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Case Closed / Detective Conan
From Virtual Japan
Case Closed: Detective Conan (Meitantei Konan) is a Japanese comic book, also known as a manga, that was created by Gosho Aoyama. The series became extremely popular and ended up becoming an anime. It first began, though, being published by Shōnen Sunday, a popular weekly shōnen magazine.
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Synopsis
Jimmy Kudo is 16. He has a crush, Rachel Moore, and friends. He likes to solve mysteries and is, in most ways, an ordinary high school student. One day he decides to take Rachel to an amusement park that is named Tropical Land. While there, he ends up solving a murder. He notices, while he is crowing about solving the murder, that there are two men who are wearing black slinking around the park. He tells Rachel to go home and follows after the two, witnessing them do an illegal deal. One of the thieves discovers that Jimmy is snooping, and he coshes him upside the head, knocking him out.
When Jimmy comes to, it is to find that he is in the body of a six year old! The two thieves decided, instead of killing him, to give him a poison that had not been tested yet. He goes to see Dr. Hiroshi Agasa, who tells him that he should keep his real identity a secret, lest the thieves discover that they botched the job. Rachel ends up running into Jimmy, who gives her the name Conan Edogawa, after Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa Rampo. Dr. Agasa explains that Conan is a relative of his, but that he can not care for him. He suggests that Conan move in with Rachel and her father, and they two agree.
Richard Moore is Rachel’s father, and a more inept detective you have never seen. Conan uses him to help solve crimes, by putting him to sleep with an anesthesia watch whenever necessary.
Series Format
Like most animes, the Conan series has a definite format. It generally starts with Conan, Richard and Rachel, or Conan and his kindergarten friends, meeting new people at some location. One of those new characters then winds up dead. Conan investigates the murder, but does so in a way that the adults actually find the clue, as no one would believe a six year old capable of finding a murderer. Once Conan has discovered who the perpertrator is, he uses his anesthesia watch to knock Richard out. He uses a voice synthesizer that he has secreted into Richard’s bow tie, in order to talk through him. Then Conan explains who committed the murder. The true murdered denies it (of course), but the evidence that Conan displays is usually more than enough to seal the criminal’s fate.
The Anime Version
The licensing to the anime version of the Conan mysteries has been bought by a number of companies, including Cartoon network. They put the show on their late-night “Adult Swim” show, and it did terribly. American audiences did not take well to Conan, finding the show not credible. Because of this, they declined to purchase more than the fifty episodes that they had shown and actually gave the rights back to the original company.