If you’ve followed me for very long then you may be aware that my “gateway anime” was Sailor Moon, as it was for so many young ladies and gents in the ’90s. However, it was not my “first” anime.
When I was a tiny person and my parents were desperate to entertain me, they offered a variety of VHS tapes, mostly official but some were recordings of stuff off of the Disney Channel. This includes both The Fantastic Adventures of Unico and Unico in the Island of Magic, films about a baby unicorn who, with the power of love and friendship, could turn into an enormous unicorn with wings (or pegasus with a horn?) to protect his friends against Big Bad Evil Dudes.
I watched these movies over and over and over again. But it wasn’t until I got into anime that I learned that they were from Japan, and more than that: they were created by Osamu Tezuka himself.
I was thrilled when Discotek licensed the films for a DVD release (although I still have my VHS copies). After a previous licensee had disappeared off the face of the earth after licensing the films, I was just glad that I would get a chance to get a higher-quality, hopefully non-melting copy of the movies. The manga— especially in its original full-color form —would have felt like a pipe dream.
But DMP is going for it: they have a Kickstarter up by which they are attempting to fund the licensing and production costs of releasing the Unico manga…which I’ve never gotten a chance to read.
I’m funding the project, and I want to do the same thing I plan to do with the DVDs: buy two copies, so I can send the second ones to my five-year-old niece. I hope you’ll fund it too!
