40 Years of (Mostly Unwatchable) Live-Action Manga Adaptations

There are so many more than your nightmares accounted for.

(This post was written as a script for the edited video above, which provides a more complete experience of the post’s subject. This video also contains unscripted interview sections notated in the text below. This text version is just for easier reference and comprehension for anyone in need.)

“Live-action anime adaptation” is a trigger phrase for a lot of anime fans, so I’ll start by apologizing for any PTSD flashbacks that the title and contents of this video may inspire. Every time another anime adaptation flops, fans cry out that anime and manga simply shouldn’t ever be converted into live-action because it never, ever works. In spite of this, a lot more attempts have made at live-action anime adaptations than you’ve probably imagined--in fact, there are hundreds of films and TV series based on anime and manga, produced mostly in Japan, but also in China, Taiwan, the United States, France, and other places where Japanese culture has been influential over the last sixty years. 

For the sake of this video, I have investigated every live-action manga adaptation starting from the first one in 1959, and ending at the turn of the millennium in 1999--and we’ll talk about what came after that and why I didn’t go any further later on in the video. Based on my impressions of these films and shows, I am going to label each of them as either WATCHABLE or UNWATCHABLE. Some of these are UNWATCHABLE in the more literal sense of being impossible to find online or with subtitles, and others are UNWATCHABLE because they are badly produced, poorly represent the source material, and suck to watch.

Live-action manga adaptations predictably got off to a rocky start--but you may be surprised to learn that the very first manga adaptation ever was actually done in live-action--and the source material was the exact same as what would be used for the first-ever TV anime just a couple of years later in 1963; of course I’m talking about father of manga Tezuka Osamu-sama’s Tetsuwan Atom, or Astro Boy as he is known worldwide. Tetsuwan Atom is often cited as the first manga character to reach iconic status in Japan and worldwide, and Tezuka’s influence over the existence of the anime and manga industries as they are today cannot possibly be overstated. Considering the grueling work Tezuka would put his team through when he brought the possibility of affordable TV animation to life in ‘63, it’s not a surprise that animation wasn’t probably considered viable option for adapting Japanese comics until Tezuka figured out which corners to cut developing Tetsuwan Atom--but if anything clearly necessitated animation as a means of adapting manga, it was the abysmal Mighty Atom TV show.

In spite of its awful special-effects, stupid-looking main character, and nigh-incomprehensible editing, there were 59 episodes produced of the Mighty Atom show. I don’t know what the competition was for kids’ shows in Japan before 1960, but I can’t imagine any fan of the Astro Boy manga being satisfied with the presentation of character and story from this show. I also can’t get over that the nightmare-inducing Astro Boy costume clearly has breast grooves. Like, I know a woman is playing the character, but there had to be a way to account for her breasts that didn’t look so much like Astro Boy just has tits--not that this is anywhere near the biggest cause for concern about the production of this very bad TV show. UNWATCHABLE.

Information about obscure Japanese media isn’t always easy to come by in English, and there are plenty of shows and movies I learned about which I wasn’t able to find anywhere, so I know there are likely plenty of barely-known older manga adaptations whose existence hasn’t been noted anywhere on the English-speaking internet. I only learned of another UNWATCHABLE 1959 tokusatsu manga adaptation in the same vein as the Mighty Atom show, based on the 1957 manga Maboroshi Tantei, because I happened to be investigating the author’s better-known 8-Man series, which itself has multiple low-budget film adaptations from different decades that are barely notated in English. It is possible that there were more live-action adaptations of manga throughout the 1960s, but the only other one I could find mention of is an UNWATCHABLE 1961 film adaptation of Sennin Buraku, which was also adapted into the first-ever late-night anime in 1963. There is surprisingly little information in English about this series, considering that it is in-fact the comic series with the longest single-author publication of all time, having run from 1956 to 2014. That such a monolithic series hasn’t seen any translation at all should tell you just how far even hardcore English-speaking anime and manga fandom has come from truly tapping into the medium’s history.

Whatever might’ve happened in the 60s, live-action manga adaptations came back with a vengeance in the 1970s, largely riding on the popularity of a few household-name manga authors with mature stories that could be made into adult cinema. None of that is how I would describe Go Nagai’s Harenchi Gakuen, though, which had four film adaptations and a twenty-seven episode TV show between 1970-71. We’ll see a lot of cases on this list where someone gets the rights to a series and seemingly burst-shoots and releases as many films in as short a time as possible--especially when it comes to Go Nagai adaptations.

Harenchi Gakuen was the first of the legendary mangaka’s megalithic successes, taking place in an elementary school where the teachers are a bunch of weird assholes, and the giga-chad children are constantly at war with them. Even though Nagai’s madcap perversion and dumb dialog have always been a turnoff for me, I can definitely feel the zeitgeist energy of this manga that must have taken it to success. It’s a perfect middle finger to everything a boy that age must resent, and the kids are so snarky and above it all that you can tell any kid reading this manga must’ve felt in that moment like they, as a kid, were cooler than shit. This manga was credited with first giving popularity to Weekly Shounen Jump, and likely jumpstarted the trend toward edgier, more iconoclastic manga going forward, as all of Nagai-sensei’s work did. 

As for the live-action adaptation, I couldn’t find it subtitled, but from what little I could gather from what I saw of them, the films seemed to age up the cast to high school, and also tone down the pacing and tone considerably. I can’t really see the live-action version appealing to the same audience as the manga, given that it’s so much more reserved and boring by comparison, though it’s hard for me to say if the show could be worthwhile in some other way to fans who didn’t care about the manga. For now, I’m marking this as UNWATCHABLE.

1972 gave us the first case of a TV series and manga storyline being released in-tandem, similarly to the way that a lot of original anime have short manga adaptations that run in magazines during the time of their airing. Android Kikaider was created by manga legend Ishinomori Shotaro, who started his career as one of Tezuka-sensei’s assistants on Astro Boy, before creating the seminal Cyborg 009 superhero squad in 1963 amid other successes, and then to create a bunch of Tokusatsu concepts after the success of Toei’s Kamen Rider in 1971.

Fans of 1970s tokusatsu probably can’t go wrong with Kikaider, so I’m inclined to label it as WATCHABLE, especially since I could find it subtitled online. The tone and trajectory of the story is very different from the manga, but at least there is a clear sense that Ishinomori-sensei designed each version of the story based on the functionality of that medium. Kikaider is a solid superhero drama in manga form, and a solid motorcycles-and-costumed-fighting tokusatsu classic, even if the two don’t resemble one-another that strongly. The TV show had an immediate sequel, and several anime adaptations with different takes and tones would come later on, but we can save that for another time.

Wild 7 is another super long-running manga which has never been translated into English, though at least you can find the couple of anime OVAs that came in the 80s, from which I learned there was an animated chase scene set to a Japanese band covering Highway Star by Deep Purple. Wild 7 seems to be an over-the-top police action series, and had a cool-looking but UNWATCHABLE in English live-action TV series for 27 episodes in 1972, which was apparently popular, but canceled because of concerns from parents about the violence.

Easily the most important and influential adaptation that I’m going to talk about in this video also came from 1972, and had by far the clearest impact on what kind of stories were going to get the live treatment throughout the decade. Lone Wolf and Cub is the first seinen manga to achieve global acclaim, launching the career of gensakusha legend Koike Kazuo-sensei in 1970, who’d go on to create Lady Snowblood, Mad Bull 34, and Crying Freeman among other popular works, and to personally train a class of artists in the late 70s whose students included many of the next decade’s most successful writers, such as Urusei Yatsura creator Takahashi Rumiko-sensei, Vampire Hunter D author Sakuma Akira-sensei, Fist of the North Star creator and artist, Hara Tetsuo-sensei, and several other legends that prove the point further just how insanely influential Koike-sensei was in a very direct way on 70s and 80s manga.

Koike Kazuo-sensei’s writing is very dense, in the way that only manga with a separate artist and author tend to be. It starts as an episodic story about a former executioner traveling with his infant child and taking assassination jobs for cheap. Kojima Goseki-sensei’s artwork is hyper-realistic and very striking, with a lot of drama put into individual panels over page layouts, paying off Kojima-sensei’s early experience illustrating movie posters for a living. The crisp clarity of the artwork gives it a very lively, masculine kind of feel, and the dialog is thick with exposition to set up the complex circumstances bringing our hero, Ittou Ogami, to the point of having to cut a bunch of people down. 

Lone Wolf and Cub seems like a fairly obvious choice to make into a live-action series, and Koike-sensei surely agreed himself, because he wrote at least in part all six of the films starring Wakayama Tomisaburo-san which were cranked out from 1972-74. Even so, Koike-sensei smartly rearranges the story so that it can function as a film series, and also tells the backstory of the main character closer to the very beginning instead of leading into it with multiple episodic stories at the beginning. It’s hard to say if the differences in the overall tone and the personality of the main character are the result of Koike writing them differently, or if the impression Wakayama-san leaves with his performance, and which director Misumi Kenji-san brings to the directing of the first-through-third and fifth films with his visual sense.

Wakayama-san’s version of Ittou Ogami comes off as much less of a charismatic badass compared to the manga version, and more like someone who’d never so much as raise a hand unnecessarily, but in the name of honoring his station will, as we see at the very start of the film, decapitate a small child. That such a dark character somehow reads as heroic in these films is a testament to just how dark and dismal this period of Japanese history is presented as having been in this series. We’re talking about a world whereing three samurai commit suicide in front of someone’s house just to send a message, and in which Ittou’s entire clan is eliminated in a power play for another clan head to take his honored position as state executioner. With his family slain all besides his infant son, Ittou sets off to become the lone wolf with cub, and beyond his backstory, the first film is comprised of shorter vignette-like stories from his travels, mostly focusing on a hot spring taken over by bandits where he gets captured.

Lone Wolf and Cub features some badass graphic violence and troubling sexual content which may disturb some audiences. It’s unfortunate that women in this story are almost only portrayed as victims of sexual violence, and I certainly didn’t want to marinate in the tone of these movies for a long time personally as someone that tends to like lighter-hearted fare, but I definitely saw the quality in this film’s craftsmanship and easily understood how this translation of Koike’s iconic character could have as much impact as it did worldwide. More so than the manga, the films draw upon the imagery and style that had already become extremely popular in prior decades with the proliferation of violent samurai movies, and the unique concept and character separate Lone Wolf and Cub from the pack enough to be one of the better-remembered series from its genre. I can’t speak as much for the TV show which came out around the same time as I wasn’t able to find it, but it seems to have been well-received at the time of its airing.

In 1980, fifteen minutes of the first film were cut into the second one and dubbed to create the iconic US release, Samurai Executioner, which became one of the influential pieces of wu-tang cinema introducing Asian film craft to worldwide audiences along with its sequels. Lone Wolf and Cub would be one of the first manga ever published in English in 1987, and has been not only a definitional part of the world’s understanding of Japanese history from the era it makes reference to, but also one of the most widely-referenced story concepts of all time. While I wouldn’t say the manga or the film series is for everyone, it is most definitely WATCHABLE.

Sadly I can’t say the same about the first attempt to bring Golgo 13 to film in 1973. Another of history’s longest-running comics, Golgo has been publishing since 1968, and continues to this day even after original artist, Saito Takao-san, passed away in 2021. Best described as an even-surlier version of 007 and the world’s greatest sniper, Golgo has been involved in every kind of politically-tinged spy action caper imaginable, and would be adapted into another live-action film in 1977, an anime film and OVA in the 80s and 90s, and a 50-episode anime TV show in 2005, all of which are leagues better than this first attempt at live-action film.

The biggest thing that makes this UNWATCHABLE is the ridiculously overwritten exposition and glacial pacing that suggests they couldn’t afford to use more than a couple of shitty-looking sets. I was excited when I first learned that this movie was filmed entirely in Iran, but there’s only a couple of even decent-looking shots of Tehran in the whole thing. It takes an eternity to get into the scant and ugly action, and the actor playing Golgo doesn’t have any danger or charisma to his performance--he just looks kind of confused, and I don’t blame him because I’m also confused how this script got approved for filming. 

Skipping ahead to 1977, the second attempt at a Golgo film with a completely different crew from Hong Kong goes over a lot better right from the start, thanks in large part to casting martial arts film star Sonny Chiba as Golgo. You might not think it would work just looking at him, but when he swims up onto a guy’s boat to threaten him in his underwear, Sonny reveals that the true secret to a successful Golgo isn’t trying to look cool, but rather insanely, threateningly intense in the eyes. I’m not going to say this is a great movie, it’s pretty typical 80s pulp, but the opening scene alone is pretty satisfying as a portrayal of live-action Golgo, so I’m gonna go ahead and say this one is surprisingly WATCHABLE.

Jumping back to 1973, the success of Lone Wolf and Cub was quickly followed by another duology based on Kazuo Koike-sensei’s manga in the form of Lady Snowblood, which might well be the most WATCHABLE film on this whole list just on account of how gorgeous it looks most of the time. This story of a beautiful assassin murdering her way through all sorts of evil people in power in edo-period Japan was a huge influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill in ways that aren’t as easily put into words as experienced in the film’s visual presentation. It’s a deeply stylistic movie with some iconic violence, and more of that ultra-dark Koike-sensei tone, even if at least this time one of the women gets to kick everyone’s ass rather than remain a victim like most of those in Lone Wolf and Cub. Stylistically, I think the Lady Snowblood films are further from the manga than Lone Wolf and Cub, but I’d find it hard to imagine that fans of either of those manga wouldn’t enjoy the films as well, whether one or the other is preferred.

1974 gave us the first example of a live-action adaptation of a manga which already had an anime adaptation, being Lupin III: Strange Psychokinetic Strategy--and I actually think in certain ways it captures the tone of Monkey Punch’s manga even better than a lot of the animated versions that we’ve had over the years. Originally a 14-volume manga series run from 1967-69, Lupin is one of anime’s most internationally iconic character thanks to six different TV shows, 12 films, 6 OVAs, and all sorts of other tie-ins building an endless episodic adventure serial about the greatest thief on Earth, his cabal of accomplices, litany of lovers, and detective rival. The first 23-episode animated series from 1971 was initially unpopular, and ended up being heavily retooled by later Ghibli founders Miyazaki Hayao-sama and Takahata Isao-sama, the former of whom would return to direct two episodes of the second 155-episode TV show that started in 1977 and the Castle of Cagliostro film in 79, toning down the adult tone of the series and making Lupin into a more happy-go-lucky and fun to watch character, as he’s remained ever since, rather than the colder, more bond-like playboy he started as in the manga.

Strange Psychokinetic Strategy is the only Lupin adaptation which seems largely unaware of the anime interpretation. This version opens with Lupin in the process of stealing a car for the hell of it, when he spots a cute girl in the back of a prison van and instantly falls in love, becoming determined to flirt at any cost. It’s a perfect introduction to both Lupin and this version of Fujiko, and the screenplay is actually surprisingly dense with raunchy, ridiculous humor that feels right out of Monkey Punch’s pen. Even the way the scenes flow feels like his manga, as does the deeply politically-incorrect humor, consisting mostly of men coming onto Lupin in very esoteric situations and verbiage. In that sense, it is a film which embraces all the things that lovers of the Lupin anime who find themselves moreso apologizing for Monkey Punch’s original probably hated about it, and so will not be inviting to those who are glad for the fingerprints Miyazaki and company left on the characters all those years ago. Still, I think it qualifies as WATCHABLE.

Another sixties manga superstar, Ashita no Joe and Tiger Mask writer Kajiwara Ikki-sensei, had a seventies sports hit with Ai to Makoto, which was adapted into a 26-episode TV series in 1974, three films from 1974-76, and another one in 2012. I could neither find this manga nor any of its films in English, so they are UNWATCHABLE. Likewise to the three films made out of the seminal World War 2 manga from the perspective of a kid losing his family to the nuclear bomb, Barefoot Gen, released from 1976-80. While those may be UNWATCHABLE, the excellent animated adaptation from 1983 which I talked about in my video The Great Anime Director Who Time Forgot is very much worth watching, and had its own sequel a couple of years later. 2007 would give us a live-action TV adaptation, but we’re not touching the 2000s yet.

Already having influenced the anime and manga industries beyond reason in the 1950s and 60s, Tezuka Osamu-sama wasn’t losing any steam in the 70s and created another of his most iconic characters, Black Jack in 1973, spawning yet another mega-franchise. Eventually the 80s and 90s would give us some high-quality anime OVAs and films, and then the 2000s would adapt a lot more of the manga proper to TV, and even create a compelling backstory for the character in 2011’s Young Black Jack sub-franchise.

Black Jack is the perfect example of an intellectual property that gets picked every so often by some team to churn out some ultra-cheap film adaptations in rapid succession, and few of these have been translated into English. The Visitor in the Eye has an English version, though, and it’s terrible. It’s uninteresting and ploddingly paced, taking way too long before Black Jack shows up and then disappointing immeasurably with his appearance. Not only does he look terrible, he looks like he feels like he looks terrible, and that’s just not very Black Jack. A character who blew himself up on a land mine as a kid, was saved by medicine, and then became the ultimate black market doctor is usually portrayed as confident and cool, rather than like his makeup is making him want to sneeze. Black Jack is one of my favorite Tezuka characters, so if you’re curious about him, I recommend starting with the animated OVA from the year 2000 and stay far away from this UNWATCHABLE film.

1977 gave us an explosion of live-action manga adaptations that I couldn’t find any way to watch online. Classic racing manga Circuit Wolf, martial arts classic Karate Master which apparently contributed to a karate boom in the 1970s, Weekly Shounen Jump’s Kochikame, which is the third-longest manga series after Sennin Buraku and Golgo 13, sci-fi shoujo classic They Were Eleven from the legendary Hagio Moto-sensei, and baseball series Yakyuu-kyou no Uta all had film adaptations that year, and all of them are UNWATCHABLE in English.

Thankfully, 1978 gave us the very first actually WATCHABLE adaptation of a Tezuka-sama series in the form of Hi no Tori, or Phoenix. Based on one of the manga’s arcs, this somewhat artsy and dramatic film certainly takes some tonal liberties with Tezuka’s typically unhinged style of manga writing, but no more so than other adaptations have done with this more graven and thoughtful material. Phoenix has received anime adaptations at different levels of artfulness and faith between its early OVAs and later TV shows, but it’s surprising how close the tone of, say, Rintaro’s Houou-arc OVA comes to the same reverence as the live-action film. I won’t say I love this movie or think it’s the best Phoenix adaptation, but I loved that a Tezuka-style cartoon phoenix rose from the flames at the end.

Haikara-san ga Tooru had three live-action film adaptations starting in 1979 which I couldn’t find, running right after the 42-episode anime adaptation from 1978. There would be another film in 2002, and then a duology of anime film adaptations in 2017 and 2019, but I haven’t seen them. Angel Guts would also start releasing around this time, which is the first of several torture porn home video series apparently adapted from manga which became infamous worldwide as supposed snuff films. I’m sure these are findable, but I’m gonna go ahead and call them UNWATCHABLE, just like that Haikara-san films.

Lady Oscar is also pretty UNWATCHABLE, and not for any absence of availability. This strange and misguided adaptation of seminal shoujo classic The Rose of Versailles by Ikeda Ryoko-sensei preceded the classic forty-episode anime series, which would start airing later into 1979, and is a French-Japanese co-production acted in English. It’s kind of a shame because a lot of effort was clearly put into costuming and setting design to realize the aristocratic French setting, but this movie ends up feeling weirdly aimless, boring and without personality. Oscar’s actress brings zero masculinity to the role, and overall the film just doesn’t hang with the heavy drama of the original story, even with its limply tragic ending.

I’d like to think that Lady Oscar single-handedly put the kebash on live-action manga adaptations for a while, because the early 80s were far more sparse with them. I know nothing about Igano Kabamaru, the 12-volume shoujo manga which had a 24-episode anime adaptation and a live action film in 1983, but since I couldn’t find it, I’m calling it UNWATCHABLE.

1985 would finally see the bold return of TV shows based on manga with the start of the very successful Sukeban Deka series, which for my money is possibly the most WATCHABLE thing I’m going to talk about in this video, because I actually could see myself watching even more of it after having enjoyed the first episode, and also having already appreciated the three-episode animated OVA from 1991. Translating roughly to Delinquent Girl Detective, Sukeban Deka is great for its hardass tone and anti-hero protagonist, Asamiya Saki, who fights with a yoyo that has her police crest inside it. Saki is coerced for the sake of her mother, wrongfully accused on death row, to infiltrate different high schools and find out about all the corruption running through them into the community which is hard for the police to get close to. As such, the stories tend to focus on rich cunt daughters of important political figures abusing their power to bully other girls in school, including Saki until she’s done concealing her power level and brings everyone’s schemes to ruin. 

On the one hand, the anime definitely feels a little toned down compared to the manga, which is much more visually bombastic, but it also gains a certain edge from using real actors that look like convincing high-schoolers, and from the hard 80s rock background music that makes almost every scene a hundred times more tense than it might be otherwise. Sukeban Deka was a big influence on Kill la Kill, and it definitely has some of the same vibe and appeal on the character and story level, even if it’s a lot less hyperactive as a regular TV show. It does have 108 episodes and 3 films, and inspired other, similar adaptations such as 1988’s Hana no Asuka-gumi, which I could only even find mention of in a Kenny Lauderdale video about another similar show that apparently killed the genre, according to his video. As far as I know, though, it’s UNWATCHABLE. Same goes for the six-film V-cinema adaptation of delinquent manga Be-Bop High School, which also started in 1985.

A Homansu is a short manga which I can’t find much information about, but I did find the very strange 1986 art film that was adapted from it. This movie is pretty much pure prepackaged vaporwave aesthetic--probably best experienced listening to some noir-like Japanese jazz or really weird slowed-down atmospheric hip-hop. Can’t really say how it is as an adaptation, but if you want to look at pretty pictures, I think it qualifies as WATCHABLE.

I can’t say as many nice things about the Maison Ikkoku motion picture from 1986, which is best-documented for having a soundtrack by Hisaishi Joe-san of Miyazaki-sama soundtrack fame. Creator Takahashi Rumiko-sensei had already become a legend for wacky shounen romcom Urusei Yatsura, with Maison Ikkoku running alongside it as her more mature and reserved college-aged romcom in the 1980s before the start of Ranma ½. An anime adaptation was starting the same year, but the film rearranges aspects of the story to better fit into a film structure, inserts things like a musical segment, and generally gives off this particular cheesy air that isn’t quite the same as the manga’s tone. I’m sure some people would find this one WATCHABLE, but I’m certain that it’s not the most favored adaptation of the story, and there would be another pair of live-action TV films in 2007 and 2008. 

Adachi Mitsuru-sensei was also extremely popular for grounded, usually sports-based romance manga in the 1980s, and it’s no surprise that his biggest classic, Touch, has been adapted to both animation and live-action multiple times, including a 1987 live-action TV special which I wasn’t able to find online, making it UNWATCHABLE, and a live-action movie in 2005.

1988 gave us the first of three visitations to the world of manga by Hong Kong cult director Lam Ngai Kai with his adaptation of long-running edgy shounen action manga, Peacock King. Kai would make two of these films before directing the better-known Riki-Oh adaptation in 1991, famous in certain circles for some of the most untamed scenes of over-the-top gore in movie history. I don’t have the stomach for Riki-Oh personally, but the Peacock King films are totally out of control in their own, less-violently explosive way that will surely catch the attention of any exploitation cinema fans looking for something new to love. All of these definitely qualify as WATCHABLE for a certain audience, but you’ll know if any of them is for you right away.

Kaneko Shusuke-san would start directing live-action manga adaptations in 1985 with an erotic comedy adaptation called Minna Agechau, which I couldn’t find, but whose anime version was talked about by Hazel in her video about The Unreleased Anime That Almost Changed History. A few years later in 1988, Kaneko-san would go in a far more serious direction by handling an adaptation of Hagio Moto-sensei’s heavily studied 3-volume 1974 manga, The Heart of Thomas, retiled Summer Vacation 1999. This slow-moving, artfully directed and wonderfully acted surreal coming-of-age film more so carries the manga’s spirit then trying to adapt it directly, but it makes some fascinating creative decisions in the process.

The Heart of Thomas was an influential early work of boys’ love, remarkable for its very androgynous character portrayals, which the film seeks to capture by casting all girls to play the all-male cast, but then to have young boys dub over all of the dialog. I would not have realized that any of the actors weren’t male based on how they sound and look, which I think makes a very interesting statement about how gender is perceived, in particular by me, but I’m not trying to go into a whole psycho-sexual deep-dive on this film. Suffice it to say that while I found it slow for my taste, this film is definitely WATCHABLE. Director Kaneko-san would go on to direct the excellent 90s Gamera trilogy as well as the original live-action Death Note adaptations. 

1989 gave us the first live-action adaptation of Yawara! The Beautiful Judo Girl, the hit sports comedy manga from Urusawa Naoko-sensei who’d go on to bigger acclaim for creating Master Keaton, Monster, 20th Century Boys, and Pluto, right before its 112 anime series started. I couldn’t find this movie, so it’s UNWATCHABLE, even though it sounds pretty cool since it apparently had real-life judo masters in it.

Live-action anime adaptations made a huge resurgence in 1990, at least going by the ones I’ve at least heard of, even if a lot of them are UNWATCHABLE in English. Bataashi Kingyou, which I know nothing about, long-running boxing manga Nozomi Witches, which also had a short anime OVA in 1992, and Osu!! Karate-bu, which seems self-explanatory, all released in 1990, and I don’t know anything else about them. What I do know is that it was also time for another Koike Kazuo-sensei adaptation from Hong Kong that year in the form of the first Crying Freeman film, titled The Dragon From Russia by Canadian director Clarence Fork--which I also couldn’t find, and is not to be mistaken with the 1995 American adaptation.

Sakura no Sono is a more WATCHABLE and interesting film from the same year, based on a manga from Yoshida Akimi-sensei, best known to the English-speaking world for boy’s love classic, Banana Fish. This lesbian-themed flim about an all-girls’ school drama club production of Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard was also adapted into stage plays, and weirdly was remade into another film from the same director in 2008. Artfully shot and with intimate dialog, I definitely think there’s an audience looking for this movie as a forgotten gem.

America would finally take its first swing at adapting manga to live-action film in 1990 and actually land a surprising hit with the iconic Guyver adaptation and its sequel in 1994. Directed by Japanese-born make-up effects master Screaming Mad George, who previously worked on Predator and Big Trouble In Little China, along with Taiwan-born co-director Steve Wang, who directed the sequel, and produced by Brian Yuzna, who also produced the Re-Animator films and the Crying Freeman adaptation a few years later. Starring Mark Hammil in the first film and David Hayter in the second, these films don’t bear a very strong resemblance to the story of the manga, but are nonetheless iconic and definitely WATCHABLE cult films, even more so than the first Guyver OVA from 1986, to anyone interested in gory tokusatsu madness.

When I mentioned earlier that some manga licenses get picked up and turned into a bunch of quick films every so often, I was definitely thinking about Nagai Go-sensei’s Kekko Kamen, the panty-masked superhero who starred in some home-video-quality films in 1991-93, which are definitely UNWATCHABLE. Low-key romantic drama Tokyo Love Story from Saimon Fumi-sensei received an eleven-episode TV adaptation in 1991 which looks extremely boring and flat by comparison to the manga, so I’m calling that UNWATCHABLE too. 

Wangan Midnight is a street-racing manga along the lines of Initial D which has a similarly cultish following resulting in a series of low-budget direct-to-video films starting in 1991 which totalled thirteen movies by 2008. From what I saw these seem UNWATCHABLE to me, but there’s definitely a bit of a vibe here that I can understand some people clicking with. 8-Man also had a couple of hard-to-find adaptations, including a weird 1992 movie with some interesting special effects that seems mostly UNWATCHABLE. Go Nagai’s Oira Sukeban also had an UNWATCHABLE adaptation that I couldn’t find anything about.

1993’s Hong Kong City Hunter adaptation almost can’t help being one of the most iconic anime adaptations thanks to starring Jackie Chan, and featuring an entire scene where the movie turns into Street Fighter and features Jackie kicking ass in a really good Chun-Li cosplay. City Hunter is a long-running manga from which I’m pretty sure the Future Funk aesthetic was built around embodying, as the tone of cheeky action fun in the big city is deep in its bones. There have been tons of anime episodes, OVAs and movies adapting the manga, and even a 2011 Korean drama spin-off, and the Hong Kong film doesn’t quite reflect the tone and story exactly, even if Jackie Chan made a very charismatic choice to play Saeba Ryo. This one is definitely WATCHABLE, but probably couldn’t be considered a great adaptation of the manga series.

I couldn’t find basically anything about the 1993 film Tsuge Toshiharu World: Gensenkan Sujin, other than that it’s directed by Ishii Teruo-san, whose Horrors of the Malformed Man is one of my favorite films, so I wish it wasn’t UNWATCHABLE. I was able to find the Tokyo Babylon live-action sequel, but I couldn’t understand what the hell was going on and I don’t really want to read the manga, so I’ll call that one UNWATCHABLE as well.

Earlier I talked about Summer Vacation 1999 and Death Note director Kaneko Shusuke-san, who also directed one segment of the 1993 anthology horror film, Necronomicon--the other two of which were directed by Guyver and Crying Freeman producer Brian Yuzna, and the French director of Crying Freeman, as well as the first Silent Hill movie and the live-action Beauty and the Beast adaptation, Christophe Gans. The 1995 Crying Freeman film is decently WATCHABLE in spite of opening on several minutes of a CGi dragon crawling over a man’s chest. From what little I’ve read, it seems like a pretty accurate take on the manga’s story, even if its lower-budget cinematography somehow feels less realistic than the hyper-detailed linework of Ikegami Ryoichi, and even the six-episode OVA adaptation from Toei that came before.

Dr. Kumahige is a manga that I’d never heard of before researching this video, written by BURONSON-sensei who is most famous for the seminal violent shounen classic Fist of the North Star and illustrated by Nagayasu Takumi, but it charmed me immediately. Set in a low-rent part of Shinjuku, the titular bear-bearded doctor is a badass professional fed up with the problems in the hospital business and running his practice basically for the sake of taking care of the most vulnerable community members. It’s warm and gorgeously-realized in manga form, and I couldn’t find the 1995 Hong Kong adaptation but for a trailer, so it’s UNWATCHABLE.

That wasn’t the only foreign BURONSON adaptation from that year, and you can much more easily find the US Fist of the North Star movie online, but you shouldn’t bother because it’s UNWATCHABLE. This big buff martial arts actor guy directed and starred in it as a clear vanity project to suggest that he is as big as Kenshiro, but unfortunately he sucks as a screen presence and just keeps gripping his fists for no reason. The story is a nonsense, low-budget regurgitation of the broad strokes of a story already so aesthetically coached in Mad Max reference that it’s especially evident when your effects can’t live up to even those classics of low-budget cinema. 

I also found what little I found of the TV and film series adaptations of Eko Eko Azarak which started in 1995 and ran through 2001 to be pretty UNWATCHABLE, but I was glad that they introduced me to the manga. From what I read the main character is just this sadistic witch girl from hell who curses people to death as a matter of course. She’s more sadistic than Yami Yugi in early Yu-Gi-Oh, it’s nuts. The TV series is just so low-grade production-wise that it’s hard to revisit, and the films, while they definitely seem like a step up, just also seem like something that’s aged way too hard since their release to be watchable today.

Garouden was a long-running series of martial arts novels written by Yumemakura Baku-sensei and adapted to manga by Baki the Grappler creator, Itagaki Keisuke-sensei, as well as into a low-budget film in 1995. I only sampled this one a bit, but it looked like there was a lot of very legitimate martial arts fighting and I know that will be enough for a particular audience to check this out based only on getting to see realistic fight scenes. In that sense, it is WATCHABLE.

1996 once again saw the release of back-to-back UNWATCHABLE Black Jack films, as well as yet another take on Go Nagai’s Harenchi Gakuen, this time for the Heisei era. The ultra long-running food manga Oishinbo also received a film adaptation that year, having already received a 153-episode TV anime adaptation from 1988-92, and it is UNWATCHABLE, as is the similarly food-based Shota no Sushi, which had 17 unbearably cheesy forty-five minute episodes in 1996.

Surprisingly, I did manage to find the 1996 TV adaptation of Iguana Girl by Hagio Moto-sensei, which I ended up reading on another screen while I played the first episode, and I couldn’t believe that this fifty-some page one-shot had gotten stretched across eleven hour-long episodes. Iguana Girl is a powerful autobiographical tale about growing up with a mother who doesn’t seem to view you as human, in some bizarre way that no one else can understand--in this case, as an iguana. The main character does see herself as an iguana too it seems, if only because of her mother’s insistence, but only after her mother’s death does she see that her mother was actually an iguana herself. What she hated about her daughter was that she reminded her of herself, and the life she had tried to run away from of her own youth. It’s tragic and messed up and probably deeply relatable to some, so I’m sure that the TV show captures some of those feelings for some people that might be exposed to the story by that means first--but to me it seems limp and uselessly drawn out as an adaptation. The biggest issue really is how little the main character is actually portrayed as an iguana, as she is consistently in the manga, as it changes our perception of how the character experiences their mother’s abuse. Anyways, it’s probably UNWATCHABLE to most, but the manga is a very solid short read.

Itazura na Kiss was the far more-successful shoujo TV adaptation of 1996, and in my opinion might be one of the most important in setting the tone for the future of what successful live-action manga adaptations were going to look like. The late 80s and the 90s gave us a bunch of hugely popular shoujo high school romantic comedy manga, many of which would breach their way into international acclaim through live-action TV adaptations. I only sampled the ItaKiss manga for the sake of this video, but I was struck by how modern the tone and pacing, character designs and overall feel of the manga still is, for something which published from 1990-99--but that’s just how much the standards of shoujo romcom were going to be settled into from this point forward, similarly to how shounen action anime found their lane after the successes of Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, and Fist of the North Star. 

The live-action ItaKiss adaptation doesn’t quite have the same energy as the manga--it’s certainly nowhere near as cute, and it tells the events a bit out of order with some changes to the characters, but I think it’s at least functionally paced and written as a show in a way that a lot of these TV manga adaptations just hadn’t really gotten right yet. I don’t think this was necessarily the single most-important show toward the proliferation of shows like it yet to come, but I think between the original manga and its first very WATCHABLE Japanese adaptation, it very likely had a lot of influence over the stuff that would get even more popular afterward. 

I say this especially because ItaKiss wouldn’t simply be left alone after this type of show took off worldwide. A fifty-episode adaptation came out of 2000s manga adaptation powerhouse Taiwan across two seasons in 2005 and 2007, South Korea did a sixteen-episode drama in 2010, Japan gave it another go in 2013, Thailand adapted it in 2015, and then Taiwan gave it yet another go in 2016. So yeah, ItaKiss is deep in the lifeblood of live-action manga adaptations!

Sadly I couldn’t find the 1997 Hong Kong co-produced Kindaichi Case Files adaptation, called Shanghai Mermaid Legend Murder Case. It’s UNWATCHABLE. So is the Psychometrer Eiji TV series that ran 20 episodes in 1997. I was able to find some reviews of the Glass Mask TV adaptation from that year, but I couldn’t find the 23-episode show itself. Luckily there is both a 22-episode and a 51-episode adaptation of the incredibly long manga, of which I know little.

Great Teacher Onizuka is the last WATCHABLE manga adaptation of the 90s, and probably comes the closest to feeling like a straightforward adaptation of its source material, even if it isn’t capable of nearly the expressiveness that the superior anime adaptation achieved. It might be a bit toned-down compared to the other versions, though, for those who find the perverse nature of the story a bit much. Personally, this wouldn’t be my go-to version of GTO, but I know it also helped contribute to the growing popularity of manga adaptations going into the 2000s.

1999 had an adaptation of the long-running Salary Man Kintarou manga which I couldn’t find, so we’re calling it UNWATCHABLE and calling it there, but we’ll talk a little bit about what came after this and why I chose to cut off this retrospective at the turn of the millennium.

Toward the end of the 90s, home video equipment was getting cheap enough and good enough to significantly democratize the ability to create movies. The past few decades have been so explosive in the growth of cinema on every grade that it’s changed the way people interface with media, to the point where if there’s a specific type of media that you particularly enjoy, there is likely to be a plentiful amount of it in existence and a consistent drip-feed of it for as long as it remains viable to supply by demand.

On the other side of the spectrum, digital effects have also become convincing enough to allow what we still consider live-action films to be enhanced through digital animation into a media amalgam that makes a lot more fantastical visuals possible for actors to interface with. As such, we both started getting more adaptations of more fantastical manga with less need to stay grounded to what can be accomplished with practical effects, but also even more adaptations of mundane manga which don’t need much on top of basic setting and costuming to sell the story.

Genres which thrive in low-budget started popping off first, with several Ito Junji-sensei adaptations in the early 2000s, further expansion on Eko Eko Azarak and other similar properties to come later like Hell Girl, and continued returns to the Black Jack and Lone Wolf and Cub franchises. Romantic comedies exploded after the success of adaptations like Taiwan’s 2001 take on Boys Over Flowers which went for several seasons, titled Meteor Garden, and the thirty-episode Marmalade Boy adaptation from the same year. In the mid-2000s, it would be commonplace to see live-action takes on popular shoujo manga like The Wallflower and Ouran High School Host Club, usually stuffed with beautiful actors and fairly WATCHABLE.

On the other end of the spectrum, legendary Evangelion director Anno Hideaki-kantoku showed us how modern effects could functionally turn a live action film into a cartoon with one of my all-time favorite manga adaptations in 2004. Following in this vein, we got a lot of revamped looks at classic characters like Tetsujin 28, Casshern, and Yatterman. After the success of the Death Note films a lot of contemporarily popular stuff started getting adapted to, like Fullmetal Alchemist or Gantz. 

The early 2000s were also a major upspring period for Asian cult cinema thanks to the growing accessibility to foreign movies, and a lot of major Japanese directors of that wave were tackling manga adaptations; like Miike Takashi-san with his Ichi the Killer film, and the more than a dozen other things he’s adapted, sometimes to the chagrin of the property’s fans, over the course of the last two decades. Versus and Godzilla Final Wars director Kitamura Ryuhei-san also handled several manga adaptations, such as the Azumi duology, and the 2014 Lupin III adaptation, which I haven’t seen yet. South Korean star filmmaker Park Chan-wook also made his international splash with a manga adaptation in 2003’s Oldboy, which may well be the most critically-beloved live-action comic book adaptation of all time.

Suffice it to say that the 2000s and 2010s got a lot more complicated for live-action adaptations, and investigating the hundreds of these that have been released in the last 20 years would take me a lot longer than I spent on the first forty years; but that isn’t to sat that I’m not up to the task. Actually, I kind of really want to do it, but only if all of you are as excited to continue this journey as I am, because I can always talk about something else if this video doesn’t do well. Just for the sake of having a concrete goal, once this video reaches fifty-thousand views, I will begin working on the first sequel and cover all of the live-action adaptations of the 2000s!

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