Adaptations of PD material: Jukan

There are eighteen surviving books in Niels Meyn’s surreal Yukan series, which have a huge potential to be translated into the English language, helped by the titular antihero who’s essentially the Amazon jungle-based Nordic equivalent of DC’s Batman. There is a high chance that, when all eighteen become PD in much of the world, their future English versions will instead partly come from the superior Swedish translations rather than from the unremarkable originals, which are in Danish. The rest will be relatively Woolseyfied to various degrees, mostly due to the fact that Niels Meyn himself was a dude as uncomfortably values dissonant as his (somewhat more polite but still brazen and opinionated) German counterpart Gerhardt Hauptmann, yet also meaner than Edgar Rice Burroughs. 

Although a definitive translation into English is still increasingly possible, there are only a few significant changes coming into the series’ writing as usual, whereas the rest are rather minor. Because of how values dissonant the series’ own creator was, it’s daring to think that it’s perhaps waiting to become public domain in almost all nations, bar Guatemala, Spain and Mexico! When it’s going to be reasonably translated (for adults) into Australian English as ‘the Old School Potboiler Edition’, (since it’s initially aimed at Nordic Silent Generation schoolboys after all) the original writing will be carefully labelled as ‘a series of Nordic pulps containing disgusting mistreatment of various peoples as usual’ (read: in terms of indigenous people’s sad mistreatment, the Nordic nations are just as bad as, if not worse than Canada.). 

In hindsight, a moderately rewritten yet much more fantasy-oriented edition of what’ll become the first eighteen volumes will instead be something much better than the original writing (of them all) at any cost. By 2028, the final two books of the original series will be published in six languages all at the same time. 

In 2029-2032, an even more plausible sequel series (read: it is ten fucking books long) will technically be written first in Estonian, Finnish and Australian English, rather than in all three official Nordic Germanic languages. 

Hey, wait a minute, there’s more to do! New Standard Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian and Estonian translations are slowly coming out at the end of this decade. Latvian and Lithuanian translations are also going to exist in the near future. Once a series becomes public domain in almost all the world’s nations (but only in its boring native language, funnily enough), it’s going to be translated into many Indo-European languages. 

A safe for work amateur review on Jungle themed works for adults

Honestly, the first film in James Cameron’s Avatar series has a large (yet rather indirect) influence on a crapload of sci fi works with humanoids from the 2010s onward. Sometimes it’s because it’s one of the costliest films ever made. Sometimes it’s because there aren’t as much unfortunate cultural implications in some of its then contemporary competitors, helping their values relevance to last for a longer time than Avatar 1 itself, which is alright if at times cringeworthy. 

The Totem Realm is a gender bending spiritual successor of it in some ways, even though it’s a story made for an adult web toon market in mind. Ironically, its own author has done considerably more research on a couple of iconic Central American and Southeast Asian buildings than on the peoples who built them. As a result, one such building is very well done, while the Indonesian inspired fantasy ladies and dudes are stereotypical and generic as hell, despite the skin colours and hairstyles being rather fairly diverse by South Korean standards. 

Mind you, there are a couple of unfortunate implications, such as some of its resident dudes being nasty bullies especially to foreigners and vice versa, as well as the very chauvinistic Machismo behaviour of its main leading man named Shaka, a dude who does a lot of things that are knowingly cringeworthy to his girlfriend named Sera, even though he surely means well. 

As in most other trashy romance focused web toons, most of the web toon’s guys surely are fairly huge and very muscly, if thankfully not as drugged out steroidal as a crapload of Mainstream American Superheroes throughout history, which is surely saying something. 

Sometimes pitfalls are far too common

As iconic as a couple of stories are, they’re not without pitfalls.   

All the Tarzan stories written by Edgar Rice Burroughs are retroactively Gary Stu and Mary Sue stories in hindsight, due to the fact that not only were most of them written for pulp mags, trashy as they may be, they’re not known for both biological and chronological accuracies at all. 

Fair enough, a growing number of Tarzan boys and Jane Porter girls (or the more relevant Sheena girls and Bob Reynolds boys nowadays) are becoming public domain at any moment. 

Potential Adaptations of PD books

From the anglophone minority world 

Fergus Hume’s The Island Of Fantasy 

Fergus Hume’s The Harlequin Opal 

P.V. Mighels’ The Crystal Scepter (as Dear Runt Mullins) 

Burt Standish’s Frank Merriwell in Gorilla Land (as Living with Gorillas and Other Beasts) 

Survivors of Japanese media fatigue

Survivors of genre and format fatigue in Japan. 

Interwar Kamishibai: Shōjo Tsubaki (adopted by Suehiro Maruo), Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro (adopted by Shigeru Mizuki), Tiger Boy and Golden Bat are the only major survivors of the Kamishibai format’s interwar over-saturation. While the second to last one mostly stays in Japan, all of the other three have a slowly growing but increasingly well known international presence. 

Emonogatari: Kenya Boy and Isamu of the Wilderness are amongst the only survivors of the medium’s downfall from grace. 

Puppet Tokusatsu: Star Fleet and Kawaii Jenny seem to be the only survivors containing any international relevance nowadays. 

Notable Kenya Boy cast members

The bootleg Korean remake of Kenya Boy must have been the franchise’s first known unofficial instalment. 

The Kenya Boy radio drama seems to be the first known official adaptation of the franchise after the famed Emonogatari graphic novels and the cancelled Kamishibai itself; as it aired from 1953 to 1954. Except for Hideko Kariya as Kate, the cast of such a short lived drama is perhaps unknown even to most Japanese people living today. 

The first onscreen adaptation of the Kenya Boy Mythos is the infamously unavailable 1954 Daiei film; which is where some elements of its more famous animated reimagining came from. The first known actors to play Joe (then called Wataru as in other previous editions and adaptations) and Kate onscreen were ex-teen idols Kiichi Ito and the somewhat better known Michiko Ueda, who is primarily known (nowadays) simply as both an independent pianist and the mother of celebrity entrepreneur Keitaro Tsuda. 

The Toei tv adaptation of Kenya Boy is well known for playing quite fast and loose with the Mythos. What made it quite a successful annual show was that it had the classic quartet of fellow veteran celebs Wataru Yamakawa (aka Nobuo Kutsuna), Midori Seki, the multitalented Hayato Tani (aka Hajime Iwatani), and the late Yukiko Kuwahara (who are all former teen idols) as Joe, Kate, Taru Taru and Jasmine. It also had a fairly popular manga companion with its own unofficial Taiwanese remake. While both are somewhat more faithful to the old graphic novels, they’re otherwise compatible with the show itself for the most part. 

The most famous adaptation of the Kenya Boy Mythos is the (so bad its good) 1984 Toei anime film, which (in an ironic twist) is a magnificent improvement of a soft remake to the 1954 Daiei film. Being both a teen and a young adult at a time when the main Toei Company’s had been churning a ton of (otherwise run of the mill to very good) Metal Heroes Shows (from the 80s to the 90s), former teen idol Junichiro Katagiri and entrepreneurial editor Ryoichi Takayanagi are the most notable pre-PlayStation era portrayers of Joe, whereas the multitalented Tomoyo Harada is the most famous pre-PlayStation portrayer of Kate so far. 

Jungle Hunt: The Kenya Boy Legacy

It’s pretty plausible that Taito’s Safari and Jungle King/Hunt Video Games are clearly needing to be remade, albeit without many (or even any) of the overtly trademarked Jungle Jim and Tarzan connotations whatsoever.

Instead, the three part remake to Safari, the (more beast-focused) video game prequel to Jungle King/Hunt, can have a ton of plot elements slipping out of Kenya Boy and into the individual games themselves, thus is a complete amalgamation to both this game and of all the possible, upcoming 56 volumes of the main story called Kenya Boy. 

The main 56 volumes are just the longest part of a very lengthy saga. He later got stranded for the second after meeting Kate again in Ireland, albeit in the southwestern part of what’s now another country called Uganda. 

A Nagasaki-born man and his half-North Indian Adivasi son went to Kenya for a gruelling paycheque. But then a ton of scary incidents happened, leaving said son stranded for barely nine years along with his family friends, themselves kidnapped years later by numerous villains. Then one of his kidnapped friends, an industrialist named Daisuke Murakami, went to a decaying factory near the Mau Forest to meet up an exiled scientist named Hans Stein from Cologne (who happens to be a green eyed Rhenish man) and a bunch of stowaway girls such as Lenora Van Halen, who turns out to be a member of the really screwed up Van Halen family. 

Joe met the flawed but wise Zega (himself an ex advisor of a corrupt Kenyan Maasai chieftain), the grumpy Kate O’Connell (a green eyed blonde Irish girl with a sad past) and then the mysterious Monster Dana (a spirit, usually in the form of a huge snake, coming from somewhere in Uganda, but who arrived into Kenya decades ago), plus a bunch of other large animals, such as Nanda’s herd. The other volumes have them fighting ghosts in dinosaur clothing, a family of deeply screwed up FRW radicals, and other villains. 

The other volumes have him meet the two fraternal twins of a heterosexual cisgender Kikuyu man named Butch, a bunch of ex-bandits who fostered Kate (but mistreated her pretty badly), and a mysterious Iranian waif named Shohreh; even though the twins aren’t appearing as much often as Shohreh and her sister Dana do. Meanwhile, another group of villains makes a whoopee. This culminates in most of the cast leaving the land for different pastures, like Joe and his dad leaving Kenya at different points in their lives. The main story will indeed end with him being back in India.

The last 14 volumes will have a new mission for Joe, who appears while only wearing a langot, which would continue when he got stranded again in the African continent. 

While the real wild ride has a rough beginning, it truly starts with Joe still stranded in the far southwest of a hectic country to be called Uganda. After fighting an army of various terrorists, Joe and his dad found each other in the jungle. Shotaro himself talked to Joe (and a new girlfriend of his) that he created a makeshift treehouse when he got stranded there. As they got ritually married, they left the jungle while someone becomes the owner of the treehouse, so that he can swing into and out of it frequently.

An amateur Friday the 13th fan theory catalogue

I studied Friday the 13th at Auckland’s Selwyn college for its media studies project on the history of biases shown in horror films. 

It was a roller coaster to see the tyrannically screwed up Pamela Voorhees killing off her fellows at what’s perhaps a monstrous path of inspiration place disguised as a camping ground (indicating that her just as bad birth dad possibly owned it for as long as she remembered, perhaps as an unfortunately OSHA-free propaganda place which centres mostly around his dad in law’s own cult of personality). A casual fan theory of mine is that those bloody excellent DAKKA skills of hers are mostly to remind fans that she’s from a family of badass anti role models. 

There is a possible grain of ironic truth in which, even though the camp/path of inspiration temple is mostly run and attended by various cult members (some of whom have tried their best to survive in such a very unforgiving place), it was founded by a wealthy mayor gone too far. Since it’s only a fan theory of mine, I’ll call him Harold Boyne. 

After Harold passed away in the basement of the camp itself, he got replaced (as the CEO pastor) by his own son in law, a lowly ex-mobster dude (fresh out of the various Asian wars before, within and after WW1’s timeframe) named Willy Burns, who had to marry the awful mayor’s only daughter and child, a middle aged basement dweller of a vampire known as Blaine Boyne. 

There are the familial issues behind Pamela and her plausible birth parents, as well as her maternal grandparents. While the daddy was a sociopathic war veteran who normally was merely petty, the mum was the sad product of a sick union between a wicked mayor and his sole long term maid, a lookalike of Cleopatra the 8th. 

At the surprisingly sequel hooked end of the first movie, she passed away in the goriest mainstream way possible! Even before that happened, she was one of the many factors in her very own unlucky son (by her husband’s friend’s own marital violation), Jason, into becoming the infamous breakout villain that many horror nerds have all known and loved.