After years of collecting my viewing data, Netflix will soon launch a series made just for me: An animated Pacific Rim spin-off which sees giant monsters roaming across Australia, potentially leaving Sydney a smouldering crater. Weirdly, the show seems to have been lost in the shuffle of every other Netflix release. As PEDESTRIAN.TV‘s resident kaiju guy, I’m here to correct that.
Pacific Rim: The Black is an upcoming addition to the synonymous film series, which saw human forces deploy giant robots, called jaegers, to combat an onslaught of interdimensional baddies.
While mecha movies are hardly a new concept, Pacific Rim boldly included Australia as a major plot point. Not only did Australia build its own jaeger, Striker Eureka, but it was hailed as the flagship of Earth’s giant robot fleet.
Guillermo del Toro‘s flick also saw Striker Eureka combat a kaiju in Sydney Harbour, a welcome change from the typical scenes of monster mayhem in Tokyo and New York City. I’m getting on a tangent here, but I really do need to point out that Sydney’s north shore being quarantined behind an enormous steel wall is Pacific Rim canon:
Pacific Rim: The Black promises to delve deeper into Australia’s role in the fight for survival. More accurately, it will show a continent left shattered by the kaiju. Here’s the official Netflix description:
There was a time when Kaiju rose from the Pacific Rim only to encounter gigantic robots, Jaegers, built to fight them back. That time has passed. Now, Australia has been overrun by Kaiju, forcing the evacuation of an entire continent. Left behind, teenage siblings Taylor and Hayley embark on a desperate search for their missing parents, teaching themselves to pilot a battered, long-abandoned Jaeger to help in their quest and give them even the slightest hope of surviving.
Netflix also revealed a couple of stills in October 2020, giving a glimpse at Taylor, Hayley, and what appears to be a mutant frill-neck lizard laying waste to Surry Hills:
Anyway, the series, which was first announced in 2018, will be showrun by Thor: Ragnarok writer Craig Kyle and Marvel veteran Greg Johnson. It comes from production companies Legendary Pictures and Japan’s Polygon Pictures, perhaps best known to English-speaking audiences for its work on Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Moreover, the series speaks to Netflix’s continuing investment in animation, both original and acquired.
Pacific Rim: The Black is slated for release this year, but no date has been revealed. In any case, I’ll return to this intro sequence until the series drops, and fondly dream of fuck-off big monsters tearing this country apart.
