Genie Family / Akubi Show 4.0

Has anyone seen the new version of Genie Family.

The show airs on Tubi. I checked it out because there was something oddly familiar about it. I’m not sure where that familiarity came from for me. Youtube maybe.

The 2020 Genie Family is a direct sequel to the anime classic Hakushon Daimao, which aired in 1969. It had a Saban dub in the eighties called “Bob in a Bottle.” From what I’ve seen, “Bob in a Bottle” has a really catchy theme song, though the English dub gives “Bob” an accent which may in our current political climate explain why this particular dub has faded into obscurity.

I’m going to call him Genie King, because ‘Bob’ seems to be something for the dub only.

Apparently Genie King’s daughter really stole the show. She has since had two TV shows and and OVA series of her own in the 2000’s. These are also oddly hard to find. I guess it doesn’t have much of a hold in North America.

As for the new series, it’s another Akubi show. You see plenty of the family, but Akubi is the clearly central character. She’s adorable.

Akubi’s age is an oddly complicated thing to explain. I don’t think the different shows are in cannon with one another. She’s usually a toddler, in the OVA she might be a teen, but in the new series the Genie world operates on a different time axis then the human world, so she’s an adult to turns into a kid who can use magic to change age but still looks like a cartoonishly abstracted version of her more beautiful adult form.

I’m told that she’s mischievous in the series I haven’t seen. In the OVA she’s just too good for the cruel world. In the 2020 series she’s whatever she feels like being at a given moment.

The shows okay. One episode made me think is was trying to be education, the next few were just crazy things happening for a laugh.