Re: "A fake form of old-fashioned Japanese speech supposed to represent the old style of the language is used."


Bart Mathias wrote:
aesthete8@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
That was from Wikipedia's article on JIDAIGEKI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jidaigeki

I was puzzled by the next two "dramatic conventions," which seem rather
natural.

# In long-running TV series, like Mito Komon and Zenigata Heiji, the
lead and supporting actors sometimes change. This is done without any
rationale for the change of appearance. The new actor simply appears in
the place of the old one and the stories continue.

They don't choose actors who look exactly like the person they are
playing. In the case of those who really exist, such as Mito Komon,
there aren't any photographs, and the others didn't even really have any
looks.

The same thing is done in American soap operas.

# In a sword fight, absurdly, when a large number of villains attacks
the main character, they never act simulaneously. Instead, the villains
each politely wait their turn to be dispatched, often standing
motionless holding their sword within easy striking distance of the main
character until their turn to be easily defeated arrives.

The villains know that if they tried a simultaneous attack, the main
character would duck and let them chop each other up over his head. I
would think that was obvious.

Another convention of the jidaigeki is that the villain has to have a
certain kind of slow laugh (heh-heh-heh) when he thinks that he has
figured out a way to trap the good guy.

I noticed this when I saw the Korean historical drama about the Korean
admiral who defied the Japanese in the late 1500's. All the Japanese
leaders had a certain kind of sneaky laugh that they had to have
learned from watching jidaigeki.

Now that I think of it, another convention of jidaigeki (and also of
Korean historical dramas) is that when there is a closeup of a male
actor, you can tell that his eyebrows have been eyebrow-pencilled over
such that the ends of his eyebrows always appear higher than the
beginnings.

.