From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma-Rays, No.164
Welcome back to another week at our all-ages comics column, From Friendly Ghosts To Gamma Rays! Last week we took a look at the really cool first issue of Scooby-Doo Team-Up, so check that comic out if you haven’t, it’s totally one of those “next big thing” possibility titles. This week we take a look at not a comic, but the comic related with the Osamu Tezuka animated films Bremen 4, Prime Rose and Baggy, over at Anime Sols, trying to be funded via crowd sourcing for a limited North American DVD release.
Tezuk: Lighting in a bottle, man just in the right time and right place, or most likely a bit of both. Volumes have been written about how this one man transformed the Japanese manga industry and basically created the Japanese anime industry soon after. As history goes on we are finding more and more about the other creators at that time that Tezuka over shadowed thanks to history being written by the winners, but the none the less his genius cannot be denied, Astroboy, Kimba, Princess Knight, Black Jack, Phoenix, the list goes on.
Starting in 1978, Tezuka productions began making TV anime movies to air during the yearly 24 Hour Television, Japan’s biggest charity telethon. While some films from this yearly job are more appealing than others, the specific trio here are all pretty fantastic. 1981’s Bremen 4 saw Tezuka take a classic German fairy tale and re-imagine it under the laws of futuristic science fiction. Prime Rose, my personal favorite of the bunch, tells the story of the Devil deciding to take the Japanese city of Kujukuri and the American city of Dallas and transporting them 10,000 years into the future to cause trouble and see what happens, and the Time Patrol lead by member Tanbara Gai has to step in to save the day! The 1984 film Baggy will be more in line with the tones and concepts for fans of Tezuka’s Phoenix and Apollo’s Song, where we get a science fiction parable about genetic DNA research against a South American back drop, as a half woman-half cat is created as a bi-product in an intriguing plot.
This trio would be wonderful additions to the scene here for animation fans and as mentioned Anime Sols is crowd funding the project on their web site. If you missed my column a half of a year back, Anime Sols is a new web site dedicated to crowd sourcing getting Japanese anime licensed and released here in limited DVD releases. Aside from these movies they have several TV series up, such as Tezuka’s Black Jack and Riyoko’s Dear Brother, both based off manga, to fund limited DVD sets too! You can watch the episodes and see if you dig the series, or in these movies cases you can watch the films.
For 30 bucks you could get a copy of all three of these 24 Hour Television Films, and I tell ya, Bremen 4, Prime Rose and Baggy all have a little something for everyone which is why I decided to write about it in my column this week. There are other levels of donation too, anything as small as 5 bucks and beyond, and like Kickstarter, you wont get charged unless it hits its goal.
As of writing this it has already achived $10,055 dollars of it’s needed $16,000 goal, with only 7 more days to go, so what do you say folks, can it get its other $5,945 it needs to come here to North America?
Check out the trio of films by starting here or check out Anime Sols in general by clicking here!
That’s it for this week, see you next!
Drew McCabe
drew@comicattack.net
