A weekly look into American otaku culture

I stumbled upon this gem of information from this blog. After looking at the offical website, I can confirm that our nightmares have indeed come true.

Cromartie High School has been made into a live-action film.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Cromartie High School is a parody of “tough guy” anime. It’s a school filled with the most baddest of the bad-asses. The main character is a transfer student who starts to learn the ways of becoming a juvenal delinquent. Among his classmates is a dude wearing a Mexican wrestler’s mask, an obvious robot who everyone assumes to be a normal human, a gorilla, and a guy who resembles the late lead singer of Queen, Freddie Mercury.

But as the recent Cutie Honey and Sailor Moon live action attempts have showed us, anime DOES NOT translate well into the real world! The reason why anime is so good is because it can break the limits of reality. When you have real life people doing this, it just looks cartoony and ridiculous. Yes, if you do tone it down a bit, it works. American superhero movies like Spiderman are good examples of this. But the Japanese don’t tone anything down, and so you just have something along of lines of Power Rangers. This will make the make foreign audience go, “this is stupid.”

However, given the completely goofy nature of Cromartie, I think this one might actually come out pretty good. The whole point of the series is to say “this is stupid” and to laugh about it. So I’m interested to see how they handle it. Hopefully the goofy guys at ADV will bring this over to the US, or someone out there will fansub this movie.

Though in my opinion, they should have had an American play the role of Freddie. That would have been sweet.