For a boy who had the nine-tailed demon fox Kurama sealed inside of him when he was just a baby, Naruto Uzumaki has been one of the biggest fan-favorite characters from the manga world for a long time now. With a story as unique as his, audiences from all around the world couldn’t help but fall in love with him: both in the manga as well as in the anime. But the story that fans have so come to like wasn’t always planned to be this way by Mangaka Masashi Kishimoto.
As astonishing and jaw-dropping as it may sound, the titular character’s father in Naruto wasn’t Minato Namikaze–aka the 4th Hokage–right from the beginning, but rather, Kishimoto had almost given that title to Kurama instead!
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Masashi Kishimoto Almost Made Naruto Uzumaki Kurama’s Son
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While everyone knows the titular character Naruto Uzumaki as a normal human ninja who had the nine-tailed fox aka Kurama sealed into him as per the series, that’s not the story Masashi Kishimoto planned for him right from the beginning. Instead, he was supposed to be an actual fox spirit and the son of the nine-tailed fox itself.
As per the original pilot Naruto published back in 1997 in Akamaru Jump, the young ninja was not the son of Minato Namikaze aka The Fourth Hokage but rather the son of Kurama–the same demonic fox spirit that attacked the village on Mount Oinari.
While Kurama gets killed by nine powerful ninjas all the while killing eight of them in the process, the chief of the village and the only survivor of the attack, Hiruzen Sarutobi, takes pity on the baby Uzumaki and decides to bring him to the village and teaching him ninja magic instead of killing him as well.
Thus, as per the pilot, this non-ninja baby Uzumaki then goes on to live his life as a mischievous human boy in search of a friend–just like Naruto Uzumaki in the official full-on serialized series.
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The Reason Why Minato Namikaze Ended Up Being Naruto Uzumaki’s Father
The reason behind all this chaos was that while transitioning to a full-blown serialization for the manga, mangaka Masashi Kishimoto was unsure of who Uzumaki’s father would be since now he was agent Cherokee for Kurama rather than its literal child.
While it is quite hilarious how Kishimoto had no idea what was going on in the series for the first few arcs and was just making stuff up, it wasn’t until around chapter 16 of the series that he finally showed Minato Namikaze as the titular character’s father through the cover page which featured Kakashi Hatake’s squad from his youth.
Despite that, Kishimoto still didn’t have a name for Namikaze yet, with the only two things the mangaka knew for sure being that the character was going to be Naruto Uzumaki’s father and Hatake’s former teacher.
Nonetheless, while the storyline as per the pilot would have been even more interesting, many are still glad that Masashi Kishimoto decided to go on with the plot he had decided for the official series which eventually ended up making Naruto one of the finest manga and anime of all time.
