Gatchaman 2000 Live Action/Anime CampaignImagine our shock when Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) released a series of animated and live action commercials featuring a Gatchaman team with updated art and Birdstyles. A special NTT website included character writeups, downloads of the animated commercials, Flash "story" advertisements, interactive Shockwave games, and a special "Gatchaman novel" that you had to register to receive (according to those who did receive and translate the novel, it was awful--lots of yelling, grunting and posturing, but none of the action that makes Gatchaman fun). Most notable were the photos of the live action costumes and the live action TV commercials featuring the popular Japanese boy-band, SMAP (yes, this means that Jun's part was played by a guy).
Unfortunately, the site is down now, since the campaign only lasted through the month of September, 2000. However, this leads to a lot of new speculation: Could this mean that Tatsunoko is considering a new Gatchaman series? It seems like they did an awful lot of work to put into a one-month campaign. Only time will tell....
