Ask John: Why Isn’t There Any K-1 Anime?
Question:
Why hasn’t there been a K-1 anime or manga about the sport? Since UFC in America has gone into partnership with Spike TV for television shows, couldn’t K-1 do the same to get a younger audience interested, like Hajime no Ippo does for boxing?
Answer:
Although anime has certainly covered virtually every genre and subject imaginable, there are and always will be omissions for a variety of reasons. Anime has covered the world of mixed martial arts tournament fighting, particularly in the form of the Grappler Baki OVA and two television series. But I honestly don’t know why the K-1 franchise, in particular, hasn’t been the subject of anime. The now internationally recognized K-1 mixed martial arts fighting organization was formally founded in Japan in 1993 and remains very popular in Japan now. K-1 fighter Bob “The Beast” Sapp is a particularly popular celebrity in Japan, having even appeared in the live action Devilman movie, and fought “Kinniku Mantaro” (actually wrestler Akihiko Tanaka cosplaying as the protagonist of Kinnikuman Nisei Second Generations) during an exhibition match last December.
But K-1 may not be popular enough among anime viewers to encourage the production of an anime. Furthermore, there’s also a possibility that there’s no K-1 anime because there’s no current manga to adapt an anime from. There have been manga series revolving around K-1 fighting, including Oda Taichi and Saijou Shinji’s ten volume Tonari no Kakuto Ou series serialized from 1992 through 1994, and Sakai Takayuki’s K-1 Dynamite children’s manga published in Monthly Coro Coro Comic Magazine from April 1998 until February 2001. But I’m not familiar with any K-1 manga stories in serialization right now.
Anime revolving around “realistic” martial arts fighting and tournaments (as opposed to fantasy martial arts tournaments in series like Naruto, Yu Yu Hakusho, Dragon Ball, Kinnikuman, and Flame of Recca), along with anime based on professional wrestling, have never been quite as frequent as anime fans may presume. There are titles including Hajime no Ippo, Ring ni Kakero, Karate Baka Ichidai, Ayane’s High Kick, Grappler Baki, Fashionable Judo Girl Yawara, Tiger Mask, Wanna-Bes, and Fighting Beauty Wulong, but these represent only a handful of titles spaced out over the past 30 years. The Hajime no Ippo manga and anime franchise has undeniably proven very popular and has attracted new fans to the sport. But I think that Hajime no Ippo is an exception rather than a harbinger of other sport fighting anime. Boxing, for one thing, is a bit less inherently brutal than K-1 fighting, which may make Hajime no Ippo more accessible and appealing to readers and viewers. Hajime no Ippo also devotes a lot of its narrative to story and character development, unlike Grappler Baki, which is far more violent and brutal and much more concerned with action than character and story development. (That’s not a criticism, just an observation.)
I can’t predict that there will never be an anime based on or revolving around K-1 or UFC fighting. The fact that the Grappler Baki anime got two television series and ultimate 47 episodes, and Fighting Beauty Wulong likewise got two television series totaling 50 episodes suggests that there is a Japanese audience for mixed martial arts anime. But that audience is small enough to support only infrequent productions. That fact may simply make the production of a K-1 anime not financially worthwhile.
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I’m guessing there’s no K1 anime, because the average life-stories of the fighters are similar to that of Rourke’s character in The Wrestler, and thus might not sell to younger audiences. Baki came out at the tail end of the “yanki/tough guy” boom of the 80s and so it still has enough of an audience to have more manga installments than I can count. That kind of stuff doesn’t sell well nowadays, though, on either side of the Pacific.
For example, if Rambo IV came out 15 years earlier, you think it would have opened at #2? Plus, they had to metrosexualize 300 to sell it to a bigger audience. And while I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of Crows Zero movie so far, having a girl with cowboy “booties” show up during serious moments does ruin it. Hell, Jake Tarbox @ Raijin once told me that Fist of the Blue Sky actually does only slightly better in Japan than in the U.S., and that the real money is in the merchandising for Hokuto No Ken. It’s probably true, too, since I never see that sucker make any best-seller lists in Japan like Angel Heart. And from what I’ve heard of Kinnikuman Nisei, the manga went that direction, too, and Yudetamago had to cancel it and reboot it. But DB: E bombing while Wolverine doing big money in spite of being leaked, er, “bootlegged”, gives me hope that audiences are tired of whiny heroes in movies, which is what probably keeps a K-1 series from happening.
For what it’s worth, Apachai of Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple is a prolific Muay Thai fighter… (I’m not going to get into the detailed differences between the various styles of kickboxing, striking, and the like… but Kenichi is worth a look, regardless..)