Great story, anoon. Any kind of post-mortem is way overdue for a lot of us.
About the term “fireball” for hadouken, while it may be true that Americans were/are not so familiar with the concept of chi, that’s not really the reason. You have to go back to SF1. Ryu and Ken said “fight–” (hands back, gathering frames)“FIRE!!” (release).
Years later in college, I met this one guy from Greece, who was trying to pick up Hyper Fighting for the first time, and he asked me “how do you do, the ice?” which made just as much sense as any, seeing as how, by then, hadoukens looked a whole lot more like ice than either of the other two descriptions…
Personally i think that the phenomenon of Ken and Ryu being genetically identical from the neck down would have been more impressive if they originated from entirely different nationalities. I dunno, i guess it’s not a big deal, but it just seems so weird to me that they felt the need to mix it up that way. Especially since that kinda trivia only shows up as a tiny footnote in some random art book released years after the game.
Writer #1: So, Ken is from California right?
Writer #2: Nah let’s make him Japanese.
Writer #1: Wtf, he looks like a total white boy surfer.
Writer #2: Who cares? Just make something up! The fans love arguing over shit that makes no sense.
The only other place i remember Ken’s background being mentioned was in one obscure line in the SF2V anime series, and let’s not forget that giving Zangief a mullet was the least insane thing those people did. I mean, does anyone really believe that they had Ken’s official hair color sorted out back when he was designed for SF1?
I don’t want to get into this Ken thing so much as it’s just one example of what differs the movie from the game, but Ken doesn’t look white. Unlike Balrog (Vega in the US) and other white characters, he alsways had black eyebrows. They made it even more obvious in SFII the animated movie. But I too was surprised first.
Wether his passport says American or Japanese is not the point. I’m talking about the look.
I just used this example to show that Capcom Japan didn’t tell the film crew and storywriters enough, in fact confused them with statements like the Sheng Long = god stuff. So I see it as mainly their fault, as they just stood there and said nothing.
Just to clarify (since no one else has so far), Ken is 3/4 Japanese. His mother is Japanese, and his father is half-white, half Japanese. He was born in the US, but he has spent a lot of time in Japan (hence how his father managed to ship him off to Gouken to get some discipline). Yes, he dies his hair. It’s always been this way, apparently (even back in SF1, his eyebrows and hair didn’t matched). I think his natural colour is light brown, but I’m not sure.
re: Hadoukens
In my country, we often referred to Hadoukens as “waterballs” (when you get hit repeatedly by Hadoukens, we called that “getting bathed with water”).
Ok, one thing that has been bothering the fuck out of me. WHY couldn’t they have aAT LEAST made Balrog the “controls” dude and Dee Jay the “camera operator?” The movie really isn’t THAT bad, it’s just so hard to watch because they butchered the real storyline so HARD.
Wow, here I was wondering why a SF Movie thread was stickied here and it turns out to be something like this.
Anoon, you are something else. I always have to give props to developers who are willing to discuss the things that went wrong with a game that was not well-received, but you certainly picked the most interesting way by coming on here and talking with largely the same group that put it down. That takes guts and balls and everything above, below, and in-between. Major props.
I just have one easy question: From concept to final build, about how long did it take to fill out a game of SF:TM:TG’s magnitude?
My (trivial) question: Have you looked into getting a SFTM arcade cabinet? You could keep it chained up in your garage, and put out cigarettes on its screen whenever you had an awful day.
Or, I guess you could display it in your living room. I guess.
CHARACTER ROLL CALL
Depending how you count it, SFTM contained about fourteen to eighteen characters when released. (Characters that had full fighting move sets and were either playable by human, or AI.) We held a good number of digitizing sessions more than that, and originally proposed even more characters for inclusion. Heres the break down, roughly in the chronological order that we shot them, followed by the ones that were pitched, but never made it.
DIGITIZED, AUSTRALIA
E. Honda
Ryu
Ken
Zangief
Dee Jay
Sawada
Fei Long
Sagat
Bison (Super Bison) [Raul Julias Double]
Akuma
Blanka
Balrog
Guile [Van Damme]
Guile [Jean Claude Van Dammes Double]
Cammy [Emma Kearney]
Vega
Cammy [Kylie Minoque]
Blade (Kyber Arkane F7)
Raven
DIGITIZED, CHICAGO
Ken [Second actor]
Chun Li
Sheng Long
NOT DIGITIZED
T. Hawk
Dhalsim
PROPOSED
Geki
Eagle???
???
???
I know for sure we proposed Geki (The ninja) from the original Street Fighter 1, (Fighting Street,) but we wanted to make the character female. Capcom did not want to do a gender switch, so they instead suggested we make a new character and supplied us with a short list of popular Japanese female names. Once we were on the track to make Street Fighter The Movie (The Game,) rather than some uber Street Fighter, our Geki fell by the wayside. In retrospect, our Geki would have shared numerous similarities to the later Ibuki of SF3.
The last three characters escape me at the moment, but I want to say that there were four additional characters included in our early documents that were never digitized. They were all Capcom characters from other games, with at least two, maybe three from the Street Fighter series. The name Eagle seems to stand out as one that might have been included. I am 100% certain that Mike Haggar was not one of them as I despise Mike Haggar. (I have a theory that any game prominently featuring Mike Haggar is doomed to failure.)
One more addend to Ultima’s, almost all of the above was explained officially once SF2 Dash came out, even though Ken’s look was that way from SF1. Gouken of course wasn’t named until much later, Super X that is.
Geki planned for SFTM might’ve resembled Ibuki? Interesting.
Yep, that Final Fight and SlamMasters series, how epic flops they were.
…wait…
(Not to mention Haggar was one of the characters a majority of folks kept hopes up for appearing as a playable character in the latest SFA collection even if they all knew it wasn’t going to happen)
Hey, owner of fightingstreet.com,That’s the exactly the same thing I have been thinking for Years !
The movie/game doesn’t suck, the info Capcom has given Suck !
I’d say both suck. At the time the game was released for Saturn I liked that it had movie sequences, everything I played before was SNES. But today I think it’s pretty lame compared to all other SF titles. Or half finished, at least the Arcade version, which is basically what anoon says himself. However it would have never fit in with the other games, even if the physics and all would have been better. I wonder what Capcom had planned with Sawada if the movie was a success. What’s he doing now?
