The Live Action Digimon That Never Left Japan

0:00 Digimon adventured the first and most iconic season of Digimon a nostalgic fan favorite thanks to characters like Tai Matt Sora once we've seen grow and transform over the years following their original Adventure their big screen outing against diobormon digimon's second season where we saw them as upperclassmen 2015's try where we saw them reimagined as modern anime high schoolers even 2020's last evolution Keys now where they returned to the big screen as 20-something-year-olds and of course who could forget their live action adaptation that everyone remembers and everyone definitely knows about alright not really don't get it twisted the live action Digimon Adventure absolutely exists but unless you are super deep into the modern Digimon fandom you probably never heard about the topic of this video super Evolution stage Digimon Adventure try the adventure of August 1st that's the live-action Digimon project from 2017.

0:45 in 2015 toy animation kicked off Digimon Adventure try an animated series of six films or 26 episodes of TV depending on how you watched it that continued the story of the original digital Destin in their high school years the six films were rolled out between 2015 and 2018 generally five or six months apart on average and they were available internationally on Crunchyroll day and day it was a cool time to be a fan of the original Digimon series but even cooler if you lived in Japan or where right in the middle of the try era a live-action version of try was created and made available in August 2017. a super Evolution stage Digimon Adventure Tri adventure of August 1st featured a live action cast of human characters wearing the same outfits as the try movies but otherwise follows a much different storyline in adventure of August 1st May and make him on are not key to the story alphamon doesn't show up dark gennai is not a thing instead

1:33 it's this tight intimate story about the original chosen children and their partner Digimon going on a camping trip on August 1st commemorating the six year anniversary of the day they first went to the digital world and met their Partners in episode 1 of Digimon Adventure the 1999 series silly anime hair aside translating the human kids to real life isn't all that challenging but how on Earth did they handle the digital Monsters in live action was it CG humans and Goofy mascot costumes the answer is actually puppetry shockingly good good and to scale puppets of Agumon gabumon pyomon and everyone else you remember were crafted for this project the stage play was performed only 10 times between August 5th and 13th in Tokyo's rapongi district and was a rather ambitious as well as unconventional show to exist on the stage writer and director of super Evolution stage kenichitani wrote in a

2:19 blog post translated by the digilab quote the nature of the content would make it seem to be impossible to translate into a stage format it felt so impossible that at one point in time there was discussion about simply projecting animated versions of the Digimon companions onto a screen at the back of the stage but Tani fought tooth and nail to make sure this didn't happen and that the Digimon companions would be real physical things on stage beside the actors Tony wrote this in his blog quote in the original anime the children's Hearts growth in the digimon's evolution are tightly linked and I was moved to tears many times Digimon are tied to their partners with a bond so tight that even the words best friends are not enough to describe them this meant that simply putting them on a screen would be insufficient and they needed to be real things that you could touch look at and perceive as real I insisted very strongly on this and so we ended up making them to scale that's not to say

3:04 there weren't some digital screen elements we'll get to those later but the ambition to have the puppet versions of the Digimon also resulted in a conversation where Tanya was briefly told that they may not be able to include all of the Digimon Partners again he fought to make sure no Digimon partner was left behind at least not the base forms quote each of the eight Digimon has their own Die Hard fans so I insisted we can't cut anything at all we have to have all of them appear though the eight Digimon Partners were represented on stage in puppet form creating multiple evolutions for each of them was not going to be possible so the story was composed with this in mind and the writers landed on a scenario where only Metal Greymon metal garurumon and omegamon omnimon were represented in physical form though to be fair the stage play puppet versions for those three Evolutions that were created were massive and seriously impressive works by the prop Masters according to the

3:50 director quote we referenced the stage versions of War Horse and The Lion King Japanese lion dances in Chinese dragon dances and I think we were able to make a satisfyingly big end result of course in this day and age you could easily get away with doing it with just the video but we wanted to challenge ourselves and try to do it live because the whole point of the stage medium is to imagine it and make it real so I pushed very hard to do it Against All Odds so what was the story of this live action stage play we mentioned that despite sharing outfits and branding with Digimon Adventure try super Evolution stage featured a different story about the cast having a camping trip reunion in the three-act play their quiet Camping Trip Reunion gets flipped upside down when edemon the weird Elvis monkey if you grew up on the English dub returns from the dark ocean who in this live iteration is neither a puppet nor an animation projected onto the background but instead it's the one instance of a

4:36 nightmare inducing human in an edemon costume I hate how this looks but I also have to admit that it's kind of Genius Like the best way to do specifically edamon in live action would be to have a human in the weird costume so it's nightmare fuel but you know props to them act 1 sees Izzy Sora and Mimi plan the camping trip that'll commemorate the sixth year anniversary of their first trip to the digital world Kari and Joe work on convincing Tai who's been in a weird Funk lately and has been spending most of his time alone while TK convinces his brother Matt to join as well when weird things start happening at the campsite like their clocks not accurately reading the time they conclude that they've ended up in a digital area they're prevented from leaving edamon seems to be behind it and specifically wants revenge against Thai and Metal Greymon says they're the ones who bested him back in the original series it's a nice little bit of continuity in Act 2 edemon's Minions

5:22 hunt down the chosen children and try to get a fight out of Tai and agamon with Tai being unwilling to fight and caught in this weird Behavior where he's obsessed with going back to the way things were back in the first season of Digimon there's a little twist that the digital area the digidestin are trapped in was not actually created by edemon but instead created by the chosen children themselves based on their desire to go back in time to six years ago when they were all kids Izzy theorizes that time is acting so weird because they don't want August 1st to come to an end and are scared about time moving forward Joe however being the only one in the group who was able to conceive of a future for himself is the first to be able to pass through the digital area when Izzy shares this info with the rest of the team we get scenes with where they each wrestle with why they are afraid of their Futures and of growing up their Digimon helped them through their emotional breakthroughs and in act 3 Tai and Metal Greymon take

6:08 on King edemon and a handful of nostalgic enemies like devimon the Dark Masters and Venom my otisman who are all projected onto the back of the stage using animation footage King edemon taunts his opponent telling them they'll literally be trapped in August 1st for the rest of time then kind of becomes or channels of Venom myodispawn Undead who is actually a new Digimon design created specifically for this play and story which is kind of neat Matt and metal garurumon save Tai and Metal Greymon evening the odds and with their teamwork and a new willingness to move Beyond August 1st 1999. they form omegamon it's an incredibly impressive prop with electronic lights and sounds we only get the bust of omegamon on stage so its head and a bit of the shoulders and chest but the actors playing Matt and Tai stand on his gigantic shoulders and honestly it kind of works it looks rad

6:53 as hell at the end they emerge from the digital prison that had them trapped in an August first time Loop overcoming their fears about the future finding closure and being able to put August 1st 1999 behind them there's some stuff right at the end about how Mako and her Digimon makomon are still out there and need their help tying it into the tri anime and confirming those characters still exist in this story which feels a bit obligatory and needless to me but also probably enticed people who went to see this show but for some reason hadn't yet watched try to give that anime a chance like to hear the full story be sure to watch Digimon Adventure try Mako teas aside though it's a pretty strong self-contained story at roughly two hours that tackles the main themes of Tri and even last evolution kizuna this idea of growing up and moving on while still maintaining a healthy relationship with your childhood Nostalgia and honestly I think it does it much better than the try anime or at least much more

7:40 cleanly no Digital World reboot no homeostasis no dark Genie Arc or Digimon Emperor fake out plotline it's clean to the point pulls on the heartstrings and I love that August 1st 1999 is at the heart of this story it's an iconic date for the characters in Digimon but also for the fans it's the year we were introduced to this franchise and these characters and so it means something to not just the characters in the play but to the audience as well and perhaps most shockingly it wasn't just fans of Digimon who enjoyed the live action show there's at least one review that kenichitani proudly references on his blog post reflecting on the production a respected theater reviewer wrote about super Evolution stage quote the puppets the videos with clips of the original anime the original voice actors performances and the lighting and sounds create a powerful effect it's a story about the worries of the modern person who isolates themselves from their own

8:25 dreams one that should be relatable to all and parallels the children's own growth to the digimon's evolution I cried I was surprised I can't guarantee it's always going to be on YouTube but as of the time of this video being published you can find the entire Place streaming online I'm not going to link to it because toei can be weird about copyright stuff but if you type super Evolution stage Digimon Adventure try August 1st into Google or YouTube you should be able to easily find it there are also DVDs that exist it's probably very rare and you're going to have to find it secondhand but if you're a mega collector maybe this is for you super Evolution stage Digimon Adventure try August 1st Adventure was certainly an odd entry in the Digimon Adventure story but something that Against All Odds seemingly came together quite well and won over the hearts of long time Digimon fans and a theater critics alike such a weird sentence I can't believe I'm saying that if you've seen the play on

9:12 DVD of course let everyone know in the comments what you thought of it if you somehow saw one of the 10 live performances certainly let me know and for everyone else feel free to comment your thoughts on the puppets on the story how it compared to tries anime and what other anime you think should be turned into Japan only 10 show only stage plays thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video