TKD Animation 'Taekwon Kid Typhoon Kang' will be on air soon.

KBS-2TV is going to televise Taekwondo animation film,'Taekwon Kid Typhoon Kang' at 6:10 p.m. on every Friday from June 2. With Taekwondo being chosen as the official sport in the Sydney Olympic, KBS has planned and Hankil Production Corp. has produced this film. This animation film is made up of total 26 series, each of which is 30 minutes long. This program goes on for 6 months until the end of this year.

'Taekwon Kid Typhoon Kang' is produced by the 2D Digital mode, which provides much cleaner and neater visual effects to watchers. For this film, Lee, So-eun, Korean famous woman singer, sings the theme song.

It took 2 years for KBS to complete filming. Hero Kang, Typhoon takes all hard and rigorous training to get to his goal, getting over all kinds of adversities, and finally he reaches his goal, and above of all, he learns to face himself and to overcome his own weaknesses. In addition, he faces friends, parents and many other people, and he bumps into conflicts with them but still gets along with those people.

The setting is WooJung Elementary School, located in the foot of Mt. WooJung, which commands a fine view of Seoul. The story starts as follows. Taekwondo lover Tae, Sa-nyeo comes in to the school as a new teacher, but from her first day she has some quarrels with the janitor of the school.

Kang, Typhoon, the notorious troublemaker in the WooJung Elementary School, was once defeated by 'Ma, Do-chun' the captain of the Taekwondo club of the neighbor school called Madoo. Since then he starts Taekwondo under Tae, Sa-nyeo's instruction, and improves his skills, having a lot of matches with Taekwon girl 'Lee, Do-mi', who keeps teasing him. Finally Tae-poong gets even with Ma, Do-chun.

Meanwhile, a new instructor named 'Storm' appears, saying he's going to show superiority of a newly-created Taekwondo of destructive power. Storm was actually the rival of Typhoon's father. Typoon wants to seek for a true Taekwondo spirit, and he visits Master Kwon, who is Tae, Sa-nyeo's instructor, and then enters into Taekwondo training of a full scale.

Other than Typhoon, the film has other naughty boys like Oh, Whang-dang (which means 'embarrassment'), Ah, Moo-gye (which means 'anonymous person'), Goo, Man-li (which means 'a long distance to go'), and these boys make up the Hwang, Moo-goo Quadrio and make the story goes fun and smooth. One more, Pae, Ji-ni, the iconic girl of WooJung Elementary School boys and the mascot of the Taekwondo club, advises and encourages Typhoon to keep up his work with Taekwondo.

Interview with Choi, Pyung-cheol, CEO of HanKil Production

-When did you plan this film?
"From July, 1998."

-Taekwondo animation is rather rare. How did you get interested in it?
"I read some materials from a USA Taekwondo association, and it said Taekwondo trainees got better grades in school than non-Taekwondo students.

-You must have taken a lot of troubles in animating Taekwondo, because Taekwondo is a professional field.
"Right. Animators didn't have many ideas about Taekwondo, so we had a lot of problems. We had some counseling from WTF. From the Dobok to basic techniques and training to games, we had a lot of helps from WTF."

-What are the technical features of this animation?
"We did almost all tasks by computer, cause we thought that it would cause lots of difficulties to represent Taekwondo motions by cell-animation."

-I heard you've already exported some?
"We've started the export to 7 countries now. Also we are talking with more than 30 countries. Particularly, south-American countries are much interested.