Osamu Tezuka's Star System
Over the course of his career, Osamu Tezuka reused the same characters in different roles in different stories. The way that Tezuka used the characters in his "star system" can be seen as somewhat analoguous to a film director frequently casting members of a regular "stable" of actors in different roles. For instance, the "actor" Shunsaku Ban or Shunsuke Ban, who played the detective in Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis, also played Astro Boy's teacher in Astro Boy. Tezuka jokingly made a list of how much they were paid and based them on famous western actors in his time.
Because numerous kanji all have the same pronunciations in Japanese, characters' names are usually phonetically identical but written with different kanji from story to story.
Read more about Osamu Tezuka's Star System: Characters, Note
Famous quotes containing the words star and/or system:
“Don Pedro. To be merry best becomes you; for, out o’ question, you were born in a merry hour.
Beatrice. No, sure, my lord, my mother cried; but then there was a star danced, and under than was I born.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“New York is more now than the sum of its people and buildings. It makes sense only as a mechanical intelligence, a transporter system for the daily absorbing and nightly redeploying of the human multitudes whose services it requires.”
—Peter Conrad (b. 1948)