Actu­ally, they came out half a year ago. I just can’t believe I missed these trail­ers until now…

No soz, not the animu, but I would gladly trade my anime sea­son year to get my hands on this right here and now. I won­der if that makes me more of an otaku (in its orig­i­nal def­i­n­i­tion) or less…

There’s noth­ing that hypes me up quite as much as CCTV’s (Chi­nese Cen­tral Tele­vi­sion) new Romance of the Three King­doms TV series (actu­ally, I gave my house­mates a heart attack over this as I exploded over it upon cross­ing the thresh­old). Out of the Four Great Clas­si­cal Nov­els of Chi­nese Lit­er­a­ture, I con­sider Romance of the Three King­doms to be the best one by far. Explain­ing this involves me to go onto a mas­sive rant about polit­i­cal schem­ing, mil­i­tary tac­tics, and bat­tle­field badassery… but I can say right now, no West­ern story I’ve seen or heard of to date could match up my expec­ta­tions to them since I’ve read/watched Three Kingdoms.

The new Romance of the Three King­doms pro­duced by CCTV has been the most highly antic­i­pated Chi­nese media project of recent years, with a bud­get well over 100 mil­lion RMBs (14+ mil­lion USD, except in China its a lot higher spend­ing power) and due to release in May 2010. CCTV dra­mas usu­ally empha­size their excel­lent script-writing and stag­ing, but tends to cut back on pro­duc­tion val­ues of spe­cial effects. This shows up very notice­ably in com­bat scenes and hurts them quite a bit, and was def­i­nitely the case for the 1994 Three King­doms series. How­ever from the trail­ers, it seems like CCTV pulled out all their stops on this one. Not only have their script got­ten even more poetic, but their mass bat­tle scenes are striv­ing for as much real­ism as pos­si­ble. With a total of 80 episodes at about ~45 min­utes each, the new series will fea­tures over 60 hours of dra­matic war pol­i­tics and epic bat­tle­field action.

I can’t wait for this…

The full, two part trailer:

There’s also this slideshow of shots from the series…

Zhao Yun, dom­i­nat­ing the bat­tle­field (click for series slideshow)

It’s going to feel weird get­ting used to a com­pletely dif­fer­ent set of actors for all the roles. I’m mostly wor­ried about whether some of the new actors are up to task, although hope­fully Direc­tor Gao Xixi strived his best on this. IMO, the hard­est role in the cast is going to be Cao Cao, and the actor Chen Jian­bin just… doesn’t quite sound up to par as the original.

I do wish Tang Guo­qiang could have played Zhuge Liang again though…

The novel begins with the “Peach Gar­den Oath” of Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei and ends with the fall of Wu and the reuni­fi­ca­tion of China by the Jin Empire, while Gao has stated that the series will begin later with Cao Cao’s failed assas­si­na­tion attempt on Dong Zhuo and will end sooner with the death of Wei min­is­ter Sima Yi.

This will comes as a mixed bless­ing. On the neg­a­tive side it skips through a num­ber of the early novel scenes, espe­cially those that explains the polit­i­cal strug­gles, the rise of Dong Zhuo, and the start of Liu Bei as a war­lord. But on the plus side it does get through many of the least inter­est­ing parts in the series and allow it to focus more about the pri­mary con­flicts of the Three King­doms era.

Hope­fully, this time the DVD release of the series will also fea­ture a good Eng­lish trans­la­tion, so I can show this off…

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• When Live-Action Is Just Bet­ter Than Anime: On War
• Romance of the Three King­doms (2010) Impressions
• The Beck­on­ing of National Pride

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 15:12 and is filed under Live-action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.