If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the good old days of Jetix and the various anime that would air on the channel. A new show has come to Disney XD and Disney+ called Dragon Striker, which feels like it comes from the Jetix era of Disney. If you’re a fan of sports or just love getting invested in a magical world that dives deep into its mythology, then this is the show for you.
Dragon Striker follows Key (Akshay Kumar) as he discovers his ultrapowerful natural talent and learns that he may have what it takes to become the legendary Dragon Striker.
I got to talk to the creators of Dragon Striker, Sylvain Dos Santos and Charles Lefebvre, and we discussed what it was like creating a show about sport for both audiences, how long they plan to keep this show running, what inspires it, and how they collaborated with the creative team to land on its artistic vision.
Christopher Mills: What was it like developing this world in Dragon Striker and the sport, Gorotama?
Sylvain Dos Santos: That was the first stone of the project, obviously, creating the sport. We really wanted to create a sport mixed with magic inside a very concrete universe that was something you could feel and could live in, where you could feel that everything was already there when you started the show.
Gorotama is a sport, but it’s way more than that inside our universe, and it talks about its rules about politics and economy, and you won’t learn that from the beginning, but it’s really the cornerstone of the project. Creating all the rules of the magic was really, really awesome.
Christopher Mills: How do you ensure you make a sports show for fans of the sport but also for non-fans such as myself?
Charles Lefebvre: I guess it’s us, you know; we love sports. Sylvian is a big fan of sports. I love sports, but football is not my go-to by default. What I really love is to make sure it’s going to be interesting. SO the idea was to have it be a gladiator game. It’s like almost having a gladiator who’s fighting in an arena with a ball in the middle.
So, the sports can be interesting for the people who play football and also for the people who love action, who love something that’s really spectacular. We try to smash those two ideas together to ensure the people who are into sport feel like “Oh, I love football; maybe I should give [Dragon Striker] a go,” but if you’re into the action, magic, and spectacle, you can find something you’re really going to love also.
Sylvain Dos Santos: If you compare it to other sports shows like Inazuma Eleven or Eyeshield 21, it’s way less about the sport itself. It’s about the universe, and around the sports there’s a lot of plot. You have the story of Key. He will follow the steps of his mother, but he will discover stuff that has nothing to do with sports and Gorotama but is linked to the past of the school and something very dark. So, if you’re not into soccer or sports, I think you can really like the universe and the real story of Dragon Striker.
Christopher Mills: While making Dragon Striker, have you come up with a possible ending in mind, and is there any idea of how many seasons, roughly, you would love to do for the show?
Sylvain Dos Santos: We have an end of this story. We think about around 5 seasons. Obviously, the audience will decide, but if we could do whatever we want, we thought the story would unfold in 5 seasons. After that, you know, the universe is very wide, and I think if people like the show and like the universe, we can do a lot of other stories because we worked a lot on the mythology, the universe, and a lot of side characters who have whole backstories too.
The story of Key and the knights can end in 5 seasons, but you know, there is more.
Christopher Mills: Earlier, you mentioned Inazuma Eleven, and I was wondering if there were any specific inspirations from the Jetix era of Disney or just any inspirations in general that helped with the development of Dragon Striker?
Charles Lefebvre: The one thing that also makes it from that era was not only Jetix but Disney XD which was the original plan for this type of show. I think that’s why we still have this DNA and why the project still works for Disney.
Sylvian Dos Santos: I think what really makes [Dragon Striker] feel like a Jetix show is that Jetix was the first main channel to broadcast anime. I think that was one of my favourite channels. Definitely action shows, shows inspired by anime – those were the main source. We watched a lot of Jetix, so there is something with the creation we made.
Charles Lefebvre: I discovered Cardcaptor Sakura and Medabots. You know, so many amazing shows. I was already into anime, but [Jetix] was the first one in cable for us to have this easy access. Jetix is part of the DNA, and for people who used to love this type of show, I think they’re going to find a home with Dragon Striker. I hope so because Jetix was a little home for me.
Christopher Mills: How did you work with the entire creative team to land on the art direction and animation you achieved for the show?
Charles Lefebvre: For the animation, one of the things to ensure the quality of the action was to make a lot of the action in-house. We had animators in-house from Japan that worked on big shows such as My Hero Academia and One Piece. A lot of French animators like me used to journey into Japan and try to take back a lot of the knowledge and to be able to put it back in projects. For so many animators in France, we never had this opportunity to do these types of projects.
Dragon Striker is now streaming on Disney+.
