103: Stampede

Last weekend I rewatched Trigun Stampede almost in one sitting. I'm bad at TV, I rarely rewatch things, and as a general rule I don't binge watch, but sometimes you get the feeling that the thing you liked a while ago can't be as good as you remember it, so you have to check. I did my due diligence and it turns out that yes, the show's still good. This specific interest might turn out to be seasonal, like other pop cultural habits: October is for Boris Karloff, and late April/early May is for Vash the Stampede.

I've written before about why Trigun as a whole is important to me, but I haven't gotten into the specifics of why Trigun Stampede (made by Studio Orange) is so special. Adaptations are tricky things, especially when they're retellings of a well-known story; the adapters are tasked with delivering something satisfying to an audience that already thinks they know what they want. Stray too far from the source material, in themes or plot or both, and your adaptation will be considered a failure.

Remakes never quite stand alone. They always exist in comparison to the versions that came before. The 1998 Trigun TV show (itself an adaptation of the manga) casts a long shadow. It's a traditional 26-episode series that's very faithful to the source material, both in plot and in character design. The overall structure is bifurcated, with the first half of the show primarily made up of villain-of-the-week hijinks that, slowly turn into a burning arc of regret, reckoning, and redemption that consumes the back half. Vash the Stampede has a tragic backstory and a powerful nemesis, and both show and manga choose to withhold those details until after the audience had gotten the chance to love him. The '98 show had space to spread out and explore rabbit holes, which served both to inform the personality of Vash's character, and to build the world of the show into a rich and colorful tapestry (a smart move, given the limitations of the show's animation budget). It's a good show that finds a satisfying way to tie off some messy loose ends that hadn't yet been resolved because the manga was still ongoing at the time.

Stampede can't do any of those things. The manga's been complete for over a decade now and the '98 show is considered a classic of the genre; the story's been successfully told twice, both times with similar plot structure despite resolving themselves differently. Instead of rehashing the same story a third time, the makers of Stampede chose to remix the story. Where the first two iterations of the story chose to withhold the fact that Vash has a tragic backstory and a twin nemesis, Stampede opens with that tragedy and the conflicted family tie that comes along with it. What would have been subtext for fans of the original story is now text for everyone watching Stampede, old and new audiences alike. This structural change frees up the series to go to new places with the same characters. The general character beats are mostly the same, but the show takes a different route to get there. This choice places Vash himself on the same footing as the audience—instead of being an aloof goofball whose motivations remain obscure, he’s sadder and a little smaller, an approachable figure who still manages to make surprising choices because of the inherent contradiction—the fact that he’s a sharpshooting pacifist—at the heart of his character.

Stampede also represents a shift in medium, and in priorities in storytelling for TV on a streaming platform. It’s been animated completely via CGI, a jarring choice for fans of hand-drawn animation, but in Studio Orange’s hands the action has a snappy timing and a depth to it. Each character’s been redesigned to match the show’s new aesthetic, roughly preserving the silhouettes of the manga versions, but lending the show a clean, consistent look. Stampede is also much shorter—twelve episodes instead of twenty-six—and therefore married to a sense of urgency that the ‘98 version simply didn’t have. The resulting show feels light on its feet, unencumbered by orthodoxy and curious about the stones that the original show left unturned. As of now, it’s still unresolved; Studio Orange has announced a “final phase” has been greenlit, but we don’t know when it will be released, or how long it will be. I can’t wait for the story to continue. I hope it sidesteps all my expectations from the original.

What I wrote:

I covered Challengers for Seeing and Believing this week. Good movie! Go see it!

What I'm listening to:

The Challengers score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross on a loop. "Compress / Repress" might not be the song of the summer, but it's going to be my song of the summer.