Reception
The original manga series of twenty-eight volumes have sold over 25 million copies in Japan as of 2007. When TV Asahi, a television network in Japan, conducted a nation-wide survey for the one hundred most popular animated television series, Saint Seiya anime came in twenty-fifth place. Animage also ranked the anime series within "Top 100" anime productions. The anime series won the Animage Anime Grand Prix prize in 1987.
It was considered one of the biggest anime phenomenons of the 1980s. It would become the inspiration for future series, including Kurumada's later work B't X, Legend of Heavenly Sphere Shurato, Ronin Warriors, Gulkeeva, and Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. In The Anime Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese Animation Since 1917, Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy praises the series' complex plot and felt that animation designers' Shingo Arakai and Michi Himeno had worked "magic" with both the anime series and the films. They also praised the grand soundtrack and director Shigeyasu Yamauchi's ability to stretch out the tension and chose the perfect places to stop an episode to keep audiences waiting for the next one. Clements and McCarthy did, however, find the series disturbing in that its main emotional impact comes from the audience seeing "older boys and men fighting brave but naive teenagers" and through victories earning more weapons. Jason Thompson describes the series as being "almost pure battle".
Yaoi dōjinshi based on Saint Seiya popularized the term "yaoi" in 1987. Saint Seiya was particularly popular as a subject in yaoi as it had a large cast which was predominantly male. This allowed "an incredible number" of pairings, although Andromeda Shun was one of the more popular characters to create yaoi for.
Tite Kubo, the author of the manga series Bleach, considers Saint Seiya to be one of his biggest inspirations for the designs of the different types of weapons that his characters use in the story as well as the battle scenes.
Read more about this topic: Seiya
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)