This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. Find all my work at MJMunoz.com.
Who is the Red Panda Reporter? This is Red Panda Report Zero... again, because I'm not very creative, I guess.
Anyway, years ago, Anthony Bishop, also known... well, I won't tell you what he's also known as...
Anthony Bishop introduced me to the terrific twosome of Toronto.
And we started listening to the Red Panda Adventures somewhere around 2012, if memory serves, as it so often does.
We had met through our interest in tokusatsu, Kamen Rider in particular, as I recall.
Anyway, Tony thought I might enjoy Red Panda, so I checked it out and I was taken by it almost immediately.
I don't remember now if I first listened to the silly original Red Panda, or if I started with the Red Panda Adventures that creator Greg Taylor prefers.
Regardless, the energy of the cast, the exciting scenarios, and the theater of the mind captivated me.
Once I had caught up on Red Panda, I listened to a bunch of Blackjack Justice and stuck around as a faithful listener tuned to Dakota Ring Theatre.
Don't expect me to start up a review series called Hit Me Again, Blackjack, anytime soon.
Despite my affection for those stories as well.
I've listened to all the audiobooks Taylor has done for Red Panda, and I supported and bought the first Monkey Brain graphic novel.
Since then, the Red Panda Adventures have more or less drawn to a close.
The main series is 120 episodes, and this will probably be my third trek through all of them.
Before starting the series, I listened to all the books and sorted them out in a timeline with the show as best as I could.
And I mean, before starting Red Panda Report, that is.
All that is to say, I really, really enjoy Red Panda and Greg Taylor's work.
As this is the case, I looked into things he liked, the things at the root of Red Panda, and I settled on the Shadow as the primary influence.
Stick around to hear some reviews of the original Shadow radio drama, and find links to a lot of episodes and a documentary about the Shadow as well.
So, as I say in the intro, or the intro before the intro, I am a writer.
So I'm going to talk about being a writer in regards to also being a fan of Red Panda Adventures.
I guess specifically Taylor's work, but here we go.
I don't know how many hours Taylor put into writing Red Panda Adventures, but he was also writing Black Jack Justice while holding down a job, being a husband and father, and doing, I don't know what else.
That is a lot. Red Panda Adventures is so well written that it tells a multi-threaded superhero story full of intrigue, adventure, mystery, humor, and payoffs of early seeded ideas and concepts to the point that it feels either organic or masterfully crafted.
I don't even like how everything turned out in the show or in the story, but I like the journey.
Taylor has done what I have long wanted to do, write a superhero story with a single consistent voice that tells a story from nearly the beginning to the end of a character's life.
Perhaps I should say career instead of life.
His skill and craft are admirable, and I would like to do something similar with my own spin on it, of course.
That's all I'm going to tell you about myself right now, so I'm going to go ahead and get out of here and let you listen to the other introduction episodes before I get into talking about the select shadow episodes and other things that all are going to feature in the ramp up to the full launch of Red Panda Report.
So, that's it. This is MJ signing out.
I hope you enjoyed that. Go to MJMunoz.com to leave any questions, comments, or other feedback you might have.
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This has been a story over everything production.