Doraemon Appears At New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Biggest Event, Sadly Does Not Win Championship

Should you ever doubt that Fujiko Fujio's Doraemon is truly ubiquitous in Japanese pop culture, consider this: Last night at Wrestle Kingdom 10, the biggest event of the year for New Japan Pro Wrestling, the action in the sold-out Tokyo Dome stopped for a few minutes so that everyone's favorite gadget cat from the future could take the stage dressed like a caveman to promote his new movie.

His thirty-ninth movie.

The new movie, Doraemon: Nobita and the Birth of Japan 2016, is actually a remake of the original 1989 Nobita and the Birth of Japan, which currently holds the record as the most successful movie in the character's 47-year history. In that story, Nobita --- the yellow-shirted weirdo in the video above --- decides that he and his pals should run away to a sparsely populated area, and decide that the best way to do that is to travel back to 70,000 years ago and found Japan by naming themselves as government officials. As you may already know if you're familiar with the series, this is not exactly an unusual occurrence for Nobita and Doraemon.

Sadly, from what I understand, the original has a tragic lack of pro wrestling content, but that's not really a problem for the remake - at least when it comes to promotion. In addition to the appearance at Wrestle Kingdom, there was also a strange cross-promotional music video from late last year that involved wrestlers Togi Makabe and seven-time IWGP World Heavyweight Champion Hiroshi Tanahashi:

The very thin gentleman in the tiger-striped briefs is a comedian Yoshio Kojima.

It's worth noting that despite the cross-promotion, Doraemon has yet to be involved in any actual storylines, which I mention mainly as an excuse to remind everyone that in WWE continuity, the Muppets are 100% real and former WWE World Heavyweight Champion Sheamus is Beaker's cousin. That's canon.