Tomorrow’s Joe: a Generation Z perspective

Tomorrow’s Joe is a huge hit of a cash cow franchise in most countries of the world, except for the Anglophone Minority World nations. 

Apart from its now apparently gross and unfair (albeit somewhat sympathetic) depictions of South Koreans and Malaysians in general, something different clearly made it a standout. Along with the Noboru Kawasaki drawn Star of the Giants, the Tetsuya Chiba drawn Tomorrow’s Joe is somewhat more enlightened for its own day than many sports mangas of the 1960s. It helps that a lot of Latinos are fans of Tomorrow’s Joe, as the second part’s two main antagonists, in spite of their infamous stereotype status, are shown to have a few good intentions as well. 

The main characters in the story have several kinds of variable mental disorders and who inevitably tend to suffer from blindly following mainstream society’s rather constricting approach to many masculinities and femininities.  

The first part of Tomorrow’s Joe basically lasted up until Tōru Rikishi’s untimely demise and largely served as the basis for the manga’s first televised adaptation. Said anime adaptation got dubbed only into Hong Kong Cantonese, Castilian Spanish and Italian because of how boring and crude it is in comparison to the second part. While Almi Television was responsible for the meh and ultimately scrapped first English dub, Hong Kong Company Tai Seng was responsible for co-distributing both the Cantonese and (bland but alright) second English dubs, as well as being one of the studios behind the horrendous animated adaptation of Return Of The Condor Heroes. 

The second part of Tomorrow’s Joe lasted up until the bloodied Joe sat down on a chair and partly served as the basis for the manga’s second anime adaptation, itself a much better and more clean soft reboot (continuation) of the first. As it is the more internationally successful televised adaptation amongst the classic two, it has been dubbed into South Korean Standard Korean, Latin American Spanish, Italian, European French and Egyptian Arabic. 

Hopefully, G Kids distribution definitely has to include a shared English dub for both shows in the near future, which is thanks to MegaloBox being so popular with a relatively niche fandom of Anglophone Westerners.