Saint Seiya: The History Of this Legendary Story 

The manga of Saint Seiya was serialized in Japan's Shonen Jump, a popular magazine of the Kodansha Publishing which showed many of famous series that became Animate, like Sailor Moon. Because of the high popularity of the Saint Seiya series, a contract to Masami Kurumada is made with Shonen Jump allowing him to make the series into animation with Toei Animation Co. It was the birth of Saint Seiya on TV. At the same time they were publishing the series into Manga (they are just the combined parts from Shonen Jumps). The popularity of the series was really high and became a great success in Japan. By 1986, the anime broadcasted in Japan in schedule of one episode per week. It shows that Saint Seiya has 114 episodes. So it took 114 weeks in going, or 2 years and couple of months to end the series. 

Then another contract had been signed with the famous merchandising company - BAN DAI. Ban Dai ordered many Saint Seiya toys and goods. This created questions like how come some of the armors did not appear in the series? So how come there are so many new fighters? Why is there Asgard? The answers to those questions are very simple. It is all about marketing, supply and demand. When seeing great amount of viewers were hooked to the series, TOEI and the scriptwriters created many stuffs for toys and goods. Hundreds of dolls were created, it really was impressive. the black Saints, have been removed but from 7 versions of Seiya, among others with the armor of the Pegasus, the new one of the Pegasus, the Odin armor, a black armor invented (??), the one of Sagittarius, and many more. But there were too many dolls for sell. When the  Asgard and Poseidon goods came out to the market, the sales of those toys lowered dramatically. Maybe it is due to the fact that the rating of Asgard series decreased and Poseidon series barely held its own. 

The truth is that we aren't millionaires and we can't buy toys everyday.  So when BAN DAI saw the losses in the sales, TOEI was forced to end Saint Seiya. TOEI finished Poseidon series and made Masami Kurumada, the author of Saint Seiya, to end the series. Therefore, Hades was only made into manga. Masami Kurumada had more projects in mind after Hades, but TOEI disapproved it. We are anxious to see the actions of the Gold Saints, Athena and the 8th senses, but the companies ignored the viewers' demand. Later in 1991, Saint Seiya was translated and broadcasted in the Spanish speaking countries in Europe. Brazil was also included. Strangely it was never translated into English. Saint Seiya soon became a hit everywhere in Europe, even Argentina. So, what happened to BAN DAI? Did they make make any action figure for the European? NO! They just dumped all the leftover from the Asian market to us. At this moment, the action figures are no longer in production. And because of the high demand in the market, the prices of those toys were jacked up to thousands of dollars. Recently BAN DAI has released a box with the 12 golden saints and its price is set at 340 US dollars. This it is the sad history of Saint Seiya because I, Emiliano, considered as a big fan of Saint Seiya are not satisfied because we did not get to enjoy the best of Saint Seiya. We had little access to any merchandises like the audio CDs, LD and stuff like that. We were only able to get 1 or 2 CD made from Columbia, price is set at almost 70 dollars by CD in Argentina. It is obviously a RIP OFF because original prices at set at 30 and below. 

The Saint Seiya movies created exclusively by TOEI Animation and they were not based on any volume of the manga, except for movie the GODS HEATED BATTLE.  Not all the movies were broadcasted in the European countries. So if you are interested, you can now go to the VCD info section and buy them all. If you have any question or problem, feel free to email me, I am glad to answer it.

Emiliano Guenzani

*This article is original in Spanish and it is translated by me, ALAN. I don't speak much Spanish, so some of the stuff might not make much sense. The original article can be found in the Spanish version of this site. It should be longer and more informative.

ALAN