In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, discover whether there was a Moon Knight TV series in Japan in the late 1970s.

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and thirty-fourth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.

NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!

COMIC LEGEND:

There was a Japanese Moon Knight TV show released in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

STATUS:

False

One of the interesting things about doing legends for as long as I've been doing them is that you'll have a question that someone will ask in, say, 2006, and you'll have no way to answer it, and so you will sort of put it out of your mind, and then more than a decade will pass and then the same question will come up and you'll see that a whole lot of new information has come out since then on the topic.

That's certainly been the case when it comes to an old legend regarding whether there was actually a Moon Knight TV series in Japan or not. With the new Moon Knight TV series currently airing on Disney+, I've now been receiving a number of requests for answers to this legend after not hearing about it for years (it was a relatively common one back when I first started doing Comic Book Legends Revealed, so I am not even going to bother citing specific people who have made this request, as let's just say that it is has been numerous).

Before Moon Knight received his first ongoing series in 1980, the character first starred in an issue of Marvel's black and white magazine, Marvel Preview #21...

In that issue, editor Ralph Macchio discussed the rather meteoric rise of Moon Knight as a character and noted that one of the things that they were surprised to learn about the character's popularity is that there were plans to turn the character into a TV series star in Japan!

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Now, here's really the main origin of this legend, and it's one that I was stuck with, because, boy, it sure does sound definitive here, right? In Moon Knight #15, Moon Knight's writer and co-creator, Doug Moench, did a text piece about the history of the character and when he discusses the same time period that Macchio was discussing above, Moench notes, "Ultimately, increasing mail response and foreign interest in the character (Moon Knight was made into a TV series in Japan) opened the door for a real and regular Moon Knight title, a monthly home to call his own."

See? There's no "PLAN to turn Moon Knight into a TV series," but rather, simply "Moon Knight was made into a TV series in Japan." As noted, many readers over the years have written me about that and while I was never able to find a Moon Knight TV series in Japan, at the same time, I wasn't able to necessarily prove that there never WAS a Moon Knight TV series in Japan. In other words, proving a negative has always proven to be a rather arduous task in the land of legends. I was not able to do so back in 2006, but in 2022, I think that I am ready to go with a false here!

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In the 1950s, there was a popular superhero in Japan known as the Moonlight Mask (the character has had a number of revivals over the years). He was so popular he had all sorts of media appearances, live action, anime, he even had albums...

moonlight-mask

My buddy Jerrry Whitworth reported back in 2018 that the famous (infamous?) Marvel/Toei deal (that I wrote about years ago in terms of how a Marvel/Toei animation deal only resulted in a single animated TV movie adaptation of Tomb of Dracula and how they had slightly more success with a live action deal for a Spider-Man TV series that, inadvertently, led to a much more famous Japanese property) was going to include Moon Knight, at least in part because of the slight visual connection between the character and the famous Moonlight Mask character.

They had gone so far as to actually work out a design for a Moon Knight costume for the cartoon...

moon-knight-tv-show

Doesn't that design look awesome? Boy, the Toei animation division was just outstanding. The aforementioned Tomb of Dracula TV series was incredibly faithful to the Gene Colan and Tom Palmer artwork and designs of the original comic book. Here, though, the design was about as far as the TV series went (although there were some supporting material that I might discuss in a future legend, as they are interesting in their own right).

Sadly, though, it never got any further than PLANS for a Moon Knight TV series. Luckily, decades later, there is a big-budget Moon Knight TV series on Disney+ that we all can enjoy, so at least good things came to us who waited!

Thanks to Jerry Whitworth for the information and the various Japanese Marvel fans who collected the great images over the years that Jerry used for his article on the topic. And thanks, of course, to all the MANY people who wrote it about this one over the years! It's definitely way up there in terms of "most asked for" topics for legends!

SOME OTHER ENTERTAINMENT LEGENDS!

Check out some entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:

1. Did Heath Ledger’s Tragic Death Ruin Plans for the Joker to Appear in The Dark Knight Rises?

2. Does Disney Give Free Tickets for Life to Any Baby Born in a Disney Theme Park?

3. Was Oliver Reed Too “Rough” to Be Cast as James Bond?

4. Did Carrie Fisher Work as a Script Doctor on Over a Dozen Hollywood Films?

PART TWO SOON!

Check back soon for part 2 of this installment's legends!

Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com