So, anyone who’s followed this blog for a while probably knows that I was… not a fan of Star Driver. For those of you just joining us, the long story short is that I found it to be a very pretty show that was done no favors by its cardboard heroes, confused villains, and flashy but very poorly choreographed action scenes. It wasn’t all bad, but for a show about protecting a girl from an evil organization in possession of a host of alien mechas, it was surprisingly boring, and I’ve often brought it up as a model of what not to do in an action show, as all the visual spectacle in the world couldn’t polish the structure that was underneath.
My first time through Captain Earth, I was eerily reminded of Star Driver. They used some shared conceits, had some similar elements of their story and episode structure, and a couple characters who at least looked the part of outright clones. And, it turns out, there’s a reason for that; Star Driver and Captain Earth were made by, essentially, the exact same people. The studio, the director, the guy on the script… all the same. Four years had passed (Star Driver releasing in 2010 to Captain Earth in 2014) but it seems like the band got back together to tell basically the same show all over again. The question is, then, did they learn from their mistakes or did they just reprocess their old work and slap a new name on the masticated remains of what already didn’t work?
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