August 14th sees a bunch of events to celebrate the birthday of Kotetsu T. Kaburagi / Wild Tiger. Below are the ones we currently know of, let us know if we missed any!
Official Event
There’s a WILD TIGER Special Birthday Party live stream on August 14th, with Hiroaki Hirata (Kotetsu), Masakazu Morita (Barnaby), Kenji Tominaga (Wild Tiger’s suit actor for The Live) and Hikaru Takahashi (Sky High’s suit actor). The stream is paid, 2800 JPY + 100 JPY fee, and the archive will be available until August 28th. Fans can send birthday wishes and submit questions through a webform (in Japanese) to Hirata and Tominaga, and also leave other messages for the series creators, or request specific merchandise to be made.
Japanese Fan Event
The Japanese fans are arranging an event on Twitter, and tweeting birthday messages and fan art to Kotetsu using the hashtag #ワイルドタイガー生誕祭2022.
And of course there’s our own event, Wild Birthday Party! Please check the link for details, we’ll have both a gallery event (Friend Rice style, if you took part in those in the past you know the drill), and a Twitter hashtag #wildbirthdayparty for the celebrations.
Submit a picture of your creation. You may make multiple submissions. Your submission must be birthday themed and feature Kotetsu/Wild Tiger in some way, and it must be SFW. DEADLINE EXTENDED:The webform is open until August 14th at 5:00 AM GMT. The pictures will be posted as a gallery for everyone to view on August 14th.
Twitter:
Tweet your birthday message using the hashtag #wildbirthdayparty during August 14th!
If you have any questions, we can be reached on Twitter, Discord or by email at mail[at]thisissternbild.com.
Let’s celebrate WILDLY!
Art by Tania, graphics by Jazzy, text by derpchan.
Or as the version in my language goes, “a beloved person has many names”. And Barnaby’s seiyuu Masakazu Morita certainly lives up to this saying, judging by Tiger’s seiyuu Hiroaki Hirata’s ever growing list of nicknames for him. Twitter user @i14015 has been keeping track of these nicknames for years, and I thought it’d be fun to romanize it for everyone’s enjoyment and so we could appreciate Hirata’s ability to come up with a new one so often.
If you’re a new fan who watched the whole series on Netflix, moving on from S1 to the movies and S2 may feel jarring. Netflix version of S1 in the west has scrubbed the sponsor logos that were in the original, leaving just blank spots, but the movies and S2 have them intact. The original concept was that the sponsor logos could be replaced, adjusting the show to whatever region it aired in. To our knowledge that never came to be, so the only versions are the original and the logoless.
An advertisement in a newspaper in November 2010, seeking sponsors for the heroes.
Without the sponsors Tiger&Bunny may never have come to be. It is a very American style show, something that was niche in Japan, so making it was risky. Superheroes are a popular genre in tokusatsu shows but they’re different from American superheroes. The ensemble cast of heroes was also ahead of its time, which may not be apparent to new fans watching it now. We’re used to MCU’s steady release schedule of new movies and series, but when it aired in 2011, Marvel was still getting on with their first phase. Iron Man came out in 2008 and it wasn’t a guaranteed hit, and its success jump started the larger MCU. In 2011, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger were just released and The Avengers would hit the box office the following year in 2012. (DCU hadn’t even gotten started yet, but who’s counting…) The long wait for S2 may have caused Tiger&Bunny to slip under the radar, but coming back to it now it feels like it hasn’t aged at all.
Tiger&Bunny can be seen as a commentary on reality TV and the commercialization of superheroes, with the heroes being employed by in-universe corporations and sporting real world sponsor logos while capturing criminals and saving people during a live TV broadcast. This point is further enhanced by the differences in Tiger and Barnaby’s views on the job at the start of the series. Despite this, the fans love the sponsors and are eager to see the new announcements. The real world brands sponsoring the on-screen heroes have themed campaigns running, though most of them are Japan exclusive. There were far more sponsors applying for S2 than they had placements available – and this is even with the hilarious amount of logos on the Double Chaser bike. (Sadly, Tenga still hasn’t reached their dream of sponsoring Barnaby, but maybe it’s for the best because that collaboration campaign wouldn’t be PG rated.) Back in the Summer of 2011 when the second part of S1 started, Origami Cyclone had amassed the most sponsor logos, and even on S2 he’s the most sponsored hero with eight different brands on his hero suit.
Sacred Seven was the other Sunrise show airing at the same time as Tiger&Bunny, and it was the one that was expected to succeed.
We don’t have information on how the sponsorship deals work, but we can assume that they were a key part in Tiger&Bunny even being made, because the studio at the time had no faith in its success. The popularity took off unexpectedly and it caught Sunrise and Bandai off guard. There was very little merchandise available to begin with, and the clear files and keychains that were available were sold out instantly. So the fans turned to alternate merchandise in their hunger to buy something. The show featured a lot of vague product placement and references to real world items, so for example a specific Kenzo perfume shot up in popularity.
Some examples of real products appearing on S1. L’Eau Par Kenzo pour Homme and Darts sunglasses.
When more merchandise was finally released, getting a figure of your favorite hero was a real struggle. The SOLD OUT is still a real thing with S2 if you dally with placing your pre-orders. Those who have been fans since 2011 will undoubtedly have their war stories of trying and failing to get a piece of merchandise. I know we do… Does this make us slaves to commercialized superheroes?
If you’re a new fan, what do you think of the sponsor logos or the lack of them? How does Tiger&Bunny compare to other media in the superhero genre? Leave a comment here or on Twitter, or join the discussion on our Discord. Links are in the sidebar!
It’s been a while since we’ve been blogging, and blogging again. And right now we’re not so sure about how much blogging we’ll do about season 2. It’s not just about how much our lives have changed since the first season (it’ll be 11 years when S2 airs – we’re no longer students, we have day jobs and commitments) but also the fact that it’ll be on Netflix and the first cour will be released in one go.
A large part of the experience for first season, probably for most of the people who got into TIGER & BUNNY while it was still airing, was waiting for the next episode to come out. Waiting, discussing, theorizing, talking about the plot and the characters. The wait for the final episode was both excruciating (and filled with carbs) and a lot of fun. We literally talked about TIGER & BUNNY every day for months. This social aspect is really important and I’m not sure if the series would have gathered the following it did if it had been released in one go for streaming. It might have been fast forgotten if it hadn’t been for the fans talking about it so much throughout the entire first season as it aired.
Times change, and binging a series can be fun – we’ve probably all been there with “just one more episode”. A binged series has to be great to make it memorable, it’s just too easy to zone out mentally when you’re on a full day marathon through the season. There’s no time to digest what you just watched when the next episode is already queued. Streaming platforms dedicated to anime (Crunchyroll, Wakanim, etc.) still do weekly releases, and Disney+ has been successful releasing an episode per week for their MCU series – although some of them actually work better when binged, and they feel like they were made for binging despite the weekly releases. Netflix is the outlier here and we sort of wish S2 would be streamed somewhere else.
The first season is currently available on Netflix in my country. They have removed all sponsor logos from the hero suits (which makes the opening sequences very awkward without nothing to zoom to) and the episodes lack the C-part. Not including the C-part (the stinger after the ending and before next episode preview) is like walking out of a Marvel movie the moment the credits start rolling. Many episodes had vital plot points in the C-part. So, if any of you have watched the first season only on Netflix, we urge you to find another version and check it out. This is the biggest problem with the Netflix release, parts of the episodes missing without good reason, and it raises a worry if S2 will have these mindless edits.
Lastly, there’s the QUALITY GYM. Parts of S1 production were rushed which shows in animation quality – something that is very common in anime as new episodes are produced while the show is already airing. Having half of the season released in one go means more even and higher quality… but the QUALITY of S1 had its own charm. If you haven’t seen the TV versions of the episodes, you might not realize how big the differences were.
Check some examples below, comparison of TV version and the corrections made for blu-ray release:
This is Sternbild 