In a recent segment on his show, Conan O’Brien has a hard time dealing with the fact that the hugely popular manga and anime Detective Conan exists in Japan.
Bewildered by the knowledge that he is not the first search result online in Japan, O'Brien goes on to explain that Detective Conan only started a year after he first appeared on television and is thus probably ripping off his act.
As for Detective Conan, this is a manga that started back in 1994 penned by Gosho Aoyama and has since gone on to be hugely popular and received an equally long-running anime series.
The premise has high-school student and detective Shinichi Kudo drink a certain poison that turns him into a child. Adopting the new name of Conan Edogawa (shown above left), he solves crimes with his friends.
While O’Brien jokingly wants a piece of the Detective Conan action, he clearly doesn’t realize how deep the rabbit hole goes on Conan related characters in Japan.
After all, there’s the very well regarded Future Boy Conan, which was one of Hayao Miyazaki’s formative works and was a more upbeat adaptation of the novel The Incredible Tide by Alexander Key.
However, before O’Brien goes chasing after those sweet Detective Conan profits, he may want to reconsider as he already had brushes with anime in the past.
Specifically, on his prior show Late Night with Conan O'Brien he used a modified insert of the RX-178 Gundam Mk-II from Zeta Gundam that replaced the face of the iconic mobile suit with his own. Though whether Bandai will want to pursue a model kit variant of that is anybody’s guess.
In the meantime, O’Brien has a lot of catching up to do with Detective Conan, as the manga is up to 94 volumes and the anime has over 900 episodes.
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