Gatchaman 2000 Live Action/Anime
Campaign
Imagine our shock when Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT)
released a series of animated and live action commercials featuring
a Gatchaman team with updated art and Birdstyles. A special NTT
website included character writeups, downloads of the animated
commercials, Flash "story" advertisements, interactive Shockwave
games, and a special "Gatchaman novel" that you had to register to
receive (according to those who did receive and translate the
novel, it was awful--lots of yelling, grunting and posturing, but
none of the action that makes Gatchaman fun). Most notable were the
photos of the live action costumes and the live action TV
commercials featuring the popular Japanese boy-band, SMAP (yes,
this means that Jun's part was played by a guy).
Unfortunately, the site is down now, since the campaign only lasted
through the month of September, 2000. However, this leads to a lot
of new speculation: Could this mean that Tatsunoko is considering a
new Gatchaman series? It seems like they did an awful lot of work
to put into a one-month campaign. Only time will tell....
