Post by Sakura on Feb 29, 2004 5:33:33 GMT 10
Anybody read or seen Cyborg 009?
Cyborg 009 is a manga from the late 1960's.
Originally begun in 1963 as a manga, it went on to air as a Toei animation in the 1970s. The manga continued to be published in various magazines, including Shonen Sunday. Though largely discontinued and no longer popular in the 80s and 90s, the very final episode was slated to have been published in the year 2000. However, author Ishinomori Shoutarou passed away this January 28th, and thus we will never see the ending of this long-running, famous, and influential story.
What is the story? Thematically, CYBORG 009 started off a story about a team of nine people - cyborgs - fighting for justice and peace against a powerful evil organization. (In fact, CYBORG 009 probably played quite a role in promoting the team-combat anime theme, which is so famous today.) But eventually, as the years went by, the story became more and more a manga version of the old TV show "In Search Of" --- the cyborgs, sometimes alone, or sometimes in smaller groups, became investigators of the mysterious and the occult, and frequently wound up interacting with such things as legendary lost civilizations, ancient robots, and even gods, aliens, and time travelers.
The beginning of the story tells us a surprising amount about Japan of the early 1960s. The world at the time (and indeed, in the introduction to CYBORG 009) seemed hardly recovered from WWII, and now, with Sputnik and the space race, appeared to be rushing madly toward a future of spaceships and high-tech warfare. In CYBORG 009, however, more lies beneath the surface. A secret ultra-high-tech organization (which is later revealed as "Black Ghost") promotes war across the globe. As our story begins, the organization has taken up an interest in producing cyborgs for warfare. To pursue this goal, this group starts kidnapping select, unwanted people: a super-intelligent psychic baby from the USSR, both a gang leader and a Native American from the US, a would-be East Berlin escapee, a failed British actor, a female French student, a starving Chinese worker, an escaped slave(!) in Africa, and eventually, a juvenile delinquent in Japan. Each is converted into a cyborg, becoming partially machine, while retaining a human core. Our hero is, of course, the last of them: a half-Japanese young man named Shimamura Joe, with chestnut-colored hair.
Cyborg 009 is a manga from the late 1960's.
Originally begun in 1963 as a manga, it went on to air as a Toei animation in the 1970s. The manga continued to be published in various magazines, including Shonen Sunday. Though largely discontinued and no longer popular in the 80s and 90s, the very final episode was slated to have been published in the year 2000. However, author Ishinomori Shoutarou passed away this January 28th, and thus we will never see the ending of this long-running, famous, and influential story.
What is the story? Thematically, CYBORG 009 started off a story about a team of nine people - cyborgs - fighting for justice and peace against a powerful evil organization. (In fact, CYBORG 009 probably played quite a role in promoting the team-combat anime theme, which is so famous today.) But eventually, as the years went by, the story became more and more a manga version of the old TV show "In Search Of" --- the cyborgs, sometimes alone, or sometimes in smaller groups, became investigators of the mysterious and the occult, and frequently wound up interacting with such things as legendary lost civilizations, ancient robots, and even gods, aliens, and time travelers.
The beginning of the story tells us a surprising amount about Japan of the early 1960s. The world at the time (and indeed, in the introduction to CYBORG 009) seemed hardly recovered from WWII, and now, with Sputnik and the space race, appeared to be rushing madly toward a future of spaceships and high-tech warfare. In CYBORG 009, however, more lies beneath the surface. A secret ultra-high-tech organization (which is later revealed as "Black Ghost") promotes war across the globe. As our story begins, the organization has taken up an interest in producing cyborgs for warfare. To pursue this goal, this group starts kidnapping select, unwanted people: a super-intelligent psychic baby from the USSR, both a gang leader and a Native American from the US, a would-be East Berlin escapee, a failed British actor, a female French student, a starving Chinese worker, an escaped slave(!) in Africa, and eventually, a juvenile delinquent in Japan. Each is converted into a cyborg, becoming partially machine, while retaining a human core. Our hero is, of course, the last of them: a half-Japanese young man named Shimamura Joe, with chestnut-colored hair.