If you’re Akitaro Daichi and you’re “adapting” the monster fightin’ manga Legendz, what do you do?
Throw out everything but the mechanics of the Legendz game, move the action to New York and cast the lead from your super bleak 1999 show Now and Then, Here and There as the plucky, chirpy lead (bringing back Akemi Okamura to voice him too). Yes, he really did this. Oh, and get Nagisa Miyazaki to produce some her idiosyncratic character designs so it looks totally different to the manga too. And to anything else on TV.
While an adaptation, this feels like pure Daichi in terms of the sense of humour and general silliness of the show, he’s in his comfort zone working with regular collaborators like Miyazaki and Hiroshi Nagahama (the animator whose bright idea this apparently was). Actually thinking about it all through the decade Daichi seems to have been on the sort of shows he wants to do, I wonder if the constant work with Ojarumaru allows him that sort of freedom to pick and choose his other projects.
I’ve seen the first few episodes back when not much of it was fansubbed, and it was a lot of fun. Again it’s one of those shows that really should be on an official streaming site as its appeal isn’t going to be there for the DVD market or TV executives. Both are likely to dismiss it as a Pokemon clone, but there’s definitely an audience for it, who might not have encountered it yet.