Digimon Pre Adventure Part 1

After the recent new trailers of both, the third Tri movie and Digimon Universe series being released, along with the announcement of Joshua Seth returning for the Tri dubbed movie, along with the dubbed release soon upon upon us, it's no surprise that I doing another post about Digimon. Digimon Adventure was what put Digimon on the map in terms of the popular children's franchise back then. But the anime wasn't the first attempt at trying to reach a mass appeal. What some may not know is that there were several material that were created that eventually led to the creation of the anime. Some well known and liked among the fans and some still a bit obscure.


                                  

Before Adventures, the first Digimon merchandise release was the Digimon v-pet that I'm sure most people know about by this point. The v-pet was created by Bandai to basically market a Tamagotchi leaned more towards the boy demographic. Along with taking care of your pet, you also had to pinned them against others in order for them to grow. As for as I know, only the first version came to the States. Up to 6 versions were released in japan along with several others as the franchise grew such as the Pendulum series. Most Digimon fans already know about the pets, but one of the more interesting things that doesn't seem to get much attention was the visual materials and manga that were created to promote them

The First Manga

The first one we will talk about is the booklet known as Digital Monster: I'll be the Digimon King. This was a guide book for the digimon v-pet  that came out on 1997. Besides it being one of the early materials, the thing in this book worth mentioning about is the illustrations. On the back of the book you can see early designs for the champion level digimon on the v-pets. These designs vary from resembling what the digimon look now to looking like there not even in the same franchise. My personal two favorite are the designs for Greymon and Devimon. Greymon the furthest from how he usually looks. His blue skin and grey horns actually makes look a lot like Veedramon, and is apparently the inspiration for Veedramons creation. Devimon also looks pretty different. For someone who is known to have a more scary and menacing appearance, this design is a pretty different contrast.

Here he has more of a chibi like body and come as more mischievous than menacing, reminds me more of Impmon or even Demidevimon. Along with the digimon, we get some of the early cast of humans companions. There are two boys(one blues, the other red) and a girl with yellow hair. Inside the book there is also a manga and a strange illustration of the cast dressed in sentai-like suits. Unfortunately I can't find a translation of the manga, but from the looks of it the manga is meant to be a tutorial on how to fight and take care of your v-pet.

C'mon Digimon

Next we have the manga C'mon Digimon also illustrated by Tenya Yabuno. This one shot manga came out around the same time the Digmon King guide was released and like that booklet featured a lot of what was to come of the Digimon franchise. The story was set in a world were instead of the digital world, digimon only existed in the v-pets where like the real life v-pets, people fought one another in order to raise the best digimon. One of the best digimon player is a character named Shinchiro Josaki who with his digimon Deathmon has not only beaten the competition but is somehow able to adsorb his opponents data and use for its own. The only hope the kids have is our main hero Kentouro Kamon and his digimon Bun. As mentioned earlier, this manga offered a lot for what was to come for the manga. This one of the first fully fledged out story for the franchise and even gave us an early deciption of what the hero Tai Kamiya will look like in the form of Kamon. Also unlike the anime series, the manga focuses more on promoting the v-pets merchandise something quite a few more digimon manga would continue to due when a new one was released.

V-Tamer

Next is probably the most well known and popular digimon manga: V-tamers. V-tamers is when we get our first introduction to the character Tai before he even made his apparence in the Adventures anime, that is if you lived in Japan as the  manga didn't really reach stateside until the show was pretty well known. This series focused on Tai(who I sometimes refer to as his japanese name Taichi to differentiate the two) who is instead of spending his time at summer camp before the adventure begins, is at a digimon v-pet tournament where his digimon is rejected for being considered a glitch digimon. Soon he his transported to the digiworld where he meets his partner, Zeromaru( a Veedramon instead of an Agumon) and Gabumon. Together they are ordered by a Holyangemon to stop an impeding doom that is about to plague the digital world and along the way meets other tamers and familiar faces. This is probably the first series where the concept of the digital world comes into play. Before this, the idea was that digimon only lived in the v-pets, that explores more of the idea of digimon living in a parallel world. Another thing that I thought was intresting was that this manga also gave us the idea of digimon having individual names( such as Gabu the Gabumon) something that is rarely explored in the digimon franchise. The manga is one the longest running digimon manga, and even continued well after the end of Digimon Adventure, leading to this Taichi to have crossovers with other goggled heroes such as Davis from 02 and Takuya from Frontier.

If any Digimon fans or even manga fans haven't read this manga yet, I highly recommend it. It is the first Digimon material to introduce a lot of digimon concepts that we come to know later in Adventures while having a lot of ideas that make it it's own thing.

To Be Continued
That about concludes part 1 of Pre-Adventures, were I covered the manga material that came before adventures. Look forward to the next Parts were I covered one of the first Digimon game and pilot that led to the adventure anime.

Anime Expo Highlights( or My attempt to cure my PCD)

I thought i was over it, I thought I was getting better. But because of the recent hype SDCC( San Diego Comic-Con) from news sites and friends Instagram, my PCD was starting to relapse. In case you don't know what that is, PCD (Post Con Depression) the depression you get after spending 2-4 days straight at a convention walking till you feet bleed, eating expensive food, and sleeping on the floor in a crowded hotel room. Despite that exhausting stress during those days at a con, you also have tons of fun going to screenings, panels, scouring for that particular merchandise you can only find online. It is because of these things that going back to your shitty life of work and school can be such a downer and that's when PCD kicks in. While looking on line for a cure I came across one of the fun ways to treat it is to talk about it, but since I have no one to talk to, I'll just write about it. Specifically, about my time at Anime Expo. Yes it's been a good while since the convention, and I feel weird posting another post concerning anime, but whatever I should continue to keep this blog thing up. My next post will be about movies or something I swear.

Volunteering

The number one thing that drove me to volunteer at Anime Expo this year was the fact that volunteering there was a good way to pay for my badges and a good way to meet people. The work is pretty much what you expect it to be, which is mostly grunt work, such as getting greeting bags ready and crowd controlling lines. A lot of co-volunteers that I met there seemed unhappy with the jobs and some who was planning to work the whole 4 days changed there minds and was only gonna work that one shift they signed up for. I think another thing that rubbed volunteers the wrong way was the sort of work hierarchy that they had. To put it simply if you were a AX volunteer(like me) you had to wear an ugly over-sized traffic vest and for the most part stand for 4 hours straight (we were supposed to get breaks but that rarely happened). The SPJA volunteers on the other hand got a way better vest, rooms paid for, and quite a few got to sit down. I for one was fine with being an AX volunteer, I wasn't expecting it to be glamorous and really was just doing it so I can get the free badges so I didn't care.

Anime Screening

I haven't been to AX since high school, but the one thing I looked forward to back then was going to the anime screenings. I don't watch to much anime, so this was always a good way to find some new things to watch. Unfortunately while I did find a few I liked (I personally thank AX for introducing me to Monogatari) a lot of screenings according to the schedule were shows I already knew and/or wasn't interested in. Fortunately, though one of the screenings I went turned out to be one of the big highlights of my time there, the "Vintage Anime Laser-disc Screening". I am a huge fan of vintage anime, so after finding out there was a screening showing old anime for almost 5 hours, I was on board. The screening showed several shows such as Tenchi Muyo and Ah My Goddess which to my sort of shock most people in the audience didn't know about( and made me feel for the first time a bit old). Regardless it was still a lot of fun, especially since you can hear several audience members make funny commentary over the movie, another reason why I like going to screening. The best one out of all of them though had to be Riding Bean, an action anime OVA involving a seemingly action hero with a tricked out car who can apparently survive a bullet to the head flip a car shortly afterwards. This movie got the most reactions out of the audience because of how insane it was.

Night Life
No I didn't go to any of the raves and I waited too long to buy a ticket for the night cafe. My night life at AX was mostly walking around the convention Friday and Saturday night checking out the gaming room and manga lounge. Despite it not being a huge party, I actually enjoyed my nights here( also I heard the parties aren't too good). After the stress of walking around and standing in long lines all day, this was a nice and calm moment to genuinely relax at a convention. It was basically what you would be doing if you had a quiet night night at home but this time, with thousands of others to share that time with. I think what took the most endurance those night those was Saturday night where I stayed up till 4am at the Marriot watching anime till it was time to catch my train.

All in all, it was a fun experience after not going to AX for so long and sucks to be back in reality. I honestly have no real interest in something like Comic-Con, but it would be fun to attend a smaller(and cheaper) convention soon. Now if you don't mind, I'm off to sulk over the fact I missed out on yaoi bingo.

What I know and feel about Tri ( or Tri is coming! Tri is coming!)

If there’s one franchise that I continue to love is the Digimon franchise. But lately, there’s one thing the Digimon franchise has done to me is make me eat my own words on multiple occasions, especially the popularity it still has in international. At first, I didn’t think Xros wars would never come to the states, but sure enough it did, none of the PSP titles would ever come her yet sure enough Digimon Cyber Slueth was on its way to the Vita and PS4. Next was the movie Digimon Adventures Tri an Movie(or ova series some would argue) made its’s  debut in Japan last fall with the announcement that it was also getting a subtitled release internationally on Crunchyroll. with that news I figured that was going to be it. I realized and happy to know that Digimon still has a pretty niche audience in the US for the series to still be distributed enough that we will be able to get the series digitally, but I was pretty certain that we would not be getting anything like a dub for the series, especially after the lukewarm response that the Xros Wars got from fans. But yet again I was wrong, early July of 2016 veteran Digimon voice actor Jeff Nimoy(voice of Tentomon and several other characters) announce on his twitter that he just started recording lines for the new Digimon Tri dub. Not only that but the will also be released in select theaters across the country. Like most digifans, I had tons questions in my head. “Will the whole cast come back?”, “will we get a straight dub?”

The Cast
As I mentioned the announcement first came when Jeff Nimoy posted on his Twitter page that he will be voicing his well know digirole, Tentomon. So it’s safe to say that like the Japanese version, there is an effort to bring back atleast some of the cast. It wasn’t long that veteran voice actors Joshua Seth( voice of Tai) and Micheal Reisz( Voice of Matt) has also express interest in returning.

The Music
Over the years, as more and more Digifans are exposed to the Japanese music of Digimon more and more fall in love with their infamous songs such as Butterfly and Brave Heat. It’s no surprise that there are fans out there that hope that the dub will retain these songs when bringing the movie to a bigger audience. At Anime Expo 2016, TOEI was there to promote several upcoming anime and games, one of them of course included a trailer for the Digimon Tri dub. What might disappoint fans of the original subbed version of the show is that the trailer didn’t include the Tri remix of Butterfly that some may hoped, but a new theme similar to what we know and expect from the dub.

This unfortunately had upset quite a few people, I for one didn’t mind the theme too much yes it was kinda bad but, it’s kinda what I feel about most anime songs, Japanese or English. Personally I think the only thing this theme had going against it, was how it was shamelessly slapped on to a trailer meant for a completely different style of song. it may be because of the fact that the Dubbed movie is coming out by fall and Toei and ElevenArts are in a rush to promote it, I’m sure if they put a trailer of there own together to better compliment the song it would not have gotten as much backlash.

The “Style”(and a bit more about the music)
When it comes to the old dub vs sub debate among anime, Digimon fandom seems to be the most divisive. There are fans who don’t mind and fondly grew up with the English dubbed series, but there are also some that are not too happy about how previous Digimon dubs have done things such as change names, music, and add dialogue to the English and believe that this has somewhat changed the from what it is in the original Japanese version. Even though I am someone who personally see’s no fundamental difference between the to and tends to watch it dub, I don’t think fans have much to worry about in terms of how this dub is going to be handle. The main reason is that unlike most Digimon series that have come out over the years this series is in a new style and aimed at a new demographic. when i watched the first movie I didn’t get the feeling like this was made to be a Saturday morning cartoon aimed at children, this show definitely made to be a series for older teens( a seinen, is that what it’s called?) and not only that its also aimed at those who grew up with the show. I think both TOEI and Eleven Arts, have shown that they are aware of this. In a Comicverse interview with Eleven Arts CEO Ko Mori, gave us a vague but intriguing idea on what they are aiming to achieve with their direction with the dub, and the music as well. In the interview, he mentions that they intend to keep the tone and style seen in the Japanese version, but create new music that Americans will be more familiar with. Whether that means we are getting new orchestral music, license songs, or a new version of “Hey Digimon”. Either way from the looks of it, Eleven Arts is attempting to create a dub that pleases both the fans of the Japanese and English dub alike.
My thoughts
As I said, despite me having more of a preference for the English dub(again, to me both versions are the same show), but I do understand the want for Digimon to retain things that are exclusive to the original Japanese version, especially as the franchise continues to reach it’s now older demographic. But I think we should remember that there are people that grew up for almost 15 years referring to Taichi as Tai and it will be a tough thing to just throw away for a small group of people. From the look of thing though, I have good faith that this release will appeal to both fans of the dub along with enough to appeal to those that want the “mature” style seen in the original movie.
Links
http://comicsverse.com/digimon-tri-american-release/ (Eleven Arts interview regarding the Digimon Tri dub realese)