This will only excite about three dozen people, but those three dozen souls will be stricken mute with wonder and paralyzed by glee. Twenty-five years later, there is actually going to be a sequel to Mysterious Cities of Gold, the 39-episode cartoon that debuted in 1982 as a US-Franco-Japanese co-production. ...
Once again from DIC and Studio Pierrot—apparently it picks up right where the first season left off, 30 years ago, as Estaben, Zia, and Tao go off to Asia in search of more adventure …. and more destroyed lost tribes, to be sure.
The original, it seems, has played in the U.S. of A. from time to time, but not in a resoundingly enough way to make me aware of it. I asked a cartoon junkie who I know if he had heard of this epic, and he said "What? No way."
But on the off-chance that one of the three dozen people on the globe that will soon have heart spasms over the oncoming Mysterios Cities of Gold sequel, we publish the information about it here.
You're welcome.
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6 comments:
Well, at least you said something Steve, I'll give you that (it made more of a stir in the anime community I once waded in recently to hear the big news over this), though opinion on the original show is pretty half and half I see. Some either like the show while others saw it once and pretty much felt that was all and simply lose interest. I'm one of those that did watch the program a quarter century ago.
The show itself was a co-pro between DIC (when they were still a French studio looking to make a bigger splash on our shores) and the Japanese public network NHK (Studio Pierrot of course was involved in the animation but that info was unknown to me for years). 39 episodes total were made of the original show which was presented in with a sequential storyline that forced you to tune in every day or week to watch to the very end.
The show itself mainly played on Nickelodeon around the mid 1980's (I recall it around 1986 myself), but lasted for only a few years on the channel and never again (leading to those of us who had to rely on the "black market" to remind ourselves the show existed long before it finally came out on DVD (the show was available on Hulu a while back but I see it's gone now).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HQDXhbExZw
Though I haven't seen the series entirely myself, it ends in an unresolved way that I suppose lends itself well to a sequel we'll see soon enough (if it ever gets licensed/distributed here). Of course a show I have better memories of seeing on Nick then I wish could get a legit release again (and also another one you had to view all 51 episodes to a resolution to the story) was "Belle & Sebastian"...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0D6PAVVZdlY
Bothering to add iodine to the pain, here's a link to a really good article a friend I know had done about these so-called Western-Japanese co-productions of the past and present...
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/the-mike-toole-show/2011-10-23
I also remember both The Mysterious Cities of Gold and Belle & Sebastian.
Chris: The Mysterious Cities of Gold is on Netflix streaming, if you're a member :)
I wouldn't mind watching it there if I had a membership to them (it seemed easier to me when it was on Hulu but I guess something got to give there, of course I got someone getting on my case over buying the limited edition box set that gave you a ton of freebies I didn't get when it was out, the usual fanboy mentality there).
Here's another obscure classic Nick aired as well many had been asking for a DVD set of too...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY7PkMzuCJU
The article writer of the piece you quote is severely misinformed about the production companies behind the new series. The sequel is not produced by DiC and Studio Pierrot at all. The current rights to The Mysterious Cities of Gold is held by Movie Plus Group, a company owned by Jean Chalopin (founder of the original DiC studio and one of the leading creative forces behind the series); and the actual production work on the new series is being done by a French cartoon studio named Blue Spirit (of course with input from Chalopin and others from the original crew). No Japanese studio is involved in the production at all, even though Chalopin originally wanted to bring Studio Pierrot back for the sequel. But that was ten years ago... the sequel project has been struggling to get financed for many years.
At least it's happening at all, I'll give Mr. Chalopin that. Shame though the Japanese involvement rumor still spreads like wildfire anyway, but perhaps that's the only way to get us foreigners hot 'n bothered about this.
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