Wednesday, July 23, 2008

News from Gatchacon

Gatchacon, the unofficial con-within-the-San Diego Comic Con, is under way. This year's t-shirts feature a schematic of Battle of the Planets robot narrator 7-Zark-7 and the slogan, "He Thinks So You Don't Have To." Finally we get to see where his FOSDIC is.

Imagi has a booth at the con this year, and their major push is the movie, "Astro Boy" (to the tune of Linkin Park's "Somewhere I Belong") along with an ad for an older project, "Cat Town," and the demo reel from Gatchaman. In the Gatchaman reel, we see glimpses of Jun and a little bit of Ken in uniform plus a flash of the G-1, but the focus is on Joe in his civilan car stealing a suitcase of cash(?) from some thugs and evading some seriously scary gunfire. He looks good, and the demo is impressive... But this is an old demo before Imagi changed their ideas and their staff.

I have heard some of the ideas being bounced around for the latest version of the movie, and to be honest, although these ideas have supposedly been scrapped as well, I'm not encouraged. Something about how Gatchaman was an ancient legend worshipped since the day of the samurai... Bleh. That's been done to death in other films. As it stands now, according to current press releases about Imagi, the movie has been pushed back to 2009, and that interferes with Tatsunoko's Japan release of the live action Gatchaman movie. Things aren't looking good for this film, and I dearly hope I am wrong about this.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any news of the Gatchaman Director?

Wendy said...

No news about the Gatchaman director yet. A friend started talking with Matt Wilson of Heavy Metal fame under the rumor he'd be writing the movie screenplay, but according to said friend, he "shut down" on her and claims he's not involved with the project.

Anonymous said...

So did you take any video, pics, or anything showing off what they had to offer at the booth??? I would love to see the demo reel to atleast see where they are trying to go with the film

Anonymous said...

The Gatchaman movie isn't being directed by Jun Falkenstein?

What did the characters look like, in terms of being cartoonish or photo realistic?