Horton No Suddardu

Horton No Suddardu



In 1998, the team behind the Old Man Suddard franchise decided to licence their product out to a little known Japanese manga artist named Kenchi Torizawa. Kenchi was told to reproduce the first Suddard film in a sixty page one shot manga. Based on the huge sales and massive fanbase that it generated, the manga was quickly picked up for serialization.



The manga which is extremely popular in Japan still runs to this day with over 800 chapters already published. Some of these have not yet been translated into English or released in tankouban form. Torizawa was told by the Suddard team that he was free to create any stories that he wanted as they would be part of a separate Suddard universe, non canon to the film series.



Torizawa did his best to mix various Suddard ideas together with Japanese culture, even going as far as to set his version of Horton as a suburb of Tokyo. He introduced various characters such as Suddard’s Mecha companion, Ro-Pu. Storylines included Suddard falling in love with a princess, dueling a band of ninja on a mountain, fighting for the honour of the great Lyncho samurai clan against aliens at the battle of Daradahara and taking Horton’s baseball team to the Japanese finals.



An anime would later be created which currently has over 400 episodes. It has been affected heavily over the years by filler episodes though and this has caused a slight decline in viewership. This is most noticeably seen in the storyline, “Suddard and the blackened heart,” where Suddard is knocked unconscious and hallucinates a conversation with a nunchaku wielding grizzly bear in a kimono for seventy three episodes.



Despite this the manga and anime have a huge following in both Japan and the rest of the world.