However, the show seems to be exclusively aimed at the Japanese audience.
One of the biggest anime/manga franchises of the 1980s — Kinnikuman — is looking to make a spectacular return to TV screens all over the world with the freshly announced 2024 reboot Kinnikuman: Perfect Origin Arc. But while for the Japanese fans the show is going to be a welcome blast from the past with familiar characters and plot lines — the Western audience is likely to be left out of the fun for a couple of important reasons.
In Japan, Kinnikuman possesses a pretty much legendary status boasting absolutely enormous numbers when it comes to both TV viewership and manga/merchandise sales. Original 1980s manga is rightfully considered to be one of the biggest hits in Shonen Jump’s history, selling over 70 million copies and spawning an incredibly prosperous franchise that continues to produce new manga chapters and anime adaptations every several years up to the present time.
In the West, on the other hand, the title remains relatively unknown up to this day. Partly due to the fact that, on top of their highly unorthodox setting and wacky character design, neither of several Kinnikuman mangas have been officially licensed anywhere outside of Japan. Under ideal circumstances the upcoming 2024 reboot of the series might have served as a great introduction into the show’s universe for the foreign audiences, but that is very unlikely to happen.
The reason for that lies in the fact that — instead of being a proper reboot of the whole series — the upcoming Kinnikuman: Perfect Origin Arc will not begin the story from the start. Instead, it will be adapting the so-called Perfect Origin arc — the first story arc of the 2011 manga, which is a continuation of the previous story that makes heavy use of many characters and conflicts introduced in the older volumes.
This means that those of the Western viewers who will not be turned off by Kinnikuman’s unusual style will also have to somehow make sense of its convoluted story without being properly acquainted with the origins of its heroes. And that, obviously, is a lot to ask.
In any case, with its legions of numerous Japanese fans, the return of Kinnikuman is promising to be a great success. A success that — if big enough — has all the possibilities to spawn another adaptation that will perhaps be more friendly towards the Western audience.