It turns out that Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac almost had an American produced cartoon released back in the 1990s, and one YouTuber has uncovered the lost pilot for the Western Saint Seiya animated series and has released it online! Masami Kurumada’s Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac manga series might be one of the most popular Weekly Shonen Jump action franchises in international territories (even getting to the level of debuting a full live-action feature film across the world later this Spring), but it’s never quite found its footing in the United States for one reason or another.ย
But it seems like there were efforts to try and bring Saint Seiya to the United States in a much different way than the anime adaptations. Much like when Sailor Moon first started to make its debut in the West, there was apparently an attempt to Westernize Saint Seiya for American audiences with a wholly new animated series named Guardians of the Cosmos. While this pilot was ultimately never produced into a full series, YouTuber Ray Mona has done the research and obtained the pilot footage from the Library of Congress so fans can now check it out online:ย
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Saint Seiya: What Is the Lost American Pilot?ย
As Ray Mona explains in a series of new video essays (following the discovery of the lost Toonmakers produced pilot for a new Sailor Moon series last year), when she tried to investigate the lost footage of a live-action pilot for Saint Seiya dubbed Starstorm, she instead discovered that there was actually a fully produced American pilot for the series known as Guardians of the Cosmos. Upon getting permission from former Bandai America president Frank Ward in retrieving those previous Sailor Moon materials, she also received this footage as well.ย
You can check out the full video essay diving into Saint Seiya’s lost and failed pilots for the United States on Ray Mona’s YouTube channel as there is much more to the story than the revealed footage would imply. There was a concerted effort to try and bring the action series to fans in a different way, but ultimately all of these plans fell through. But now years later fans will get to see Knights of the Zodiac in a full live-action movie, so it seems the franchise bounced back after all these years.ย
What do you think of the lost pilot for Guardians of the Cosmos? Would you have liked to see this American version of Saint Seiya in action? Let us know all of your thoughts about it in the comments! You can even reach out to me directly about all things animation and other cool stuff @Valdezology on Twitter!
