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AKB48's Mayuyu Named Eva:2.0's TV Support Team Head
posted on by Egan Loo
Mayu Watanabe, a member of the all-female idol group AKB48 who is known by her nickname "Mayuyu," has been named ōen-taichō (support team head) for the television version of the Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance film. A self-professed anime fan, Watanabe will appear in commercials and a short segment to promote NTV's August 26 broadcast of the film. The film is the second part in Hideaki Anno and Khara 's four-part remake of Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelion television anime series.
Just as in other NTV Friday film broadcasts, the "TV version" of Evangelion: 2.0 will have an optional, onscreen "scene guide" with text data linked to the scenes of the film as they play on digital televisions. The scene guide will also display a graph for a special campaign called "Synchronization Rate Test" (a reference to a plot term in the anime). The graph will rise or fall depending on how viewers do in an "Eva Cult Quiz" that will run simultaneously with the airing. If the quiz answers break a certain limit, the Synchronization Rate Test will enter Berserk Mode. People who participate in this campaign can enter a giveaway for presents.
Watanabe will appear in Evangelion: 2.0 commercials of 12-, 15, and 30-second lengths during the airing of the Detective Conan: Full Score of Fear film this Friday. She will also appear in a segment immediately before the August 26 airing of Evangelion: 2.0 itself.
Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance originally opened in Japanese theaters in June 2009 and was released on DVD and Blu-ray in May 2010. The film screened in American theaters in January, and FUNimation Entertainment released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in North America in March. On the same night as its television premiere, the film will return to five theaters in Japan.
Watanabe was the star of the first chapter of Kodansha's online manga AKB48 Sprout by AKB48 producer Yasushi Akimoto and artist Natsuo Kume in 2008. She then participated in a creation of an anime short during her idol group's AKB48 Kami TV Season 2 television program in 2009. She received her own manga series in Shueisha's Weekly Young Jump magazine in 2010, and she was drawn by Suzuka/Kimi no Iru Machi creator Kouji Seo for an illustration in Kodansha's Magazine Special magazine this year.
Source: Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web, Oricon
Image © Khara
