Interview With A Volgar

 

Thirty years ago the voice cast of the 1979 Star Blazers series was a mystery to American Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato fandom. The credits for Star Blazers listed the Japanese title and a host of Japanese creatives, but failed to mention any of the American voice talent. Without a late 70s NYC telephone directory and a lot of money for long-distance cold calls to businesses that might not even still exist, research possibilities were limited.

That changed one day at a fandom event in Atlanta. A friend of mine was not only a popular local cosplayer but also an accomplished puppeteer, and in that capacity she was involved with Atlanta's Center For Puppetry Arts. It was there that she met another puppeteer named Michael Chechopolous. In the course of  conversation she learned Mr. Chechopolous was the voice of the character "Volgar" from the TV series, Star Blazers, to which she replied, oh, I have a friend who's really into that series. The next time I saw my friend at, oh, DragonCon or the Atlanta Fantasy Fair or some such fandom gathering, she mentioned this interesting detail.

Star Blazers' Volgar is, as we all know, the Gamilon general commanding planet Balan, strategically located halfway between Earth and Iscandar. Known as 'Geru" in Japan, we first see Volgar in episode 15 as he's suddenly demoted to assisting the new base commander, General Lysis. Volgar grumbles and backstabs his way through the next story arc until episode 22 in which both he and Lysis are (spoilers) defeated by the Star Force.

 

I lost no time in setting up an interview with Michael Chechopolous. The interview we conducted was published in the summer 1994 issue of the print version of Let's Anime, and in an edited version in the first issue of the Star Blazers comic from Argo Press in 1995. Here today at the 21st century blog version of Let's Anime is the original, unedited, un-revised interview; at least as original as it's going to get without transcribing the audio cassette the interview was originally recorded on. Thirty years later it remains a fascinating document, revealing some of the experience of being a working actor in NYC in the late 1970s, the 1990s ineptitude and exuberance of four young anime nerds whose enthusiasm far exceeded their journalistic skills, and the patient hospitality of Chechopolous, who allowed four complete strangers into his home to talk about cartoons. So here, without further interruption, is the mostly unredacted text of our interview with Michael Chechopolous.

Michael Chechopolous is a puppeteer and television producer here in Atlanta, working with the Center For Puppetry Arts and GPTV, the local PBS station. Back in the late '70s he worked with Westchester on their production of Star Blazers, as the voice of Volgar. Our thanks to him for graciously agreeing to this interview.

This interview took place on a September night in Michael's apartment in Atlanta GA. Present in the room were Michael (MC), the author (DM), Matt Murray (MM), Christian Smith (CB), and David G. Wilson III (DW). It got pretty noisy.

MC: OK, now, what can I tell you about Star Blazers?
DM: Well, start at the beginning, I guess. How did you get contacted, who did you contact at Westchester, just what happened?
MC: I, geez, let's see. That's been how long ago?
DM: That was what, seventy-
MM: About thirteen years.
MC: '78?
MM: I saw it (Star Blazers) in 1980.
DM: Yeah, I figure around '80, '81, '82...
MC: '82... New York City.
DM: The teeming metropolis.
MC: God...
DW: There are a million naked... cities in the...
(general laughter)
MC: Yes, and this is just one story. Uh, what was I doing, oh, I must have started working for Lord & Taylor, I was lighting design for the Fifth Avenue windows and I did... we used to set up at Christmas, the animation, you know, they have animated window figures which was always a big attraction, so I was doing things, you know, as I could there in the evening or whatever, let's see, how the hell did... 

MC: Oh, that's right, it was an agent, who was a friend of mine, who was a character actor gentleman, he had told me about that, so it was like networking, he heard that this, ah, he may have done some voice-overs for them too. I even forget the man's name now. So I was always talking to him, so he gave me the contact and I called them. They were auditioning, so they had me come in for a preliminary reading, look at sides (scripts) like you do for a film reading, they give you a fresh section of the script, and they give you a while to go through it, and they explain the character.

MC: When I talked on the phone to them, they said, can you do a, sort of a Russian - Bulgarian accent...
(laughter)
MC: So I started thinking of old Bullwinkle the moose, and Natasha and Boris, and then I started thinking of, oh, Count Dracula, and so there was a combination of Boris and Count Dracula.
(laughter)
MC: So that's what I was thinking when I was trying to get this character's voice. Then I went in and they showed me the script, and he said, this is sort of a crazed military commander. So, uh, I said, all right, crazed, if they want crazy, I'll give it to 'em! So I ran over it a couple of times and I just, you know, I was just (a) wild, raving maniac, and they said good, we like it, (laughter) you're hired! 

MC: So, uh, then they had a studio space in New York, a sound booth, and it was closed off with glass, and you had microphones, and on the other side of the sound booth were monitors, they would play the tape, right, and you had the script in front of you, they gave you the script before so you could read it, but you didn't have much time, and you had to try to memorize as much as you could, but you had it there to refer to. So they play the tape, and then you try to synchronize the dialogue to the action of the character as he was moving and talking...
DM: So you got to see the picture?
MC: You see the picture, you got to see it, and then they do takes, and many times you did or they'd stop and they'd say, from this point, go on.

MC: Of course, the less you goofed up, the more they liked it, because it took less time and they were able to move on and you know, less studio time and whatever. So as an actor, you wanted to not goof up, (you wanted) to try to get it on one or two takes, and do it, you know, and then you had other actors next to you, if there were two or three in a scene, so you had somebody to read off of, but you were concentrating on the monitor out there, trying to synchronize that. It was fun, I liked it. 

 
MC: So of course when I saw this character, this bald-headed, big figure, I immediately could get into it, and then, you transfer, of course, the voice into the character that you saw, so it's your, your creation became something different already. So I had from puppeteering, you know, that's sort of what happens with a puppet. So I had experience, as I create a puppet as an artist, I create one thing, but when you start performing with the puppet, it becomes something else from what it is, because you're adding a life to it, and it has its own life outside of just structural, physical characterization. So just like a cartoon drawing is one thing, when you add a voice to it, the combination becomes a creation. And so, uh, it was fun. That's how we did it, and it did pretty well. I got a couple of times... I think I had about eight sessions with Volgar, right, and that was it. I've always wanted to do more, but...

DM: Did they never call you back?
MC: Uh, no. I don't know what the hell happened with that.
DM: Neither do we.
MC: It was non-union... (cross talk prevented us hearing this)
MM: We don't know what happened to any of those voice actors. We've never heard them again.
DM: What happened with that show was that, the first release they did here of Star Blazers was two television seasons, and later in Japan they came out with a third television season, but that didn't get translated and brought over here until, five years later? It's like, really recently.
MM: They couldn't find the same voice actors to do the roles, and the new ones aren't nearly as good.
MC: Huh, they should have called me.
(laughter)
DM: You know, no one can figure it out, I mean, people just don't vanish.
MC: You know, the reason was, because it was non-union...
(everyone says "Ahhhh,")
MC: So they didn't want to keep records, because I was equity SAG (Screen Actors Guild), now...
DM: So they didn't keep records?
MC: Probably not. Outside of paying you.
DM: The smoking gun!
(laughter)
MC: They probably didn't want, uh, to know, or to keep track of people, because they use a lot of union people, OK? And of course I was making like, what did I make every time I went into the studio, 150, 200 bucks, you know, so, hey, I don't care if you're union or non-union, that was good money for three or four hours in the studio just playing around! So, you know.
MM: They didn't list any voice actors in the credits for Star Blazers. None of them are listed.
MC: And that's another reason why, so I'm not... I didn't credit for that... bastards!
(laughter)
MC: So...
MM: Yeah, and all these other shows like Robotech, when they list voice actors, they don't say who played who.
DM: Well, you will (get credit) now.
MC: Yeah and not only will we know, but when we show the clip on 8 (the PBS station) and you're being interviewed, you'll say, "...and the voice actor..."
(laughter)
MC: ..."who never got credit, the poor guy, he's a struggling person, who's also assistant producer of this show, I believe...
(laughter)
CB: By a strange coincidence...
(laughter)

(Chechopolous was working at Georgia Public Television at the time, and there had been some talk of producing some sort of TV program about Japanese animation fandom and anime in general. This did not wind up happening, but the project is mentioned a few more times in the interview.)

DM: So what was it like working with the other voice actors?
MC: It was great, you know, we were all pretty good, professional people.
DM: Were they all professional actors?
MC: Yeah, I'm sure they all were. New York, you know, eight million people, and you know, everybody is an actor!
DW: Couldn't throw a stone without hitting an actor.
MC: You know, yeah! From the cabdriver to the waitress, they're all in the business. So it wasn't hard for them to find talented people in that city, who were professional and willing to work, off scale.
CB: Did they track all of you at once? I mean, did they have each person miked, and you all read parts and put it down to tape at once, or did they take each person at a time, when they were recording a session?
MC: No, no, they could, they did both. They could run two together, they could go, but usually the tempo and the flow wasn't (like) that... so that usually when the next person started, they'd have to stop, and start with him. But if it happened, they would try to go for it, and if it hit, they would let it go, OK? But if you couldn't get it, they'd stop and say, OK, you start, and they'd let the next actor shoot. But sure, when we had a dialogue going between us, we would try to take it, the dialogue, and sometimes, you know, we'd get it, it worked.

DM: So, you know, they, uh, do you remember the last episode your character was in?
MC: No.
DM: Well, you...
MC: I died?
DM: Yeah! Well, see...
(laughter)
MC: I blew up, right?
DM: General Lysis planted a bomb underneath the, the Argo, the way the Japanese (episode) had it, he had the bomb, and they sat there and blew up, 'cause he was trying to blow up the bigger ship.
DW: The bomb was still in Lysis' ship while it was attached to the side...
DM: It was suicide. But the Americans took it, I guess Westchester took it and snipped it around a little, and redid a scene where Lysis and you, like, escape and got away.
MC: Ahhh...
DM: But you never see them again. So you're still alive!
MM: They just took the same footage and ran it backwards, to show the ship fly away.
DW: Which is more effort than anyone has ever done, in a similar situation.
MC: So they kept my character alive, in the American version?
MM: In the Japanese version they just, click, poof, you're gone... beause they figure they're going to show it to kids.
DM: They usually do that when it's a kid's show in America, they have... they take Japanese shows and just snip the violence out, any...
DW: Innuendo of any kind...
MC: Death, they don't want to see you die, yeah, you can get hurt but be all right.
DW: You can't even get hurt, really.
CB: Well, occasionally.
MC: Just sort of hurt.
CB: Like a strange virus or something.
MC: Yeah, like, what's that series on now, about the polluters, the toxic, uh, thing?
CB: Toxic Avengers... (Toxic Crusaders? Captain Planet? Who knows)
MC: Yeah, like that, you never see anybody get seriously hurt.

 
DM: Well, the Japanese... this shows... well, Star Blazers was originally Space Cruiser Yamato, and the Yamato was, you know, their super battleship during World War Two.
DW: The biggest and the best ship they ever had.
DM: The whole point behind Space Cruiser Yamato was that they revived the Yamato as a space battleship, to save Earth, and the Americans, they, you know, they said, yeah, it's the Yamato, but they called it the Argo, and it lost all the militaristic Japanese impressions, but to Japan the show is very much a political, patriotic...
MC: Ahhh.
MM: It's like Japan saving the Earth.
DW: It's as if the Enterprise (from Star Trek) was like an American, uh, spaceship.
CB: Which it pretty much is.
DW: Well, I mean if it had...
CB: The American flag painted on it...
DW: It would be that kind of thing.
MM: It's like, the planet they're trying to reach in the ship (in Star Blazers), it has one land mass on it, which looks suspiciously like Japan...
(laughter)
MM: It's very obvious.
DM: It's a very interesting show, both, you know, as far as, we like animation and it's neat, but looking at in a wider, in a sort of...
MC: How much did it play? I mean, where... I would like to know, what exposure did it get?
DM: Space Cruiser Yamato... what, in America? It's been shown all over the world.
MM: There are whole fan clubs devoted to the thing.
MC: Yeah? I could be a celebrity and I don't know it?
(laughter)
DM: There are people out there, that say, "Well, this is neat!"
MM: Mostly in Texas.
DM: They're in... well, there's these two guys! (gestures to people in room)
(laughter)
MM: There's a fan club in Texas that's named after the Earth Defense Command from Star Blazers, yeah, their primary interest is that show...
DM: Well, it used to be.
MM: Well, yeah.
MC: That would be interesting for (Channel) 8 to mention all this...
DM: There was a Star Blazers Fan Club that ran for many years in New England...
MC: Can you get connections to that?
CB: Oh yeah.
MC: So when we get on that 8 thing, and we show them, and we we talk about that, (we need to) bring as much material to support the...
DM: How many boxes?
(laughter)
MC: Well, I mean, as much...
DM: We've been into this stuff for so long...
DW: We'll have to bring a pick-up truck.
CB: We'll just come in like this (spreads arms wide)
MC: That's it! My producer will go crazy!
(laughter)
DW: It's like, how many hours can we devote to this one subject.
MM: We could show side-by-side in comparison. Here's the American version, here's the Japanese version (laughter); we have Japanese episodes too.
MC: OK, so where... it played all over America, how long did it play?
CB: About a year and a half ago, they played it weekly for a while. It was originally a daily show, they started running it on Sunday mornings only.
MM: Like, in '85 was the last time they showed it that way.
MC: You know, I should have got residuals, if it was union, I would be getting residuals, but because it was a payoff, non-union, we all got, you know...
DM: Well, you took the money then...
MC: I was a starving actor! Still am!
(laughter)
DM: But Star Blazers, or here, it was called Star Blazers, I'm not sure what it was called in Europe, it was Space Cruiser Yamato in Japan...
MC: And it played in Europe?
MM: I think it was just Space Cruiser, in Europe. (the 1977 Yamato film was released in the UK with the Space Cruiser title. The series had different titles in other European markets.)
DM: Yeah, Space Cruiser in Europe... in Japan they had three TV series and five different movies, that are all new... um, merchandise out the butt..
MM: Oh yeah.
DM: Toys, models, books...
MC: Do they have any of Volgar, do you think, (of his) character?
MM: I've seen just two figures and those were just the main characters.
DM: I don't even know if they have a Lysis.
MM: Well, unless you count IQ-9, that makes three.
DM: I think he was a main character.
DW: You've got the IQ-9, I've got, um, a...
DM: You know, the wind-up, you know the robot? I've got a little wind-up IQ-9... they've got little action figures...
MC: Yeah! Bring 'em!
(laughter)

MC: He's going to go wild.
DM: We could do a whole show on Space Cruiser Yamato.
MM: Yeah, why not?
DW: Alone!
CB: That'd be good to do.
DM: I think in Mexico it was called Space Cruiser Champion...(it was not.)
DW: I didn't know there was a Mexican series.
DM: You see, Japanese stuff is really popular all over the world. There are Japanese cartoons right now that are popular in Canada and Europe.
DW: Japanese cartoons are really, uh, growing in interest (here) too...
CB: Unfortunately it's the wrong ones...
(laughter)

(At this point the interview concluded. and we moved to another room with a TV and a VCR so that Mr. Chechopolous could enjoy his performance as Volgar for the first time in years.)

Thank you for coming with us down memory lane, and thanks to Mr. Chechopolous for inviting us into his home and giving us the details on his Star Blazers voice acting.

-Dave Merrill

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Rosemont: 1999

As occasional historians of North America's anime fandom, sometimes we're called upon to make our research available to the general public. Gerald Rathkolb of AWO has been doing this over at the Internet Archive for a while, and when I got a request for the Anime Central program book from their 1999 show, I did the same. As I was watching the scanner do its thing to this 25 year old document, it occurred to me that what we have here is a unique snapshot of anime fandom at a critical juncture. Pokémon and Sailor Moon and Cartoon Network's Toonami block were forging new otaku out of channel surfers, the home video market was filling the shelves of Best Buy and Mediaplay and Suncoast Video with product, and all this was driving more and more people to the anime conventions that were cropping up everywhere a hotel ballroom lacked cosplayers. So let's look at the Anime Central 1999 program book, and let it tell us about anime culture circa 1999. 

Well, first off we have the bikini area of All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku, hurling itself at the unsuspecting reader. Perhaps this amount of displayed cartoon flesh was business as usual to anime fans, but might have been a bit lurid for the public at large. This artwork was used for the ACen 99 t-shirts, leading to a lot of hasty explanations about what exactly was happening down there in Rosemont, was this some sort of X-rated adults-only thing? No, it's just that Japanese anime fandom in the 90s was still a very male, very male-gazey, fan-servicey, Gainax-bouncy, horny nerd culture that only an incoming crowd of Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon fans - that is to say, girls -  could mitigate.

Sakura Wars is a Taishō period Sega game that since 1996, has appeared in seven different animation projects and 17 different video games across multiple platforms. Were any of them available at Cyberzone in Shaumburg? Probably!

A Pokémon-filled note from the con chairs, back when you could throw licensed characters in your program books without somebody's lawyer showing up to harsh your buzz. Actually I don't think anyone in anybody's legal department really cares what we put in program books. The first Anime Central in 1998 drew 1200 attendees, and it really felt like it, it felt like Chicagoland anime fans were chomping at the bit to finally get their anime con scene started. See also Anime Boston, which also started strong out of the gate. Was ACen '99 the year a big rainstorm moved through and one of the stairwells got flooded? I forget.

The Alternative Video Warehouse spent who knows how much on a full page ad promising 1000 titles, discounts and immediate shipping, and yet forgot to include any way to find them or get in touch with them at all. Whoops. 

I always enjoy these Chamber Of Commerce style "about our city" blurbs, but come on, this isn't Des Moines or Erie or Louisville, this is CHICAGO. There was a whole musical about that toddlin' town! On the other hand, Rosemont itself is a self-contained municipality created specifically to house conventions, a rare, fascinating case of FBI-investigated single-family machine politics.

Guests of Honor include Project A-Ko's Yuji Moriyama, Bubblegum Crisis' Kenichi Sonoda, and Tsukasa Kotobuki, whose oddly proportioned skulls perhaps were the pivotal element driving me away from the Japanese animation of the 1990s. Also appearing are Jan Scott-Frazier and Doug Smith, two names that will be familiar to anyone who attended late 90s anime cons, because they were at all of them.

Toshifumi Yoshida moved from Viz to Pokémon where he continues to keep those pocket monsters a part of pop culture, while AnimeEigo recently changed hands but is still committed to bringing anime to English-speaking audiences. Chicago native Crispin Freeman is still voicing and producing in the anime field today!

I was at this Anime Central but I didn't go anywhere near the Masquerade. I'm pretty sure I spent Saturday night sampling a selection of Midwestern craft beer. 1999 was actually the last time I had anything to do with any anime convention costume contest anywhere; I MC'd the AWA 1999 costume contest and it was a nerve-shattering, demoralizing experience that caused me to question most of the life choices that had led me to that point. No more, I said. Since then it's been 25 wonderful, cosplay-skit free years. 

I'm pretty sure I was on the Corn Pone Flicks panel, and I believe there was some sort of history-of-fandom thing I was on at a shockingly early, hung-over hour. There definitely was an Anime Hell happening at this Central, though it didn't make it into the program book. 

I'm pretty sure this is the 1999 ACen Anime Hell flyer, but I could be mistaken. The flyer is definitely 90s vintage, however, designed as it is to meet your needs in a world of crisis.

Is Fushigi Yuugi the future of anime? I'm going to use 25 years of hindsight and say "maybe," considering how big isekai is now. I will say I love the "anime cel trading session" and we should bring that back, because let's face it, they aren't making any more of those things and if you have some, we should probably set up some trades. 

Take note of the Y2K references in the NekoCon ad - when January 1st 2000 rolls around all the software that wasn't updated for the new millenium would crash and civilization would end. And that's exactly what happened. Anyway, it sure felt like it the next morning, thanks to...  let's just say that New Year's Eve featured a lot of Jell-O shooters.

Oh man, the Con Suite.  Remember Con Suites? That there would be a hotel suite set aside for con attendees to just, sort of hang out in? With snacks and drinks? The Con Suite was a vestigial organ left over from the anime con's evolutionary ancestor, the literary SF convention, which were quieter affairs of a few hundred attendees. Some events naturally scale up as attendee sizes increase, and some don't, and the con suite doesn't work so well when it's expected to provide hotel sofa space for two or three or five thousand. 

Speaking of literary SF conventions; was there enough crossover between the Worldcon audience and the anime convention crowd to justify this two-page ad confusing everyone with two options for hosting Worldcon? I still don't know what a "pre-opposing membership" is. What I do know is that the 2002 Worldcon wound up being held in San Jose, and attendance was 5916, which made it a fairly large Worldcon. Meanwhile, in the 2002 anime convention world, Otakon had 12000 attendees and Anime Expo did 15000 that year. I think we all see where this trend is going.

The dealer's hall is a key part of any anime con, and in 1999 my recollection is that the tables were loaded with VHS and laserdiscs, because the domestic anime DVD market wasn't even a year old at this point. Localized manga wouldn't become a bookstore-filling phenomenon until the early 2000s, so most of the manga you'd buy in 1999 would be Japanese editions, American-style 32 page comics, or Viz graphic novels. Of course T-shirts and wall scrolls and figures and model kits and gatchapon toys snared a good proportion of the ACen '99 attendee's spare change. I'm seeing a lot of familiar names on the vendor list; Houston-based Planet Anime did a ton of conventions before the owners sold the store in 2005. AD Vision had, um, some exciting times on the road to bankruptcy. Norcross GA's House Of Anime went online only a few years back; they still vend at shows, I think. Nikaku Animart is still open in San Jose CA! Musashi Enterprises had amazing vintage anime stuff at their vendors tables and I was *always* too broke. They also developed the Star Blazers Fleet Battle System tabletop gaming system. Anime Pavilion? Still your VA home for anime goods! Manga Entertainment is now owned by Starz. Joy's Japanimation remains a time capsule of rental anime VHS in scenic Greensburg PA. Media Blasters survives, Neko-Con still happens every fall, Katsucon still happens every spring, Otakon happens every summer, Anime Fest is having its last show this year, Fantasticon holds comic cons in the Midwest, turns out AnimeVillage dot com was Bandai all along, and Dan Kanemitsu continues to lecture about Japanese doujinshi culture. And if you were still wondering about how to find Alternative Video Warehouse, they're at tables 5,6,7,8 and 9! 

Look at the staff list and you'll see some con chairs, some manga editors, and overall a bunch of people that I still talk to or toss jokes at across social media on a regular basis. In '99 the scene was still a small community; if you staffed an anime con you probably knew a dozen people who staffed other anime cons; chances are you could poke your head into any event at the show and see someone you knew or at least looked familiar, or who maybe you wanted to avoid. That's one of the pitfalls of a small community; you don't always get along with everybody you're sharing that small community with.

"Animevillage dot com" is no longer totally free, but whatever holding company wound up owning the URL will probably sell it to you for a reasonable price ($12k, last I checked). Instead, why not go back in time and get Mari Ijima's autograph at Anime Expo '99?

Here the ACen book takes the bold move of making their back cover look like the front cover of a magazine. AWA did this in 2005 and the print shop put the covers on backwards. Oops. Seems to have worked out for ACen and Planet Anime and whoever that is from whatever anime that's from, though. One thing that stands out when looking at this program book is what's not in it - for one thing, there's a definite lack of mecha. No robots, no transforming jet planes, no super mechanical fighting machines, not even a stray Scopedog, Giant Robo or GaoGaiGar. Absent are mentions of the shows we now regard as emblematic of 90s anime - no Dragonball Z, no Gundam Wing, barely any Evangelion. The name "Hayao Miyazaki" never appears. However, let's remember this program isn't representative of anything other than a con committee trying to put together what turned out to be a really slick, professional looking publication on a deadline and a shoestring, so you can't draw too many conclusions from what made the cut and what didn't. Sometimes it just comes down to what's available at the moment; anime cons haven't the luxury of waiting around for things to be perfect. Perfect is for next year, let's get this year's show out of the way first.

I went to the first six Anime Centrals before life scheduled me away from Chicagoland, but the show continues to fill Rosemont with midwestern anime fandom every spring. Why not drop into the convention next year and let me know how it compares to 1999? 

-Dave M

Anime North 2024

 

Another year has rolled around and before you know it, it's time to pack up and head out for Anime North! Since 1997, AN has been Toronto's number one anime fan convention, moving from collegiate institute space to interstate off-ramp motels to where they are now, filling the North and South buildings of the Toronto Congress Centre as well as all of the Delta Hotel Airport with thirty five thousand fans enjoying each other's company in the late spring/early summer Ontario sunshine.

It literally seems like yesterday, but the fact is it's been almost two decades since I first talked the Anime North people into letting me do panels. I guess I'm doing something right because they haven't told me to quit yet!  So what am I up to this year?

Friday night at 10 it's time for Anime Hell, my late night two-hour confabulation of clips, shorts, ads, fakes, and whatever else I can snag ninety seconds of that's about Japan or Hell or Anime or all three or sometimes neither. 

At 1:30pm Saturday afternoon Neil Nadelman and myself look at the pioneers who blazed the trail of anime localization in North America and brought us Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Kimba The White Lion, Prince Planet, Marine Boy, Gigantor, 8th Man, Amazing Three, and other groundbreaking works of cartoon entertainment. 

 

This year we dealt with the sudden loss of legendary mangaka Akira Toriyama, and we'll be looking back on his life and career Saturday at 4:30.

Saturday night means it's time for Neil Nadelman to bring the Totally Lame Anime to a packed house of fans ready to have their sensibilities offended by some of the least successful Japanese cartoons ever animated. 

All day Sunday Anime North turns the Paris room into the home of Old School Afternoon, six hours of classic anime, all currently unlicensed here and yet deserving of our attention and appreciation.

 

At noon Sunday I'll be joined by Neil Nadelman and Shaindle Minuk as we discuss the saga of Candace White Adley and her struggle through the tumultuous early decades of the 20th century while simultaneously entertaining an entire generation of 1970s fans worldwide.

 

Ninety minutes later anime expert Mike Toole and myself will wander through a forgotten graveyard where lie the corpses of anime dubs that once entertained millions and now lie neglected, disregarded by time and progress. Dub disasters or secret masterpieces? They'll all be uncovered by our shovels. 

It's been fifty years since Space Battleship Yamato premiered in Japan and that means it's time to take a 148,000 light year journey through the epic voyages of this iconic anime legend. Without Yamato there's a good chance none of us would be here talking about these Japanese cartoons, and a panel at 3pm on Sunday is literally the least we can do. 

 

And that's not all that's happening this weekend! Game shows, screenings, cosplay, improv, a vast vendors hall, a giant artists alley, a gunpla model kit exhibit, guest autographs, the yard-sale Nomonichi event, dances, musical performances, fashion shows, video and tabletop gaming, workshops, panels, and events of every description are happening at Anime North 2024. See you there! 

 

-Dave Merrill

With An "E"

Let me start with a personal note. I grew up in the US, but twenty years back I moved to Ontario to begin a new adventure north of the border. As a new Canadian, I lacked the cultural background that informed the upbringing of many of my new friends and coworkers. I didn't know Mr. Dressup or The Friendly Giant. I was sadly unaware The Littlest Hobo was, in fact, a dog. I'd never been to the Pop Shoppe, didn’t know who Tim Horton played hockey for, never watched Late Great Movies On Citytv. But there was one Canadian cultural giant that I and millions of others were aware of, one that predated SCTV, Celine Dion and the Kids In The Hall. Perhaps the biggest early Canadian pop culture export? An orphan girl named Anne. 

my Anne LDs

The story of a child finding a home and a life in turn of the century Prince Edward Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1908 novel Anne Of Green Gables has sold fifty million copies, been translated into 35 languages, and has been the subject of films, TV shows and stage plays. This red-headed heroine appears in a bewildering variety of media including dolls, toys, picture books, musicals, museums, costumes, even license plates for the fictional Anne’s very real province of PEI. L.M. Montgomery was from PEI herself and used her childhood as inspiration for what would eventually become a series of Green Gables novels, even as she moved to Ontario and what we’d now call the Greater Toronto Area.

drive carefully, Anne lives here

There's a part in Montgomery's novel where the fire in the Green Gables hearth on a November night is described as "the sunshine of a hundred summers being distilled from the maple cord-wood" and I'm reading this and asking myself, did that L.M. just get away with this? She did, didn't she. The prose of Anne Of Green Gables is filled with minute, evocative, almost-sentimental touches of descriptive poetry - certainly in keeping with the Gilded Age provenance of its origins - and it speaks to the determination of Anne and through her, Montgomery, to find the beauty and wonder in what at first glance might seem to be unexceptional places, humdrum tasks and the sometimes tragic moments that make up life, a tall order for an unwanted child in a world that has almost no sympathy or resources for anything other than itself. 

Anne begins with middle-aged siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert requesting a boy orphan to adopt to help out around their Avonlea farm, as if they were buying a draft horse or ordering a new plow. When Anne arrives instead, there’s some clinical calculus as the Cuthberts weigh their agricultural needs against the literal welfare of a child. At this time, Canada was seen as a convenient destination for the unwanted children of late-period British Empire; from 1869 right up until the late 1940s the UK sent something like a hundred thousand children to homes across Canada. Most would spend their remaining childhood as de facto indentured domestic servants or field hands. The reality is that most of these children weren’t actually orphaned; most had parents overcome by financial or personal disaster, forced by circumstances to break up their families. Anne’s orphan drama played out in real life for decades on train platforms across the country from Nova Scotia to British Columbia.

my Anne cel

We first see Anne as an awkward tween, sometimes overwhelmed as her overclocked imagination battles her desperate desire to belong.  She matures to become a self-disciplined young woman determined to make something of herself, along the way, pulling Marilla and Matthew out of their gruff, glum routine and into a more fulfilled, if less orderly life, while making friends and rivals alike at the local school. Anne's overworked sensitivity shows its negative side when she overreacts to minor things, exploding them into major life-altering events as only a too-dramatic teen - which is all of them - can blow ‘em up. 

that girl is trouble, and is IN trouble

 

Cheerful perseverance in the face of hardship and an ability to tease the fantastical out of the everyday spoke to audiences around the world, even early Taishō era Japan, which is when the novel was first published in Japanese. Though suppressed along with other Western literature during the Pacific War, during the Occupation Anne Of Green Gables was put on General MacArthur’s Recommended Children’s Literature list, along with another classic of rural kid-lit, Little House On The Prairie. Both series would inspire enduring fanbases and Nippon Animation anime series. And that’s where we here at Let’s Anime come in.

Fifty episodes of Nippon Animation's Akage no Anne (“akage” means “redhead”) would air on Fuji-TV from January to December of 1979.  Anne was the first series under the banner of World Masterpiece Theater, a showcase that started as Calpis Comic Theater, then became Calpis Children's Theater and then 1978’s Perrine Story saw the title remixed to Calpis Family Theater, and then next year somehow changed again to World Masterpiece Theater for Anne. In 1986 the banner changed yet again to House Foods World Masterpiece Theater. Stay tuned, who knows what they’ll call it next? Anne of Green Gables would join Nippon Animation’s roster of exports, airing in Korea, Spain, Germany, Portugal, the Arabic world, the Philippines, Italy, France, and French-speaking Canada. A South African English dub would broadcast in Taiwan and South Africa. 

Marilla, Matthew, Anne, and PEI's Strategic Potato Reserve

Directed overall by anime legend Isao “Horus Prince Of The Sun” Takahata, Anne’s character designs were by animation director and fellow anime legend Yoshifumi “Future Boy Conan” Kondo. Reference for the wonderful backgrounds, art-directed by Masahiro Ioka, was provided by a July ‘78 research trip to Prince Edward Island by Kondo, Takahata and Nippon Animation producers Junzô Nakajima and Shigeo Endô. You’ll swear you hear Joe Hisashi in the soundtrack but that’s all Akira Miyoshi there, bringing Anne's fantastical imagination to musical life in a beautiful Hayao Miyazaki-animated OP. 

sure, just put some airplanes in there, Hayao

Miyazaki did layouts for the first 15 episodes of Anne, perhaps repaying Takahata for the help Takahata gave on the recently completed Future Boy Conan. But Takahata’s realistic, textural vision for Anne was at odds with Miyazaki’s desire to expand upon the source material, as he did with Conan. Soon Hayao would leave the show and Nippon Animation entirely. Watching the series with 2024 eyes, we see what legions of internet memelords would later call “the Ghibli aesthetic” are all present in ‘79; the cozy fires, the tempting food, the homey overstuffed sofas and Victorian comfort of the giant overcoats and pinafores and moustaches, far enough in the past to be hazy and nostalgic but not so far in the past that we can’t enjoy ice cream or trains. 

the aesthetic in full force

This nostalgia helps the show - and the novel -  breeze past some of the more brutal realities of the era, the first of which is how orphans were treated like one more exploitable natural resource. Pay attention to how Anne talks about her life before Green Gables, it’s a life of constant toil, either caring for somebody else’s children or cleaning somebody else’s house or trying to keep somebody else from dying from some Victorian illness. It’s no wonder the girl would spend as much time as possible conjuring up fanciful stories about trees and rocks and streams - 19th century reality is harsh. Like the Little House series, Anne seems to work as a subtle hint to modern readers that no matter how awful their own childhood may be, at least they weren’t stuck doing farm chores or battling cholera in a time before Hot Wheels and Barbies. 

before Green Gables, things were a little grim

On television as in the novel, we see a hopeful Anne arrive at the train station en route to surprising everyone at the home she’ll soon name Green Gables. Anne makes a friend in Diana Barry from the next farm over, and a fierce rival in dashing local boy Gilbert Blythe. She meets her own personal Nellie Olesons in the spiteful Pye sisters, charms the various busybodies and old biddies of Avonlea, wins an academic scholarship to Queen’s Academy in Charlottetown, and from there wins another scholarship to a mainland university, forcing her to consider leaving Green Gables behind forever. 

Anne's Style Adventures

Anneheads and Gable-otaku, rest assured all your favorite story beats are in the show, whether it’s the part where Anne dyes her hair green or the part where Anne defies death by walking across the ridgepole of the Barry’s roof. We indeed see Anne conjure up a rich fantasy life as the tragic, raven-haired beauty Lady Cordelia Fitzgerald, which leads to the tragic loss(?) of Marilla’s emerald brooch. Anne gets Diana drunk, Anne bakes the cough-syrup cake, and then Anne gets trapped on the pond, only to be rescued by the last person on Earth she’d ever want to rescue her.

they grow up so fast

 

Seemingly overnight, Anne transforms from a gawky tween into a Young Lady as the rest of her body catches up with her once oversized skull. The last quarter of the series is a show about an adult (teenagers hadn’t been invented yet) dealing with isolation, aging parents, career choices, tragedy, and the kind of exam anxiety staring Japanese viewers right in the face. Also anxious was the Nippon Animation team producing the show. Whatever slack they’d had early in the production was gone thirty weeks in as the crew dealt with an exodus of talent pulled away to work on Galaxy Expresses, Lupins, and Bannertails, not to mention subcontractor issues and staff downtime due to illness. However, the Anne anime remains entertaining even as the animation quality suffers, due to its firm foundation of gorgeous background illustration and solid character design.

will the princess be forced to marry someone she can't stand?

Given free rein with Anne, Hayao Miyazaki probably would have placed more emphasis on fantasy segments conjured out of Anne’s more whimsical notions. But Takahata - whose own daughter was Anne’s age -  put his foot down, keeping the show firmly rooted in PEI’s famous red soil, perhaps hastening Miyazaki’s exit towards TMS and the direction of a popular Lupin III film. Akage no Anne shares the same sensibility as the rest of the World Masterpiece Cinematic Universe; action and spectacle are underplayed in favor of characters and feelings, set against well-researched architecture and lush watercolored backgrounds. Takahata’s quieter, grounded Anne has an emotional weight it might lose if set amidst Miyazaki’s trademark contrabulous fabtraptions and death-defying action sequences. Anne would also be Takahata’s swan song at Nippon Animation; next for him would be Chie The Brat for TMS.

Anne merchandise includes this bicycle (bicycle does not fly)

45 years later Akage no Anne still entertains. There’s a double hit of nostalgia, both for the original property and for its 1979 version, which gleams with those wonderful Masahiro Ioka landscapes and Kondo’s characters. At the time it was up against shoujo opposition like Candy Candy, Lun Lun the Flower Angel, Rose Of Versailles, and Haikara-san ga Tōru, and sequels to Space Battleship Yamato, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, Cyborg 009, and Star Of The Giants. And there was something called Mobile Suit Gundam that came out that year. But even without a tacked-on animal companion, New Type powers or cybernetic augmentation, Green Gables welcomes and rewards repeat visits.

keep your dreams in your Anne Dream Can

Everyone, that is, but the North American viewing audience, which has seen Anne as the star of silent films, musicals, the Megan Follows CBC show and a Canadian cartoon, but so far hasn’t been permitted to see this anime version. The absence of Nippon Animation’s Anne is a loss for us all, whether we’re students facing book report deadlines, executors of the L.M. Montgomery estate, or the hardworking staff of the PEI Ministry Of Fisheries, Tourism, Sport, and Culture, who’d probably appreciate an extra bit of attention come vacation booking season.

visit PEI this summer!

Nope, Americans can’t watch Anne Of Green Gables. Well, okay, you can, the show is up on YouTube with the English-accented English dub, and with subtitles  But there isn’t a legit Blu-Ray set, no official release, it’s not real here in the way the GKids Future Boy Conan is. Absent the anime show or a trip to PEI, maybe all we can do is spend a fall afternoon in the Ontario countryside, visiting L.M. Montgomery’s 1911-1926 Leaskdale Manse home or maybe the park near where she later lived on Riverside Drive in Toronto. On the way you can stop in anywhere that sells books and pick up the copy of Anne Of Green Gables you’ll find there. 

Leaskdale, just north of Uxbridge, L.M. says "have a seat"

An inescapable layer of Canadian cultural bedrock, Anne is so much a part of the landscape here that one could almost believe she was a real person. If we ever needed someone to remind us what it’s like to dream big dreams once in a while, Anne of Green Gables is the person to do it, real or not, whether live-action or animated, whether in prose or radio or film or TV or whatever medium you choose. Can we dream big enough to see Akage no Anne finally return home? 

-Dave Merrill

I am tremendously indebted to Animétudes and their amazingly well-researched and comprehensive look at the production of Akage no Anne.