Thread by @katewillaert

Streamline Pictures was founded by two animation-fans-turned-pros who wanted anime to be mainstream in America. Their first U.S. theatrical release was Castle In The Sky.

In 1989, they distributed Akira and Lensman. One is considered a classic, the other mostly forgotten.

In Japan, Lensman was extremely influential. A quick search of shmuplations.com reveals that Gradius' aesthetic was heavily inspired by Lensman, and Capcom's Akiman was "obsessed."

But in America, people who saw Lensman right after seeing Akira were not as impressed.

There are many possible reasons why Lensman has been forgotten, but the biggest factor is that it hasn't been available since Laserdisc.

The reasons why it's unavailable is surrounded in rumor and myth, and taking up way too much space in my head. So here's a braindump thread.

Lensman began in 1937 as a story called "Galactic Patrol" serialized in Astounding magazine before being collected as a series of books starting in...well, it's complicated.

Bits of it seeped in to later sci-fi stories, consciously or subconsciously, such as Star Wars.

When Star Wars got big in Japan, several animation studios bought the rights to some of the old pulp stories that reportedly inspired George Lucas.

Captain Future (1978) was relatively faithful, but Lensman (1984) was heavily reworked into a Star Wars clone.

When I say Star Wars clone, I mean that the main character was changed from an experienced highly-trained adult into an inexperienced farm boy. The strong female character dresses in white and was given a Leia bun, but only one, so it's not the same at all, right?

The farm boy inherits his lens from a dying Lensman in a crashed ship.

Which is hilarious because it's the origin of the Silver Age Green Lantern, whose Green Lantern Corps "space police" concept was basically a lift of the Galactic Patrol. Who at the studio was reading GL?

Creator E.E. Smith didn't live to see this. He died in 1965.

His estate was run by science fiction fan (and his daughter) Verna Smith Trestrail. But the Japanese studio hadn't involved her in the project. When she saw the final product at the 1984 LA Wondercon, she was livid.

How did this happen? Well, after original publisher Fantasy Press folded in 1955, the books went out of print, then E.E. Smith made a deal with Pyramid Books, who released them as paperbacks around 1964.

Pyramid was folded into Berkley Publishing around 1979.

What Smith's estate apparently didn't realize (and maybe even Smith himself), is that Pyramid/Berkley had been granted exclusive licensing rights across all media. So Mitsuru Kaneko of MK Company licensed the movie rights through Berkley.

Did Verna Smith Trestrail try to sue Berkley? That I'm unclear on. I'm also unclear on why the paperback books suddenly went out of print some time after 1987. Rumor is that she "pulled" the rights, but it doesn't really work that way. Maybe it expired and she refused to renew.

Regardless of what went down between Berkely and Smith's daughter, MK Company retained the rights to the movie. Which is how Streamline Pictures was able to create a dub in 1989, and release it on VHS and LD.

They even licensed an adaptation/spin-off to a US comic company!

Oh, Verna was a new form of livid over this twist. How can a Japanese movie company license the rights back to a US book company?

To be more specific, MK Company licensed it to Harmony Gold (a US company who did a TV dub in 1987 before Streamline Pictures did their own in 1989), who licensed it to Eternity Comics, an imprint of Malibu Comics. Whew.

But it sounds like all Verna could do — according to what the artist heard from his editor — was prevent them from using anything from the books that wasn't already in the movie or show.
timeldred.com/lensman1990/

Oh right, I forgot to mention there was a 25-episode show right after the movie! Let's hit pause for now and continue this tomorrow. This was a productive braindump.

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