Giatrus (ギャートルズ) is a Japanese manga written and illustrated by Shunji Sonoyama. It spawned two other manga, two anime television series, a television drama, and an anime film. This TV series marked the debut of Joe Hisaishi, composer of My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. The official English title is Gon, The Stone-Age Boy.[1]
It was first published from 1965 to 1975 in Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha's Weekly Manga Sunday,[2][3]
Shunji Sonoyama won the 1976 Bungeishunjū Manga Award for his work on the manga series.[6]
The third manga was adapted by Tokyo Movie into a homonymous anime television series consisting in 77 episodes, which was broadcast on ABC between October 5, 1974, and March 27, 1976.[7][8][9] Another anime was produced; this time Studio Pierrot adapted the second manga into a series directed by Yutaka Kagawa that originally ran from April 3, 1996, to January 22, 1997, in NHK-BS2.[10]
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First Human Giatrus was adapted by Tokyo Movie into an anime film, which was released by Toho on March 15, 1975.[11][12]
The manga was adapted into a live-action Japanese television drama entitled Back to the Giatrus Days (バック・トゥ・ザ・ギャートルズ・デイズ). It was produced by Koji Matsuoka and starred Ryoko Takizawa, Katsuhisa Namase and Toshiya Sakai.[13]
During the stone age, Gon is a boy living with his parents and his friend, a gorilla named Dotechan. He goes out hunting for mammoths on the plains and always loves his girlfriend Piko. His father gets occasional seizures where he supposedly dies and three men come from heaven to pick him up, but Gon saves him everytime.
