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Osamu Tezuka's Wonder 3 Manga Inspires Stage Play Adaptation
posted on by Karen Ressler
The official Osamu Tezuka website announced on Friday that Tezuka's Wonder Three manga is inspiring a new stage play titled Amazing Performance W3. The play will run from July 1-9 and then from November 3 to March 4, 2018 at the DDD Aoyama Cross Theater in Tokyo.
The play will have a "team A" and "team B" cast. Team A will consist of Kazuhiro Nishijima, Philippe Aymard, Kazuma Kawahara, Yukari Shiihara, and Yukiko Matsumoto. Team B will consist of Minari Ai, Shuichi Sakaguchi, Yusuke Umezawa, Saki Ishii, and Makie Sekiguchi. The cast member's roles have not yet been announced. Worry Kino is directing the play.
Wonder Three (The Amazing Three) ran in Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine from 1965 to 1966. Digital Manga Publishing is running a Kickstarter campaign to localize and publish Wonder Three and several other Tezuka manga in English, and the campaign has already met its goal. Digital Manga's omnibus release is slated for August.
Digital Manga describes the story of Wonder Three:
Wonder 3 takes place in an alternate Earth in the year 196X and the world is overrun with war and violence. The Galactic Federation consisting of all the advanced species of the universe convene to decide the future of Earth, but due to a lack of information they decide to send an elite team, Wonder 3, to observe human species for one year and determine whether or not humans are worthy of saving. Upon landing on Earth, the three members of Wonder 3 – Bokkō, Nokko, and Pukko – disguise themselves as animals and come across the two Hoshi brothers who defend humanity in their own way. With a time limit of one year, what can Wonder 3 learn from the Hoshi brothers about life on Earth?
The series inspired the first original television anime created by Tezuka's Mushi Production studio and the first Japanese made-for-television animated program to use a specific animation illustrator for each specific character. The black-and-white series ran for 52 episodes from 1965-1966 and was later broadcast in the United States in 1967.
