Having just launched the science fiction anime adventure Outlaw Star, the Cartoon Network announced the acquisition of two other new anime series, The Big O and Pilot Candidate. All three series are still relatively new in Japan where they have been on TV for just over a year.
Like Outlaw Star, The Big O is produced by Sunrise Animation (Cowboy Bebop, Gundam) and has a down and dirty tone that has been influenced by the American Batman animated series. In a gritty futuristic city a skilled crime fighter resurrects a massive robot from the past (the Big O) to help subdue criminals who constantly challenge the police. So far only 13 episodes of The Big O have been produced in Japan.
Pilot Candidate is co-produced by Xebec, the TV arm of Production IG (Ghost in the Shell). The original Japanese title of this series is literally ' Candidate for Goddess.' Set in a 'Top Gun' space academy where students train to defend their planet from alien attack, Pilot Candidate features computer-aided animation of white knuckle-inducing space battles.
The two new series will undergo a 'localization process' which is a euphemism for bowdlerization in which 'damn' will be changed to 'darn' and the amount of blood, gore, and nudity will be reduced substantially. With any luck original Japanese versions with subtitles will eventually become available on DVD. Here the censors actually work in favor of specialty retailers by creating a demand for the 'real' version, and DVD is the perfect medium to exploit the differences between the Japanese and the Americanized version.
The potential importance of these new series to retailers can be gauged by Outlaw Star's quick rise to the top 50 in Lycos Internet Searches in the week following the show's initial broadcast (see Outlaw Star). If any of these series catch on here in the US, there should be quite a bit of merchandise available. All three new series have ties to Bandai. Sunrise is a unit of Bandai Visual, and Pilot Candidate is co-produced by Bandai, and Xebec, so it appears that Bandai will control licensing.
