaption, the first being in 1966), Taga Tame Ni (For Whose Sake), a catchy as heck song that I find myself humming all the time, with Lyrics written by Ishimori.

I've known that particular tidbit for quite a while. I was already a huge Sugiyama fan when I discovered the song, and while I didn't recognize it initially, when I looked it up, I was very pleasantly surprised. So why did I wait until now to make this thread?

Well, because I recently came across the 1980 Cyborg 009 movie "Defenders of the Vortex (Also known by the more engrishy title, Legend of Super Galaxy)" on Youtube. It's a horrible movie with a dub so bad it makes 4Kids look like Funimation. It's campy and crappy (as opposed to the manga and 2001 series, which are campy and awesome). But before all that, the first thing I noticed about it was this:



That's right, Koichi Sugiyama scored the whole thing.
Except for one song. Where I literally said out loud "Wait a minute, that's not Sugiyama!" And if you ever see the movie, you'll see the credits for that one song right after the Sugiyama credit.

What's more, the charitable Cyborg 009 fan Givijoarna86 has uploaded the entire soundtrack to Youtube for our listening pleasure.

Ever wanted to hear Koichi Sugiyama score a story about a multinational Cyborg team going into space in a campy 80's movie based on a campy 60's series, but with added silly alien designs and racial insensitivity? Well, now you can! Hey, everyone's gotta start somewhere, and I was content in knowing that even though he scored an awful movie, he would go on to score one of my favorite video game series in a few years time and revolutionize video game music forever.

This is the biggest thing I know about Sugiyama's early career, and I know he did the music for more things. If you can share some with me, that would be great. but until then, I hope you enjoy what I've posted here, and continue to love the man and all of his works.

Glad ya like it! A while ago, I was considering posting Taga Tame Ni on your profile and going "Guess who?"

I remember at one point during the movie when they landed on a dead planet covered in primitives and entered some mysterious ruins, I found myself thinking "Oh look, they're entering a mysterious shrine. It sounds like they're entering a mysterious shrine. I feel very DQ right now."
Probably the beginning of track 9, which plays when the cast first meets the purple gal in the picture teleports them all away from danger into a secluded part of the destroyed ruins to talk to them. It feels like one of his shrine themes and one of his love themes at the same time to me.

I am actually sad to say I didn't get through this movie on my first try. At first I ws able to laugh as it's silliness, but some of the voices, one in particular, really got on my bad side and I actually got a little uncomfortable. I didn't get mad or anything, just kinda odd. I did get more than halfway through it, though. And I got to hear plenty of music.

For the sake of the soundtrack though, I'm probably gonna try again. Unlike many video game soundtracks, movie soundtracks don't have to loop, and you can use pits and pieces of them at different times, or as events move forward in a straight line, as opposed to in a video game like DQ which is linear, but has room for exploration between points, some more than others. Especially since it was the first DQ that really set the template for compositions for the series and other games of it's ilk, what with having a town song, a field song, a battle song, and so forth. This movie doesn't have things set in stone like that, and as a result, neither is Sugiyama, and I hear lots of different aspects of songs I've herd mingling together in here. I definitely don't think it's the best of his stuff, some tracks feel a bit repetitive to me in rhythm and when the tempos change, but it's interesting as heck for many reasons.

And yeah, it was cool for me to hear him using electronic instruments too. There are a lot of times in this movie where the main cast will be in a ship at the bottom of the ocean or in the dead of space, and they'll hear or see or have to do something that is weird to them. Hence all of the quiet ambient synth noises at the beginning of some of these tracks. And though there are plenty of instruments and sounds I as a DQ fan am not usually used to in his stuff, even how the music progresses and the sounds mingle still sound like him in essence. Even if it doesn't remind me of a particular song or game all the time, I keep saying to myself "This bit here totally sounds like something he would do."