The comic series Avengers Arena doesn’t hide its influences, with the villain boasting of stealing the idea from “a couple of kids’ books.” Even beyond the young adult film franchise boom, the film’s premise was evoked by the “controversial and groundbreaking” reality show of “ questionable legality,” Kid Nation, and the CW show The 100. In the years since the release of Battle Royale, the imagery of children thrown into Darwinian struggle has only become more ubiquitous. Other sources claim the average age was actually 22, but that is still four years younger than the average age of a soldier during the Second World War. The 1982 documentary Vietnam Requiem claimed the average age of a soldier in Vietnam was 19, inspiring Paul Hardcastle’s 1985 hit. These stories of teen warfare evoked the memory of Vietnam, a conflict associated with the loss of a generation of young men. In the 1980s, movies like Red Dawn and War Games found teens playing war.
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Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins claims that the premise of her books was an update of the classic story of how Athens would sacrifice groups of children to the Minotaur on the island of Crete, positioning her heroine Katniss Everdeen as “a futuristic Theseus.” It’s also possible to draw a line connecting Battle Royale to William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies.
Of course, the premise of Battle Royale was not necessarily original. The film’s story of a bunch of teenagers trapped on an island and forced to murder one another became a cult classic, as well as a point of reference for a wave of young adult books and films over the next decade or so: The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Divergent. It coincided with the wave of international success for Japanese genre cinema following the breakout of Ringu. Kinji Fukasaku’s adaptation of Koushun Takami’s novel Battle Royale was perfectly timed.