So you know the sci fi posts I mentioned earlier? Here's a short one, a semi-sequel to the End Point Trilogy post.
Baphomet's Revolution (1981)
Format: a 4 episode miniseries made up of 20 minute episodes, though it would later be edited into a single 80 minute film which would be the most commonly viewed version until the series' DVD release.
... simply put, the animation collectives involved had put too many resources into their End Point adaptation for the end result to justify the expenditure on its own terms. So they went with the only sane option: they recycled as much of their work from The End Point as they could in order to make something else with as little effort as possible. The most obvious example is the protagonist, Lei Federov, who looks like a younger Wei, with many of her movements being recycled Wei animations. If you know what you are looking for though, you'll be able to find a lot: backgrounds from the garden settlements of the Platonic men were recoloured; designs for stairways and corridors and bridges were copied onto a dark background in order to be used as catacombs; and here and the background for a Wilde man palace was just darkened, sometimes with an occult symbol added on a banner or just as graffiti.
Even the setting details are similar to The End Point, to such a degree that fans sometimes speculate that it is a sequel to the animated series. Lei Federov's culture are blatantly Platonic Men, with Lei herself being of Chinese and Soviet origin; Baphomet's religion/culture being a radically different take on the Wilde Men drawing from Aleister Crowley and Livy's scandalised accounts of bacchanalian Roman mystery cults instead of Oscar Wilde and West German reactionary culture; and an early discussion in the first episode says that a capitalist remnant that seems comparable to the Cold Men exists (though they are never seen).
Fortunately, the creative teams put more effort into the story...
Lei Federov is a spy whose normal job is to infiltrate and investigate the capitalist remnant. She is called in by the higher council (the closest thing to a governing body at this point) for an unusual job: the higher council has come to suspect that a religious leader of sorts calling himself Comrade Baphomet intends to make himself a dictator and resurrect a society comparable to the old AFS, and they want Lei to find out if this is true and if necessary sabotage his project. Lei is reluctant to spy on someone who is a comrade until proven guilty, albeit an eccentric comrade descended from a British aristocratic family, but given the risk agrees to it.
The first episode ends with her having successfully infiltrated the citadel of Baphomet's cult disguised as a new recruit. The second episode follows her confirming that the cult are stockpiling weapons and supplies and are training for something, but don't seem to be planning any attack in the sense the council were worried about and instead are busy studying some sort of time-space anomaly. The third episode, following on from the second episode's cliff hanger where Lei is discovered, follows Lei's increasingly desperate attempts to escape, which ultimately fail.
The final episode is probably where the fanbase for the miniseries comes from. Beginning with Lei being brought before Baphomet and his bodyguard/lovers, she outright accuses him of trying to launch a reactionary revolt as the Council suspected. Baphomet responds with the endearingly sincere line:
"Well gosh, nobody here wants that."
As it turns out, Baphomet and his cult are communists themselves, the time-space anomaly they were studying is a stable wormhole leading into the past, and that they intend to go back and liberate the earth's past so that all of human history may live in a world where "love is the law". Lei tries to convince him not to do this. First, she argues that the cult would be putting the present at risk, but Baphomet insists that Lei's present is in no danger as "the universe doesn't conform to human notions of causality: as long as all the particles in your body are present the universe doesn't care if their existence doesn't make any sense". When Lei them tries to convince Baphomet that it is the choice of the people of the past when they move on to communism Baphomet dismisses this by saying that they are not just making the choice for themselves but for many generations of their descendants who are hurt and trapped by the choices their ancestors made.
Realising that she's not going to convince Baphomet, Lei manages to briefly escape and tries to sabotage the power supply for Baphomet's fleet. She fails, and ends the series captured once again. The last shot of the series is Baphomet's fleet of Temple-Warships flying into the wormhole with no implication of what occurs afterwards.
- Entry from Soviet Animation, a watcher's guide and history.
