Daft Punk-Ulysses

In 2001 Daft Punk released 'Discovery', the album relied heavily on sampling






and saw a move towards disco inspired house music (house shares many similarities with disco but is predominantly more stripped down and electronic in style).

"This album has a lot to do with our childhood and the memories of the state we were in at that stage of our lives. It's about our personal relationship to that time. It's less of a tribute to the music from 1975 to 1985 as an era, and more about focusing on the time when we were zero to ten years old. When you're a child you don't judge or analyze music. You just like it because you like it. You're not concerned with whether it's cool or not. Sometimes you might relate to just one thing in a song, such as the guitar sound. This album takes a playful, fun, and colorful look at music. It's about the idea of looking at something with an open mind and not asking too many questions. It's about the true, simple, and honest relationship you have with music when you're open to your own feelings."

In keeping with the retro feel of the music and the idea of sampling ideas from the 70's the group set about commissioning renowned director Leiji Matsumoto to supervise the production of I
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The style of the film (which in turn served as music videos for the album tracks) was drawn from favourite cartoons of Daft Punk. Their main influence was the French cartoon Albator 84 which was directed by Leiji Matsumoto (the clumsy guard in the above can be seen in his original incarnation at 40 secs in the clip below)


 

Whilst British fans could see more similarities with the classic French Japanese collaboration on Ulysses 31, the blue characters being the most obvious, not to mention the head bands, fighting style etc. Sonically there are similarities between the theme tune (which has to be one of the greatest ever) and Daft Punk's new sound, as well as featuring a section not too dissimilar to Mr Roboto by Styxx (though that song wouldn't be written until 1983, a full two years after Ulysses). So amazing was this theme tune than many people thought it had been composed by post punk, art rock, new wave legends Devoit was in fact composed by Shuki Levy who you may know from Sweet Valley HighPower Rangers, Digimon, Hello Kitty amongst many others. 



Not to mention the incredibly violent and non sensical (because it was so violent British TV cut half the scenes, added a new character a robot named 7-Zark-7 who performed explanatory voiceovers and light comic relief, which not only padded the time lost from editing but also filled in the gaps in the story line. This device bears the influence of contemporary Star Wars film, with 7-Zark-7 having a visual appearance not dissimilar from R2-D2, and a somewhat campy personality in the style of C3POWhich continues the obsession with numbers in childrens sci fi TV. If you watch the intro below you'll notice similarities in the Daft Punk Digital Love video with the helmets and space ships




If you like Daft Punk and French house then you'll probably also like



not to mention Cassius (and be kicking yourself for not making this video)



and the cheesy Bob Sinclair



Modjo (who sample Soup for one by Chic)



and finally Stardust (with their Michel Gondry video complete with intertextual references to many of the above artists [and Robert Palmer])




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