What a great goal for Prime Video bringing to its platform the original anime of ‘Captain Tsubasa’ or, as it was known in Spain, ‘Champions: Oliver and Benji’the legendary anime football series. Although it dates back to 1983, in our country it became known thanks to the arrival of Telecinco in 1990, where it was broadcast daily at the now unthinkable time slot of 8:30 p.m.
In fact, the version that Prime Video brings us has certain differences with that of Telecinco: it is remastered, so the image quality is much higher than that of that distant 1990 but, yes, we cannot enjoy the famous song by Gustavo Toro that a generation of children sang tirelessly for months. Otherwise, Everything in its place: Amazon has brought all 128 episodes of the original seriesbased on the manga by Yoichi Takahashi published between 1981 and 1988 in ‘Shonen Jump’.
We know the story very well: Oliver Atom is a young footballer with exceptional talent, who is rising in the world of football from the youth leagues. His main rival is Benji, a goalkeeper with extraordinary talent, with whom he maintains a strong rivalry. Both will progress in the world of football, facing each other again and again in an endless duel.
‘Oliver and Benji’ surprised at the time with the radical way it showed football matches on screen to show the effort of the players: fields distorting into infinity, frozen moments which allowed us to see the reaction of all the players and spectators, absolutely impossible shots on goal… an extreme narrative that today we easily relate to anime but which in 1990 took Spain by storm.
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