Animations: prince, talking pig, magic monkey...and..

Cafe Society
1

I was watching terribly late/early tv this morning and some strange dramatic cartoon was on. I just watched part of it because it was just too odd and uncomfortable for me. Ther was a prince on horseback with his three companions: a talking pig, a monkey with magical powers and obviously racist African man character. They wer traveling through some mountains and had to do battle with evil forces including the head bad guy who turned into a bull. There was also some imp character that was causing trouble. This cartoon looked relatively old…1940’s or 50’s. but it could have been 1960s or even70’s, though I don’t think it was that recent.

Any clue what I’m talking about. It was truly a wtf show

2

Alakazam the Great?!

CMC fnord!

3

That sounds like it was based on the 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West, with:

  • Tripitaka or Xuanzang as the “prince on horseback” – he’s actually a Buddhist monk personifying the Buddhist scriptures.
  • Zhu Bajie as the “talking pig”.
  • The Monkey King as the “monkey with magical powers”.
  • Sha Wujing as the “African man character”.

This story has been re-told an extraordinary number of times: there’s a list in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_media_adaptations_of_Journey_to_the_West, bt I’m not sure that the cartoon viewed by the OP is in that list.

4

Yes this is it…exactly. Thanks!

5

I’ve been wanting to see the original Japanese cut of this with English subs (accurate to the original, not the dubs) but have had no luck finding it. Anyone know if it exists? (I found a subtitle file, but it was machine-translated from Russian, and is pretty awful.)

6

I think it does. I was looking up this film (I saw it on its first American release, back in the 1960s, as a kid. I was amazed when I encountered Journey to the West many years later, because I knew the story.) several years ago and saw that there was an uncut version available.

Wikipedia page on the bastardized American release:

The Japanese original was called Saiyuki, but I can’t seem to find the original anymore, and there have been numerous other adaptations under that name since.

Here, at leasat, you can see a trailer of the original Japanese version: