Kind of a Japanese version of The Final Countdown or the Axis of Time series, I guess. Anyone seen it? Is it any good? Spoilers welcomed.
What a cool, cool, cool idea! I love the premise!
And I say that as someone who thought The Final Countdown was awful.
I think you may be confused.
The Final Countdown - awesome
The Final Countdown - awful
Zipang does sound cool. It’s available on Netflix and I’ve bumped it to the top of my queue.
There is no difference in quality between the two.
The Final Countdown was utterly pointless. Nimitz and her crew went back in time to the day of Japan’s sneak attack, spent 90 minutes unable to decide what to do about it, and then came back to the present without doing anything. Pointless!
It’s a movie, not a TV show! I wanted to tell the screenwriter. You don’t have to have a reset button!
Presumably, in the altered timeline, the anime boom of the '80s is launched by the groundbreaking series Space Battleship Mirai.
I note that the original title of the series was Jipangu, which I believe is the original source of the English term “Japan,” courtesy of Marco Polo by way of China. Zipang is just another secondhand version of the same name. Given that neither name was used by either side to refer to Japan during WWII, why bother to change the title at all? I realize I am treading on wafer-thin ice in demanding any sort of logic behind the naming schemes of anime exports…
Something did happen in the movie. The effect was just a bit more subtle:
James Farentino’s character, the air wing commander, is stranded back in 1941. At the end of the movie, we learn he helped to design the Nimitz. (Who knows what else he helped to design?) He also married Katharine Ross’s character and grew fabulously wealthy.
And thus, the events of World War II played out entirely differently. :rolleyes:
How do you know that they didn’t? After seeming defeat at Pearl Harbor, the Pacific theater of operations seems like an incredible series of victories for the US Navy: Coral Sea, Midway (especially), Leyte Gulf. Maybe they had help.