Many of the early episodes and surgeries parallel chapters and scenarios from the original Tezuka manga, with the primary difference being several recurring characters and Hazama’s position as an untried medical student.įor instance, in the opening episode, a boy is injured in a train derailment and loses his limbs. Instead the show feels more like a dry run of his future life, narrated oddly enough, by Akio Ootsuka, who is traditionally the voice of Black Jack (though Yuuchirou Umehara plays the younger Kuroo Hazama in Young Black Jack).

Unfortunately, despite having a brilliant era of upheaval to work with by setting the story in the 1960s and having plotlines that run through Vietnam, American civil rights, and the Japanese medical student protests, it mostly manages to fall flat.Īny one of those events in the 1960s could have been enough to twist young Hazama’s ideals from becoming a doctor who helps everyone to the black market surgeon who notoriously only operates on people who can afford his price, but instead he goes through all those events and largely comes out the way he started, robbing him of the kind of growth we expect. Young Black Jack (based on the manga written by Yoshiaki Tabata and illustrated by Yuugo Oukuma) would presumably be the story of what turned Kuroo Hazama from a brilliant medical student into the unlicensed rogue surgeon known as Black Jack. He gets away with his fees because he’s a medical genius who can save a life when no one else can, but despite his money grubbing image, he’s not as mercenary as he pretends to be. Black Jack was an extremely popular manga that ran from the early 1970s to the early 1980s written and illustrated by legendary manga creator Osamu Tezuka (best known in the US for Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion).īlack Jack is the titular unlicensed surgeon who charges exorbitant amounts of money to perform his job. Let’s start from the beginning with this one.

Young black jack opening 1