Street Fighter The Movie - Live action vs. anime - Cut/scene #6 - Nowthis nerd

For you, the day the live-action ‘Street Fighter’ graced theaters might have been the day your dream of seeing an amazing videogame adaptation died, but for me, it was Tuesday. Well, actually it was a Friday, December 23, 1994, a date that will live in infamy among fans of Capcom’s fighting game franchise. I know you like to look at yourself on television. So look at this! But despite the American movie’s failure, that very same year Japanese audiences were treated to an amazing anime adaptation of ‘Street Fighter II,’ that set a new high bar for game movies in what seemed like their darkest hour. So why did the movie bomb so hard while the anime is still awesome to this day? I’m Andrew, you’re watching Cut/Scene and this is A Tale of Two Street Fighters Besides the obvious contrast between flesh and blood and pen and ink, there are some fundamental differences between the two. First and foremost, the live-action ‘Street Fighter’ is completely The Wrong Genre ‘Street Fighter’ was written and directed by Stephen de Souza, the screenwriter behind legendary action flicks like ‘Die Hard,’ and ‘48 Hours.’ That’s one helluva resume, but de Souza never really had the chops to make a proper martial arts movie, so he didn’t even try. I guess you didn't see that, did you?! Instead, he pitched his vision of Street Fighter as a militaristic action romp in the vein of James Bond. Uh huh. So, instead of a globetrotting tournament to determine the world’s best martial artist, we get a ragtag group of soldiers teaming up to take down an evil dictator using lots of guns, a lame boat that we’re supposed to be really impressed with, and a bare minimum of actual Street Fighting. Y'know, the thing that we wanted to go see in the theater? That the game is about? Street fighting? You're all under arrest. Surprisingly, Capcom was actually cool with him turning their franchise into GI Joe, because the game developer was literally trying to do the exact same thing themselves. They had inked a deal with toymaker Hasbro the year before, who were looking to revitalize their GI Joe line by rebranding it with Street Fighter characters. What's a Dhalsim? Oh! Both companies was gung-ho to add tanks and toyetic accessories to their franchise about bare-knuckle brawlers, resulting in a 'Street Fighter' movie with barely any one-on-one bouts. Now the anime takes a lot of liberties with the plot, too. For example, there’s still no sign of the World Warrior tournament that’s the backdrop for the game. Instead, M. Bison is using cyborgs to scour the world for top-tier martial-artists that he can brainwash into his own personal assassins. It’s a fairly flimsy premise, but it’s a great framework to showcase some incredible fights. [KUNG FU NOISES] There’s still plenty of intrigue, espionage and life-and-death stakes, as Guile and Chun-Li team up to take down the shadowy crime-lord, but the bulk of the narrative is the bond between Ryu and Ken. They’re the focus, as they absolutely should be, because the live action film suffers from Too Many Characters One of Capcom’s original demands was that every fighter from the game, including the four New Challengers from ‘Super Street Fighter II,’ had to be included in the movie. The script was constantly being rewritten to incorporate them, hastily throwing in characters simply because the suits said they had to be there. It didn’t matter what role they played in the lore, or why That’s why Balrog, the evil prizefighting boxer, is now a TV producer, and why DeeJay, the happy-go-lucky Jamaican kickboxing champ, was turned into a wimpy computer geek working for the bad guys. That's great news, general! Congratulations! On the contrary, I mourn. Okay. It suffers from this serious '90s 'ick' where people were just doing weird crap to fill niches. We need a hacker! It's the '90s, we gotta have a hacker. Unbelievable. A hacker. Between the convoluted origin for Blanka, Sagat as a suit-wearing henchman, and E. Honda as a Hawaiian cameraman, there’s just not enough time to make any single character special, it's a case of too many cooks in the kitchen, which is a bummer, because there’s some seriously great casting. You have made me a happy man. Next I'll make you a dead one. Ming Na Wen absolutely kills it as Chun Li, and Raul Julia’s final performance as Bison is better than the movie deserves, he absolutely steals the show, and, by the way, homie's Puerto Rican. Something wrong, Colonel? Come here prepared to fight a madman, and instead you found A GOD?! The biggest casualties of the live-action transition are Ryu and Ken, who are transformed from the heart and soul of ‘Street Fighter,’ into a pair of con-men trying to sell nerf guns to terrorists. Yes. That's what happened in the board meeting. That's what they decided on. That Ryu and Ken, shotokan masters, are con men. Above everything else, 'Street Fighter' is supposed to be Ryu’s story, as he travels the globe looking to hone his skills against the world’s toughest fighters, something the anime captures perfectly, even though it’s packed full of characters, too. in fact, it actually has more, since Fei Long didn’t make the cut in live-action. That's Bryan Cranston? Bryan Cranston played Fei Long? Listen: So long, see you again, my friend. Sure, some of the World Warriors are haphazardly thrown in, like how Zangief and Blanka have a fight scene because… Well, because they’re Street Fighters and that’s what they do, T. Hawk and Cammy show up for a hot second and split, and Akuma is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him cameo, but he’s there, and it works, because with an anime, you don’t really have to justify why they exist. There’s no need to explain the origin of a green electro-monster from Brazil, or how a sumo wrestler pays the bills in the off season. They just have to show up, they look awesome, and fight. Speaking of which, the animated battles blow away the movie’s Awful Action The live-action Street Fighter was a rushed, chaotic, and stressful experience for damn near everyone involved. In light of the aforementioned Hasbro deal, Capcom was insistent that the film met its targeted release date, but Raul Julia was suffering from the effects of stomach cancer, and needed time to recuperate before he could film his dialogue scenes. As a result, the crew was forced to film all of the fights first, without the months they had planned for elaborate fight choreography. People were basically figuring their stuff out moments before the camera rolled, or just winging it and hoping for the best. The crunch also resulted in the removal of what makes Street Fighter so awesome: The special moves. There was no time to come up with the elaborate staging and special effects needed to pull them off, which is why the one hadouken we see is literally just a white flash frame. The flash kicks and thousand-hand slaps were equally unimpressive, but the anime treated the special moves like they were actually special. Instead of hadoukens being something you mindlessly spam to whittle down your brother while he's just, crouching in the back and he thinks he's so much better than you, but you're over here now and I've got nine hadoukens and you don't know how to jump block, idiot! It's all about zoning. the anime turns them into an earth-shattering blast that makes a kamehameha seem like a sneeze in comparison. Don't @ me. Shoryukens, spinning bird kicks and sonic booms become devastating, fight-ending finishers, but even without the fireballs and fancy moves, the fights have a real sense of weight and authenticity, because they were choreographed by real-life MMA legends Kazuyoshi Ishii and Andy Hug. The de Souza movie had no chance of matching the intensity of Ryu vs. Sagat, or the raw brutality of the Chun-Li/Vega scene. Honestly, even if you made a live-action ‘Street Fighter’ movie today, I don’t think it could touch the awesomeness of the anime. They even had another chance with ‘The Legend of Chun-Li,’ and they blew it then, too! Maybe it’s because animation is inherently more suited to adapt the hyper turbo action of the legendary series, or it could be that the American producers simply misunderstood what has always been a fundamentally Japanese franchise. Look, I’ll always appreciate ‘Street Fighter’ for its campy charm, and the sheer audacity of its existence, but I’m not gonna put down my fightstick to watch it again anytime soon. The ‘Street Fighter II’ anime went on to inspire the entire series of Alpha games, some of the best fighting games I've ever played. and stands tall as one of the best video game adaptations ever. Yes, I said it. While ‘Street Fighter’ the movie is yet of another cautionary tale why Hollywood and Hadoukens just don’t mix. Things can't get worse. I was wrong, it got worse.