Obscure Adventures in Geek and Nerd Culture

The Genco Visionaries Line  Adventurer Dankichi  Based on a series of manga and children’s books by Keizo Shimada Plot: Dankichi and his mouse Carabino are stranded in a foreign coast after a shipwreck killed the boy’s parents.  Age Rating: 9+ 

The plausible plans for the Mazinger franchise’s 55th anniversary will include a Shueisha Dash X Bunko serial novelisation and a 28 volume Shueisha manga line focusing on at least the four main franchise robots.  The first show, based largely on its manga counterparts, will focus on both Mazinger Z and Great Mazinger themselves.  Mazinger Z is an everlasting icon with distant links to Alexander Belyaev’s sci fi works. Its most faithful onscreen adaptation to date will feature a multilingual soundtrack. Unlike every other animated version, it will be co-produced by Studio VOLN and Holy Cow. It is also going to be distributed by Aniplex internationally, with permission from the Dynamic Group (Go Nagai’s Dynamic Planning, Gogasha and Dynamic Productions).  While Masaaki Yuasa will still helm it to an extent, Nobutake Ito will storyboard and co-write the whole show from scratch. Rising icon and soon to be fellow co-creator Toshiyuki Kanno will serve as a character designer fo...

Deep In The Eastern Congolian Frontier  A Salgari style adventure series about a nature hero born in Tokyo’s northeast side. His father, a disengaged salaryman, met a brunette prostitute and both had a baby boy, who then got orphaned in a tsunami. After coming to what was then the Belgian Congo, his scientist uncle and aunt were kidnapped by terrorists torturing both natives and expats alike. Thus, he was found by a bunch of gorillas in the wild, and the gorilla granny took him in. The boy learns a lot throughout the years of his childhood, while trying to live largely on the fruits, nuts and foliage in the rainforest. He doesn’t care that he’s a human, he’s still trying to survive like any other animal in the wild.  The young man lets both his uncle and aunt return to Tokyo, only for him to be shunned by his birth society, which suggests that the jungle is his true homeland. Finally, he becomes a gardening guy who rescues a mutinied former lackey, teaching her the skills he h...