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Osamu Tezuka's Wonder 3 Manga Inspires New Stage Play
posted on by Alex Mateo
Osamu Tezuka's Wonder Three manga is inspiring a new stage play that will run at the Theater Milano-Za in Tokyo next June and at the Hyogo Performing Arts Center next July.
The cast includes (pictured above from left to right, starting with top row):
- Mizuki Inoue as Shinichi Hoshi
- Soichi Hirama as Kōichi Hoshi
- Songha as Commander Lamp
- Takato Nagata as Pukko
- Ruka Matsuda as Bokko
- Hiroki Aiba as Nokko
- Mao Ayabuki as Hoshi brothers' mother
- Makoto Nakamura as Ham Egg
Worry Kinoshita is directing the play. Narushi Fukuda is writing the screenplay. Shunsuke Wada is composing the music.
The manga previously inspired a stage play titled Amazing Performance W3 in 2017 at the DDD Aoyama Cross Theater in Tokyo.
Wonder Three (The Amazing Three) ran in Shogakukan's Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine from 1965 to 1966. Digital Manga Publishing successfully ran a Kickstarter campaign to localize and publish Wonder Three and several other Tezuka manga in English. Digital Manga released the Wonder Three manga in August 2020, but canceled publication of the seven bonus Tezuka manga originally announced with the Kickstarter. Tezuka Productions allowed the company to continue with Wonder 3 but denied production for the other seven manga.
Digital Manga describes the story of Wonder Three:
Wonder 3 takes place in an alternate Earth in the year 196X and the world is overrun with war and violence. The Galactic Federation consisting of all the advanced species of the universe convene to decide the future of Earth, but due to a lack of information they decide to send an elite team, Wonder 3, to observe human species for one year and determine whether or not humans are worthy of saving. Upon landing on Earth, the three members of Wonder 3 – Bokko, Nokko, and Pukko – disguise themselves as animals and come across the two Hoshi brothers who defend humanity in their own way. With a time limit of one year, what can Wonder 3 learn from the Hoshi brothers about life on Earth?
The series inspired the first original television anime created by Tezuka's Mushi Production studio and the first Japanese made-for-television animated program to use a specific animation illustrator for each specific character. The black-and-white series ran for 52 episodes from 1965-1966 and was later broadcast in the United States in 1967.
Source: Wonder 3 stage play's website, Comic Natalie
