Hi guys! I'm kinda new here so please bare with me. So I'm currently studying Japanese and I've gotten to the point where I'm curious about how media from a America (Star Trek in particular) is dubbed and localized there. Eventually I came across this video: Being interested in graphic design, what struck me immediately was the font choice for this, as far as I can tell, TV bumper from Japan. It actually got me looking at the other logos for Japanese Star Trek media and found that the fonts used stylistically match with the original english fonts. So I wanted to ask, does anyone know where I might be able to find these fonts? I'm also interested in any other Japanese Star Trek media anyone might know about!
Hi Beamer. I've no idea about those fonts you found, but there was the sadly failed Build the Enterprise-D partwork magazine from deAgostini (link to Memory Alpha's article) - It was initially released in Japan but the fonts used seem quite generic, and no where near as fancy as the TV ones up there. Good luck with your studies! EDIT: I got curious and found these film posters but, judging from your images, I imagine you've already seen these?
Indeed I have already seen the film posters, but I had no idea about the magazine. A shame there wasn't much demand in Japan.
They even had old TOS Enterprise models....with propellers http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/KSN_Midori
I think it's kinda cool that they at least tried marketing the franchise that early on. It was still a pretty unknown show at the time after all. When I started looking into this, I found this article http://iffybizness.blogspot.com/2009/12/star-trek-in-japan.html The author attributes the lack of popularity to a change in name (originally it was called Cosmic Operation or Uchū Daisakusen), the popularity of Star Wars, and the loss of licencing during the 70's. It's probably why that magazine failed during it's initial tests.
Sorry for bumping (not sure what the rules regarding that are), but someone over on stack exchange found the font used for the first 6 movies: http://www.usskyushu.com/trekfont.html Apparently it was made by a Japanese fan because there's no Japanese Trek fonts as far as he was aware. I have my source on Stack exchange looking for the Kelvin Universe font, but it's possible it doesn't exist in a commercially available state.
So another update, seems I've found a font that's incredibly close to the one used in the DS9 Cold Open video I posted earlier: https://www.jref.com/resources/frigate-katakana.20/ If I had to guess, it's probably a derivative of it. That just leaves the TOS font to be found but I'm highly skeptical it will be. I've actually taken the liberty of recreating what logos I can using the TMP font that I found yesterday and taking a few liberties with other fonts to make a Japanese TNG & ENT logo. If you guys are interested, I can post them here.
Sorry to bump this thread after so long, but I figured I'd at least post the logos I've created. I used the movie font for DS9 & Voyager, but modified a font called NicoKaku for use on the TNG and Enterprise logos. I will say that recreating the cold open logo for DS9 was the hardest since I had to make several modifications. Until someone makes a Japanese front for TOS that could possible include hiragana so I can use the original title these are probably the only logos I'm gonna make. Spoiler: TNG Logo Spoiler: DS9 Cold Open Logo Spoiler: DS9 Logo Spoiler: Voyager Logo Spoiler: Enterprise Logo By the way, I'd love to hear anything that anyone else has about Trek in Japan, but should I open a new topic or keep the discussion going on this topic?
Wow! Good job with the logos (the look, as I can't read/speak Japanese). The DS9 Cold Open font has a 60s psychadelic look. As for continuing the "Trek in Japan" topic, unless you can get a moderator to change the title of this thread to something less specific, I'd start a new thread. And just in case this thread does continue, I found this very distinctive Japanese Trek art (the fonts seem less distinctive, though): Trek art of Toru Kanamori - words and pictures.
I think we should change the name of this topic to just "Trek in Japan" if a mod is willing. I've been seeing that artwork here and there, but wow is that gorgeous. It's quite a shame the artist has been forgotten, I really love his style. I'm gonna see if I can't find clearer versions of the artwork we only had rough pictures of. I'm assuming this guy was searching for them in English rather than Japanese and that can limit search results. Great find! I also stumbled across this. According to this Japanese site: https://goo.gl/KW5AyX Apparently this was the original Japanese intro to TOS that was used from the 60's to 80's. There's another version I've found which seems to be a straight up copy of the US version, only with Japanese voice over. I'm guessing it's a difference in dubs, the latter coming into existence after Paramount got bigger reigns on the franchise. I will say, it does look somewhat bizarre.
Yikes! That be-tentacled monster thingy was a bit of a shock in that intro. The accompanying sound effect reminded me of Battle of the Planets / Science Ninja Team Gatchaman - I may have to hunt down an episode or two...
Back in the 1970s, I read somewhere that the Japanese syndicator accepted the TOS episodes visually, but made up their own stories! And George Takei was the boss in these new plots. I don't know how true that is. But it's absolutely true that they changed Sulu to Kato, and Scotty to Charlie. I was also given to understand that the TOS plots were changed significantly in the first German versions, chopped and up and made quite silly. To the point where Germans were confused as to why so many Americans took the show seriously.
As far as I'm aware, neither dubs ended up that way. I know for sure that the German dub was very faithful to the original material (barring a case where they changed the year of the eugenics war to 2096 rather than 1996). According to another Trek BBS topic though, apparently they inserted some really awful puns into the scripts. Here's a link to that: https://goo.gl/ByAVYk As for the Japanese dub, from what little I can pick out of the clips on YouTube, it seems to be rather faithful to the original script, but presumably those clips are from the 2nd pass done for the DVD releases. According to the Japanese Wikipedia article, it seems that several scenes were cut from episodes so as to fit the Japanese air time slots back in the 60's. When brought the series to DVD, they added the removed scenes back in, but there were a lot of instances where the voices were changed due to the original dubbed voices being retired or deceased. I'm guessing this means that they retained the original dub but added on to it and changed the opening credits to be more faithful.
I still feel terrible for double posting (old habits I guess), but I wanted to post a few things before I forgot about them. Apparently a Japanese Netflix Page had a few promo pictures for Star Trek series in Katakana. I also found a promo page for TNG HD and managed to get a copy of that logo. The Voyager picture's logo is very interesting (at least to me) since they tried to mimic the English logo but didn't use the movie font. TNG's is kinda interesting for the opposite reason since it seems to use a slightly modified movie logo font too which seems to be something that's occasionally carried over into the TNG films with new re-releases. Poor Enterprise though seems to get a very common font for it's logo however which I suppose is kinda sad. Another thing I've found but can't really get more info on is an E-Magazine in Japan called Star Trek Network Journal that runs through this site:http://www.startrek.ne.jp/. Apparently the main site posted an article about it 4 years ago: http://www.startrek.com/article/star-trek-japan-set-for-launch . If anyone has more info about it, I'd love to know more. Oh by the way ZapBrannigan, apparently the reason for changing Sulu's name is because of the infamous tendency for the Japanese to confuse R with L. Suru (with short sylabbles like this: スル) in Japanese is the japanese verb that means "to do". The Newer films decided to go with elongated syllables (スールー) instead of keeping the Kato name. As for Charlie, I'm not entirely sure about why they changed the name, but he's Scotty in the newer films.
I can't read Japanese, but I can pick out which part says "Star Trek" because it's the same characters in each logo. But in the one here and other examples posted, TNG has their "descriptor" (for lack of a better term) before "Star Trek", while the others have it after. Is there a reason for that, like does it translate differently or something?