Jungle Heroes and their ilk

The Showa Children’s History series is an underrated look at the Showa period as it was known to people of many generations. 6 of the books are now in my collection. My first one is about jungle heroes and their ilk, as well as their impact on many cultures around the world. 

Much of the book is dedicated to Yoshimasa Ikeda’s character Baalumba (Barumba), a book character who’s a snowman like Giant raised by wild jungle animals. He also spawned his own, somehow better known spinoff counterparts, Burūba (aka Zamba) and his own fan-made son Shōnen Burūba. 

Since Kyuuta Ishikawa was a big mighty fan, he created Shōnen Burūba (1960-61) - the sequel of Kunio Watanabe’s manga tie in to the movie - and (childhood to adolescence-focused) Zamba (1962-64) - the manga set between the wild man’s adoption by beasts and his first full fling with romance. As a result, thanks to his unpredictable writing and mildly uncanny valley artwork for both semi-official tie ins to the Burūba movie, the eponymous spinoff saga may’ve become a more interesting tale about a stranded wild man, his childhood friend and their own goofy kid. That’s because the film itself was pretty daring even for its day, as a story where the young woman got adopted into the jungle by her bereaved, orphaned childhood friend, so that both might’ve gained a son after their honeymoon. 

Although a so bad it’s good movie, Burūba seems more prepared for domestic cultural posterity than its own parent book series, since by the barely there standards of tasteless mainstream YA novels, The Baalumba’s Adventures book series remains infamous in Japan for being such a gigantic cliche storm that it couldn’t be fully completed until 1992, 12 years after its creator’s own passing in 1980! 

As for the notes by the creators and their fans, many of them do seem culturally insensitive today, but the oldest notes still might not hold up well even in the early Heisei period. Nonetheless, such well meaning yet chauvinistic notes are still of an interesting touch which deserves to be recognised for its interesting hindsights even in a world where the top trending IPs outcompete almost everything nowadays.  

It’s pretty telling that, because of how it’s spawned tons of surviving fan artworks on so many websites, Disney’s take on Tarzan is basically what most young Japanese people, and also most young people throughout the world, now remember in this day and age. Something similar can’t be said much for the canonical ERBU mythos’ Tarzan part itself, as it’s currently in a league of its own due to how mind screwy it’s becoming within a few years alone.