#oh s1 designs. it is so strange to draw you

[jays-supersonic-dynamo]

tfw you and your fellow teen ninja both catch pokémon at around the same time, so you compete to train it better than your rival

[rosetheocto]

My Rants and Reviews on the Failtopia S2 Finale Outfits!

this post was inspired by the one made by @cosmo-production so please check out their post too! my review is under the cut

Major Failtopia Season 2 spoilers ahead!

Mar

yeah it’s the basic one, but i think that fits him! If I had to pick another outfit it would be the Pro one, but I genuinely can’t see him in anything else other than the boring chef outfit. I feel like if he wanted to change it he def could (I mean look at his imp outfit) but the basic chef outfit is very solid for him! If it ain’t broke don’t fix it! 7/10

Orion

I know the outfit is very clashing and has a bunch of colors, but in Dan’s defense: Orion’s makeup already has a bunch of colors, and when you look into it the colors the outfit has actually matches with the makeup a bit! and also, I kinda wish Dan didn’t have the makeup be as out there for the sake of those drawing fanart, but at the same time this is Daniel Failboat. Insane designs are expected. That being said though, I can’t change the clothes or makeup even if you forced me to. the context for it is just so freakin cute!! we all love great fathers in this household. He makes me wish I had a meaningful relationship with my dad. 6/10

Friend

I like it! I have a few minor gripes though. This may be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t like Zone (the hat) or Ship (the staff). Not in the Finale at least. I think Friend should’ve removed them both to show that they’ve moved on and don’t need something like Lee anymore. Symbolism and character arcs and all that other fancy stuff idk. Also I like that she looks more like a priest than a Cleric, it makes sense! He’s really religious in-universe and their war cry is literally “die, sinner :)”, so I don’t have any problems with that! As much as I like her in purple, he looks oddly good in a black and white outfit too! 8/10

Shrimp

listen guys I’m sorry but her outfit kinda sucks.. the bright pink hearts don’t really give off the same vibes as her first outfit did.. I get where Dan was coming from with it but I just personally don’t like the design :((

I think that he should’ve went with the emo goth outfit for her instead, especially since it fit her more and the fandom latched onto it like a moth to a light, but that’s just me. it gets a free half point for matching up with Bill though, 3.5/10

Erica

look I love it but the actual armor part is so overdesigned. I hate drawing that thing. that’s my only problem though the rest of her outfit is cool as hell!! Let’s go lesbians. 8/10

(and this doesn’t really count for anything, but don’t like her weapon, again I get the idea Dan, but she realistically would NOT use the giant arm 😭)

Chi

This kind of outfit fits her so well omfg. The stupid bowtie? The short sleeves and general lack of lab safety?? The triangle patterns??? It all just screams “Chi” to me! Thank you Miitopia for creating this outfit. Flawless. 10/10

(also another weapon mention, her using the ketchup bottle in the finale?? as someone who is obsessed with S1 of this series, Daniel, ty sm for including that.)

C!Failboat

the catsuit is very boring, but it is also very iconic. I like it. I’d give it a solid 7/10. But I don’t wanna talk about that one. I wanna talk about his outfit when using the Power of the Scythe.

oh my lord. this outfit. this is not me dunking on Daniel or Wafferscotch at all, I genuinely love their art and content!! but like. you’re telling me this man saved the universe in tracksuit sweatpants and an open button up shirt WITH HIS OWN MERCH ON??? He killed god in the Bee Movie shoes?? The Piss Adidas??? It just. doesn’t really fit the Miitopia vibes to me, and I think this could’ve been better as an outfit for ACNH. It could’ve looked much worse, but still. I think it’s a 3/10

Bo

perfect. love the callback to Rose (and I mean, they’re very similar characters, so it makes sense!) She also looks cool af in a suit. her new look can be strange at first but you 100% get used to it with time. And her multiclass was just chefs kiss. Absolute goddess, let’s go lesbians. 10/10

Chat

very good. very iconic. so glad this series came out before the Kirby Era cuz i think the lips would’ve ruined it. 10/10

Big Bill

It looks really comfortable!! I want this robe irl, I like the patterns! I surprisingly really like the pink for Bill! It stands out compared the rest of his appearance and I think that’s really cool!! the dark blue also fits him really well!! Half point bonus for matching with Shrimp. 9.5/10

Void

GOD TIER!! PEAK DESIGN!!! We all love Void in this household. 20/10

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

no-sleep 1x09rewatch ramble-essay (all content warnings for the episode apply here)

i was just like. oh i’ll watch a feel-good episode of gossip girl! s1 thanksgiving ep is great isn’t it! blairenate family feels!!! ruflyson love triangle drama!!! vdw siblings AND humphrey siblings hanging out!!! dan’s “see you later waldorf” *salutes & closes the cab door* !!!

& like. yes i DID remember serena’s whole not being sober on thanksgiving thing, and yes i DID remember blair’s ED relapse - which is heavy, but eating disorder content isn’t particularly triggering for me personally (i find it kind of cathartic, if we’re being honest) BUT . i somehow forgot. that THIS was the episode which has howard’s suicide attempt?? and now i have some of the most painful nate feels in the world. 

blah blah blah, leight’s acting brought me to tears, which probably doesn’t sound like a very big deal but sort of is, for a variety of reasons (watching things doesn’t usually make me cry, it’s happened maybe a single-digit number of times before + also just my blair feels in general --> she’s a really interesting character but i don’t find her AS relatable as i do dan, or nate, or vanessa, or maybe even serena at times --> so i usually do have a bit of a disconnect re: watching her, which i really do not have for like. dan, for instance.) 

i just cannot divorce that very cute outfit blair wears with her ED relapse - which brings me to the next point, which is that blair is maybe THE only character ever for whom her clothing choices and her plotlines are so interwoven in my head (lemon yellow shirt and funky little hat is her mean bridesmaids competitive game day, yellow-&-orange dress is her choose chuck over dan moment, genderqueer plaid skirt and grey shirt is her “dan loves me for me” moment, white shirt with the pink flowers is her get owned by nelly yuki moment, etc etc)... the only other time i noticed outfits is derena cotillion, but that’s just because i LOVE derena cotillion, and date matching shirts, but that’s because i am tuned into all things date and couldn’t possibly tell you what those outfits actually symbolise, with the exception of dan’s pink flannel shirt from when he’s holding milo. or any of the outfits from 2x06 because that is my episode hands down. oh hey would you look at that, i do actually form associations. but you gotta believe me on this, blair’s the one it happens most naturally for, which is very strange. i think it’s because her outfits are always Statements in a way that the other characters never do, except for jenny, who is a fashion designer, so it’s Different for her. what am i trying to say. 

oh yeah another iconic outfit is serena’s golden jacket and bright blue pants to the morgue to identify what might be chuck’s corpse. she literally dressed like she was going clubbing and i respect her so much for that. 

anyway. gosh. nate just - getting gaslit by his mom, getting reprimanded by his dad for telling his mom to stop being rude/petty... howard was like “don’t fight my fights for me” but nate wasn’t even doing that?? he was just asking his mom Not to be rude, and the fact that nate got told off at the end of that interaction... uh. it shows a lot about the archibald family unit in general and just. how nate is sort of treated as ... i don’t have the right word, but my brain is like “second class citizen”... which is absolutely NOT the right concept for nate but like. he is treated like he is Less a part of the family than his parents are....... RIGHT until one of them (or both of them!) fuck up in a big way and it’s down to nate to fix their mess. i haven’t read “adult children of emotionally immature parents” but from whatever i’ve heard about it, i think nate could do with reading it. or not. maybe it’d just make him sadder.

and fuck - nate’s whole talk with his dad and his dad telling nate that he doesn’t know how he can go on, etc etc... idk what to say or where to draw the line but i have really complicated howard & nate feelings. i really truly think anne was the worse parent (not like it’s a competition of course) and i sometimes seriously wonder if maybe howard archibald had a more supportive life partner, maybe he wouldn’t have ended up being ~like that~ to nate (doesn’t justify anything of course). anyway nate’s sitting by the hospital bed and his dad is denying his suicide attempt at first and nate’s just like, no, stop. this is also making me think now of nate sitting by serena’s hospital bed after tripp, and nate possibly sitting by blair’s hospital bed some point pre-series (eating disorders are serious and i really do think, esp with eleanor being eleanor, that it must’ve gotten pretty bad for blair before she got help - which. sorry. i know, it’s sad but i’m just putting together pre-existing implications.) all i’m saying is some point in the future i wouldn’t be surprised if nate’s just. uncomfortable in hospitals and unable to piece together why. oh yikes i just remembered blair’s miscarriage. at which point do hospitals become overly suffocating for natie, remind him of his own helplessness, etc... because i really think they would. anyway. 

anne archibald chills me because she is such an accurate representation of a very specific kind of mother and. i hate it for nate obviously but i struggle to remember a time i’ve seen a tv mom who i can 100% relate to so hard. as in. fuck. worded that wrong. whose SON i can relate to so hard. ouch. this may be a moot point because i don’t watch much tv, but honestly anne & nate is just. a Lot. in a way that is significant to Me, specifically. this is part of my pet peeve (not enough to fight with anybody don’t worry) when people make edits about mothers & daughters, as if what was happening between nate & anne, somehow didn’t have the same complications - i honestly think there’s some solid eleanor & blair/ anne & nate parallels to be drawn. and we’ve been over this somewhere else, but lily & serena / rufus & dan / rufus & jenny definitely have a lot of the same specific issues (parent projecting on child, etc.) again - everyone engages w the show differently, im ready to admit that like... maybe 65% of my problems with the ‘mothers & daughters’ reading probably stem from gender dysphoria, lol. but whatever.

i have feelings about dan & alison, too... i really do think dan was closer to his mom than to his dad for majority of his childhood, and this ep really cements it. anyway. i don’t have any more words and i’m tired. and i might just watch derena cotillion episode because . derena cotillion episode my beloved... 

wait wait before i forget. venn diagram of humphrey family & van der bilt family & playing american football. i know this has come up before but like. here we go i;m thinking about it again. both dan and nate have been competitively thrown in the grass by a family member in the name of sports. no wonder nate chose dan over chuck in 2x06 (i would put a tone indicator but even i can’t tell if this is /gen or /j) 

[katyatalks]

Otomedia April 2019 - Character Designer Kameda, Eyecatch Team Kenja, Series Co-ordinator Seko & Director Tachikawa - Interview Translation

Here’s Character Designer Kameda, Eye-catch Team Kenja, Series Co-ordinator Seko & Director Tachikawa’s interviews from April 2019’s Otomedia! Semi-summary style as there’s a lot to get through - naturally, this is a long one, but there’s plenty of cool stuff in here that makes for a good read. Includes stuff like why certain scenes were cut from the anime (boxcutter Minori, the cat, etc.), Joseph’s original character design, where Reigen got some of his ‘wise sayings’ from, the reason behind the kaleidoscope imagery in the S2 intro and outro, and plenty more!

KAMEDA YOSHIMICHI Character Designer

Asked how the production environment was for season 2, he says that it was “strangely pretty hectic - lots of stuff going on (laughs)”. States that with season 2 they understood the direction that MP100 would take more than they did with season 1. Something he and Director Tachikawa struggled with in season 1 was what kind of anime style would be best for the manga.

For season 2 the majority of the staff working on it had seen season 1, so production was steady.

He says that before season 2 he’d been working on “Doraemon the Movie: Nobita's Treasure Island”, but work for season 2 began before he was finished with that film.

Just before working on season 1 of MP100 he’d worked on One Punch Man, “and it’s thanks to that that I was able to snap into work on Mob Psycho 100, but this time around it was a bit of a hard fight.” While drawing the designs for the new characters who’d appear in season 2 he eventually found himself readjusting to the proportions of MP100 (vs. Doraemon’s style)

Mentions how Tachikawa has been working on the MP100 OVA previously so getting back into work on Mob Psycho didn’t seem to be that strange for him, but for Kameda personally it took a bit of getting used to.

He’s asked if there’s anything regarding Mob’s character design that is essential to maintain a certain ‘Mob’-ness about him, to which Kameda replies; “The length of his fringe/bangs, ie. whether or not you can see his eyebrows.” Discusses how there’s only a certain amount of space between where his hair ends and his eyelids start to give an expression, and the depth of his expression varies greatly depending on if he has eyebrows or not.

“Mob is a character who isn’t really expressive, but regardless, it is important to be able to show his expressions. That’s something I told everyone to pay attention to.”

“In season 1 we avoided drawing Mob with eyebrows as much as possible, but in season 2 we see them again and again, and then we have the super handsome sparkly-eyed Mob that we see in S2E5! Since that episode, even in his normal state, it became fine to give him eyebrows (laughs).”

“This season, he’s had a lot of angry scenes. The start of episode 9 has him quite notably angry. For that, you’ve got to give him eyebrows.”

Q: “Would you say season 2 lifted the ban on eyebrows?” A: “Season 2 lifted the ban on eyebrows!” States he himself didn’t draw eyebrows much at all during season 1. “Right now, I’m doing work on the final episode, and I’m giving those eyebrows a certain plumpness (laughs).”

He is asked if there were any other changes made to the characters. “This is a very minute change, but for certain characters like Mob and Reigen I made a change to their silhouettes - beforehand, their hair had a rounder shape, but now their hair has become a little more playful.”

“I suppose rather than a choice I made on purpose, their hair ended up this way because it’s easier to draw. It’s probably the result of the great amount of advertisement art I drew after season 1 finished broadcasting.”

Asked what he thinks season 2’s “power-up” point is or where it’s changed compared to season 1, he says that they had a lot of young animators participate this season and the quality of their digital work was amazing.

Mentions how with digital animation the look of things like smoke and sparks, and spatial representation, improves.

“For example, in S2E3, when Reigen is looking through the window, the camera passes by him and while approaching the girl, the camera turns to the wall and enters it… the animator made the environment for that scene in 3D with a virtual camera.”

Q: ”A good amount of new characters show up this season - which of them is your favourite?” A: ”Shinra Banshoumaru! I made him chubbier than he is in the manga. His belly that sticks out, his short legs, his harem pants… I drew those, but Tachikawa-san told me I was going too far. But I persisted; ‘Tachikawa-san, we live in a time where there’s no chubby characters in anime! If there’s any anime that can challenge that it’s Mob Psycho 100!’ I was like a bulldozer with the things I said, and as a result I got him how I wanted him!... I say that, but Tachikawa-san also topped-up the amount of belly-sways Shinra has (laughs).”

He's asked about characters post S2E9, to which he mentions Joseph's clothes being different in the manga. "He wears a greyish suit in the manga, but I feel like Joseph has more of a white image. Plus, a grey suit would overlap with Reigen. At first I had Joseph wear a black leather jacket, but a few days later I reviewed that and went, 'nah, that's not right.' I had it changed to white."

He is asked about any scenes up until S2E9 that he particularly fussed over, or any that left an impression on him. “Episode 7. It’s a great Reigen story, and I had the privilege of being the animation director for it. I paid great attention to Reigen’s expressions. It’s an episode with a lot of good cuts, so I wanted to make sure they were all the best quality they could be.”

Q: “Of those cuts, which would you say is the best?” A: “It really leaves an impression on you in the manga - when Reigen says, ‘You’ve really grown up, haven’t you’, a message for beyond the camera. [...] Then, in the final part of the episode, when he talks to Mob on the bridge. Episode 7 truly has some great expressions; my favourite faces.”

He’s asked if there’s anything coming up that he’d like us to pay attention to & any highlights - mentions the battle between Shibata and Gouda. Says the anime brings action and originality that only anime can achieve.

His final message to readers is that if you haven’t read the manga yet, don’t go running to read it, wait for the anime first, so you can experience the tension of not knowing what happens next. “The quality of season 2 is insane, right up until the end.”

---

KENJA Eyecatches Kenja are described as a video production group, who have made promotional advertisements for MP100 (both for the manga and S1 of the anime), and were in charge of the eyecatches for season 2. The eyecatches were mainly made by koya, Takarai & 0gt. koya, their representative, has worked as ONE’s assistant, and Takarai participated as an animator this season.

Asked how they ended up doing the eyecatches for season 2, koya says that Satou Miyo (who was in charge of the season 1 ending) was a classmate of his when he was a graduate student. “We got back in touch and the message I got was, ‘I’m doing work on the ending of Mob Psycho 100, do you want to work on something too, koya-kun?’ (laughs).”

Takarai had his way in via already being an animator for the show, and koya discusses being ONE’s assistant. “ONE-san and I get along very well, so I’d tag along to anime events. I got talking to Director Tachikawa and now here we are.”

They were originally told that it’d be fine to have the same eyecatch for before and after the commercial pause, but they were worried that watching the same thing twice would be a bit unbearable, so they made two for each episode instead.

koya: “Ended up being tougher than I thought (laughs).”

Takarai: “Well, simply put, we doubled our work load (laughs).”

The eyecatch for episode 3 is brought up. Takarai; “Eyecatches have this image of being stand-alone things, but for this episode, it snuggles up to the plot. It was a choice that made me anxious, but looking at everyone’s reactions to it, I was relieved.”

Their final message to the readers comes from koya, who states that going on Twitter and seeing everyone react to mob psycho 100 stuff as it happens in real time is very encouraging. “Even just, ‘I wonder what the eyecatches will be today?’, makes me happy.”

---

SEKO HIROSHI Series Co-ordinator

Asked where he thinks season 2 has powered up compared to season 1, he says that season 1 had to introduce all the characters - season 2 starts off with the characters introduced, so the action kicks off full-throttle.

He’s asked what his thought process was in choosing what parts of the manga to leave out of the anime. “My process is, I first write with absolutely everything from the manga in the script, then choose what to cut from there. The flow of the story as a whole is important - I keep that in the forefront of my mind, and choose to keep things that are vital to the story. Other than that, I try to keep scenes that show off the personalities of the characters. There’s been moments where I’ve had to cut scenes, even though I really like them, just because they wouldn’t fit into the length of the episode…! Other than episode length, there’s also parts of Mob Psycho 100 that we wouldn’t have been able to include due to broadcasting code.”

He’s asked which character he thinks grew the most, to which he says Mob. “What stuck with me was episode 3. ‘Mob’s been thinking about this kind of stuff’... I was like, ‘oh’. 

He’s asked if there’s any other character he feels has had a big change since season 1. “Naturally, Reigen. [...] I feel like Reigen has had a layer peeled back, after episodes 6 and 7. He’s an adult, and he does act that way sometimes, but there’s parts of him that haven’t matured… but I feel with the completion of that arc, he’s taken a step closer to becoming a fully-fledged adult.”

He’s asked if there’s been any part of the season up until episode 9 that’s particularly left an impression on him, to which he says episode 8. “The marathon. [...] That was a part that made me think, wow, this manga is amazing. You have a regular school marathon, and then come home to find your house on fire - not something you’d be quick to find anywhere else, huh. (Laughs)”

He discusses how originally season 2 was 12 episodes, and the house fire would’ve come at the end of Part A of the original episode 8, and Claw Arc would commence with the B part. It was with Warner Brother’s intervention that season 2 became 13 episodes, as an individual from Warner Bros. wanted to have the fire come at the end of episode 8.

He’s asked which of the new characters in season 2 has particularly been on his mind. “His entry is a little later on, but I love Serizawa from the Ultimate Five. How should I put it… it’s not surprising that he’s the way he is. He was a hikikomori, and he doesn’t know anything about society, so he believes in and follows his ‘boss’. I think this sort of situation can happen to anyone. He was brainwashed, so to say. But, what becomes of him? His story is one that I really love, so he’s definitely the character on my mind.”

He’s asked what it is about Mob Psycho 100 that makes it Mob-Psycho-100-ish, to which he says that the characters don’t feel like they’re just characters - they’re all a bit hopeless but that’s what makes them loveable. 

“The Telepathy Club guys, for example… if they were real they probably wouldn’t be able to become proper members of society, but we still think of them fondly. Perhaps we’re too harsh to people who we deem hopeless in this world of ours.”

“No matter who you are, ONE-san will be warm to you. I think the goodness in Mob Psycho 100 comes from ONE-san’s personality.”

---

TACHIKAWA YUZURU Director

Says that the average age of people working on season 2 dropped slightly compared to season 1. “We had people who love the manga, people who had only seen season 1, and those who love both. So there was a harmonious atmosphere.”

States that there was a lot of creative freedom given to the staff. “We can play around. That’s a merit of a show of this calibre - you can do as you please.”

States that Season 2 powered up compared to season 1 when it comes to emotions. Says that even in fight scenes, the personalities of the characters and their relationships shine through, which is something he wanted to maintain when shifting the MP100 manga into anime form.

“There’s quite an oscillation when it comes to emotions in the first half of the season. Episode 1 is warm and fluffy; episode 2 has a mix of laughs and horror; episode 3 impacts you… as do 4 and 5 (laughs). Then, episodes 6 and 7 moved plenty of our staff to tears. They’re full of heart.”

States that within all this oscillation, “from the start to the end, something we paid attention to was making sure the theme of ‘Mob’s ongoing growth’ was present. That ‘he is able to change himself’.”

“He’s able to change because he has everyone, and everyone around him is able to change, too.”

Discussion of season 2’s ED. “The emotional intensity of season 2 shifts a lot, and when the show makes you feel down it makes you feel /down/. So, I asked for an ending that’s warm and fluffy - something that calms you when you watch it. The illustrations are incredibly cute, but actually, the ending is not just cute - there’s stuff depicted that holds a deeper meaning.”

He’s asked about the kaleidoscope imagery present in the intro. “Originally the S2 outro didn’t have any kaleidoscope imagery, but I wanted to add it in, so now there’s that link between the intro and the outro. Mob continuously changes as a result of the people he meets… that’s a theme of the outro, but it’s also a theme of Mob Psycho 100 in general. There’s several parts within a kaleidoscope, but put the parts together and they create something new and charming. Mob gains friends, and as a result of all these different friends, he’s able to grow… that’s the meaning behind the kaleidoscope, and why it’s present in both the intro and outro.”

Interviewer brings up that Tachikawa previously said that season 1 was written with Reigen & Mob’s shishou-deshi relationship at its core, and asks what is at the core of season 2. “Reigen is also a protagonist-type character in Mob Psycho 100, but this time around we focused on Mob… season 2 has ‘The people surrounding Mob and his relationships with them’ at its core. Episodes 6 and 7 are pretty firmly about Reigen in that ‘people surrounding Mob’ role. Then there’s Mogami, and Serizawa later on. But, even deeper at its core season 2 focuses on how Mob grows as a result of the people he meets.”

Interviewer brings up that Tachikawa previously said he wanted to animate Reigen’s press conference, and asks how it was having that wish become reality. “We have it in season 1, that scene where Mob meets Reigen for the first time. When we put that in season 1, we thought if we’d ever get to animate the press conference, we’d use that scene again but have Reigen’s monologue from the manga this time around. I’m glad we were able to do that.”

Reigen’s past not being in the manga is brought up. “With the anime, I wanted to show a bit of how Reigen ended up where he is now. We don’t see the company Reigen used to work for in the manga. Occasionally, Reigen will come out with some ‘wise sayings’, such as ‘the secret behind business success lies in your smile’, so we thought it would be good to have those words come from where he used to work. We struggled deciding whether Reigen’s past should be as a water filter salesman, or as an insurance salesman. Ultimately, we asked ONE-sensei, who decided for us: ‘I like the idea of him selling water.’”

Discussion of Tsubomi coming to S&S as not being in the manga. Tachikawa wanted a scene in which Reigen, Ritsu, Teru do something for Mob - “something that sets things back to normal, after Whitey Arc.” ONE gave the idea, then published it as an omake manga.

He is asked what he’d like us to pay attention to with the final episodes. “Each character has their own motivation, but at the end of the day those motivations all add up to  ‘defeat claw’.” Mentions a bunch of new characters making their entrance.

His final message to readers is that a lot of work went into the final episodes and attention was paid to detail, so please enjoy.

---

Original twitter thread has a few more pictures in it, link to that is here.

Otomedia April 2019;

ONE’s special interview here.

Sakurai Takahiro [Reigen VA] & Itou Setsuo [Mob VA] joint interview here.

Kokuryuu Sachi [Shou VA] interview here.

Itou Setsuo [Mob VA] & Irino Miyu [Ritsu VA] interview here.

Character Designer Kameda, Eye-catch Team Kenja, Series Co-ordinator Seko & Director Tachikawa's interview here.

[keepyourpantsongohan]

Ayesha Liveblogs Free! S3

I will never get tired of Makoto offering Haru a hand out of the water

OMG I guess some things do change Makoto’s been dunked and I kinda love it

“I’m never gonna be a normal person” wow who is this this Goth Diet Haru

I love the phrase “hot minute” actually thank u for ur teen slang Asahi

Offering people his lecture notes and texting back right away will anyone ever be as good as Makoto? Trick question no

“I’m still young and innocent” “That’s a weird thing to say” I love that Haru’s meeting a bunch of people who aren’t used to his antics

This flashback seems to indicate that Haru felt Some Kinda Way about Ikuya which is weird because they look almost the same

“Don’t worry too much about the family” LMAO Sosuke has received a blessing from his cousin to follow Rin to Australia 

“Just inferior copies of Ikuya” that’d be more meaningful if Ikuya had done anything other than stare broodingly

It’s telling that the Iwatobi team is dressed like the Wiggles in this outro

All this outro really told me is that they aren’t really that good at differentiating main character design

“We have to try not to spoil them too much” I approve of Ikuya’s brother and his co-parenting buddy

“I’m not going to move ever again,” said Asahi, with the full confidence of a twelve-year-old boy who knows absolutely nothing about anything

Okay but for real Ikuya and Haru straight up look like siblings this weird rivalry energy on top of that fact is a little bit Much

[Rose and Rosie voice] It’ll never work out their hair is the same colour  

“Is Haru the guy who was all dressed up and riding a camel in the recruiting video we saw?” UNBELIEVABLE their Arabian Nights outro from S1 was actually their recruitment video Iwatobi do u take constructive criticism

“I’ll even be good enough to compete against you” how many rivals does one young man really need my god

Hey Trenchcoat Man maybe introduce yourself before telling these teens how to live their lives

Dude you’re so controlling trying to prevent Ikuya from seeing his friends

Ahhhhh I love Haru being in touch with his emotions and apologizing to Ikuya tbh I give Makoto and Rin a lot of the credit for his ability to communicate lmao 

“I’d prefer you didn’t keep him too long” listen I get where you might be coming from since Haru hurt Ikuya’s feelings but also stop that

“Thought I’d give you a wake-up call” I really don’t like the vibe of Hiyori

“Japanese guy! Friend of yours, maybe?” An accurate representation of what it’s like to hang out with white people lmao

There’s a different vibe from a teenager who giggles about swimmers’ muscles to an adult swim coach who is coaching swimming at a university giggling about swimmers’ muscles put that away Mikhail

Hiyori gives me the straight up heebie jeebies every time he opens his mouth

I can’t read Japanese but I have to assume Rin was gonna call Haru and reminisce about their bed sharing night lmao

Natsuya is some kinda Swimming Capitalist Nomad I’m not mad about it

“How many of these dreams do you have?” that’s valid lmao Rin has #calledout for being a rival slut

“His face told me that what matters most to him is not here” I can’t tell if this is a reference to Ikuya or to Natsuya’s white-haired rival-friend-boyfriend-probably

You know what, in the context of this show: Boyfriend 

“Hey, calm down. Listen, Archerfish--” HARU PLS

I don’t know Misae but the fact she calls her boyfriend Archerfish has already won me over

Hiyori would you fucking stop interfering this isn’t fair to Ikuya

“Ikuya’s too busy to waste his time reminiscing on childish things” well that should be Ikuya’s decision shouldn’t it like not 2 get 2 real but this is all the markers of an abusive relationship if someone does this to you please tell someone

God this stubbly weird man and his ominous advice STILL without any introduction 

“I’m getting sick of hearing you speak for Ikuya like you’re his damn boss” ME TOO ASAHI

YOU CANNOT DECIDE WHO IKUYA’S FRIENDS ARE HIYORI YOU ABSOLUTE SHITPRETZEL 

HA Ikuya knows you’ve been giving the boys the runaround fuckweasel

“If I swim with Tono, maybe it’ll help me understand him” Makoto coming after jerks with his best weapon: empathy <3

“People you swim with all seem to end up suffering, don’t they” LISTEN YOU ASSBANANA IT’S NOT HARU’S FAULT THAT PEOPLE GET OBSESSED WITH HIM HE’S JUST A GOOD SWIMMER

Omg I enjoy the drama of Sosuke interacting with the one (1) person in Japan who has seen Rin lately 

“I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed there isn’t a single pudgy person here” like I know this is probably gonna be a running gag for their opposite body preferences but it’s also a self-burn for the creators of this show only drawing different scales of one body type

I really do love that Rei is swim team captain now my boy has come so far

Oh Romio is there anyone in this swim universe that doesn’t have some kind of Traumatizing Swim Experience 

“Think about what your reason for jumping in is” Sosuke’s advice sounds like beautiful nonsense I don’t know how that’s supposed to help him concentrate on start times

Lmao I love this Overbearing Friend Gesture of Shizuru and Nagisa putting seaweed on Romio and Rei’s plates without asking kjhfkghfghfk

“Actually, if you don’t mind, we have a proposition” $500 says that Nagisa and Rei are about to propose a relay race

Update from 8 minutes later: Someone owes me $500

“Can you tell how proud I am?” Natsuya is such a good big brother <3

 Hahahaha “a guy he wants to swim with again some day” Natsuya is also a good wingman for Rin lmao

Based on his inner monologue Sosuke should also be a swimming coach except in the vein of Cryptic Trench Coat Stubble Man who just offers random unsolicited advice to any teenage swimmer he passes by in the street 

“I’m so proud of you” jgjhgjhg Shizuru I love you and your tears for Romio

What kind of child welfare laws are there in Japan that Hiyori’s parents were allowed to just leave him alone in the park

“When I saw [Haru] again, the weakness I thought I left behind came flooding back to me” the moral of this story is that competitive swimming makes you gay

Ikuya used to be fun and sweet lmao what made you so broody my dude

Lmao @ Hiyori being mad that Ikuya thinks of Haru as his Prince Eric instead of him 

Wow I love Nao being a guiding force for this group of nerds

“I’m not hearting anything for you” Asahi understands Stranger Danger

It took Ryuji a solid six eps to even get a name u’d expect him to have a more important character connection than Rin’s Swim Coach’s Rival

“Then you should start swimming other stuff” I Love Misaki, Adopted Child of Haru and Makoto 

Well this wistful playground vibe has taken a strange turn

“It’s none of your damn business okay!!” TONO JUST GOT DUMPED HA

KJGHKJGH THE RAGE IN HARU’S VOICE ABOUT THE MACKEREL

Ryuji: He can just buy me dinner or something. I’m not picky. As long as it’s not mackerel

Haru [through gritted teeth]: I’m ready when you are

AH I LOVE KISUMI AND ASAHI BABYSITTING TSUKUSHI

“After all we’ve been through, why does it have to be like this?” U MADE IT LIKE THIS HIYORI

HAHAHAHAH Makoto and Ryuji had a standoff of wills and Ryuji lost

“Maybe it’s time for you to approach things more seriously” Nao has declared it’s time to stop sowing your wild oats and settle down Natsuya

Kazuma only shows up to remind Sosuke he is free to run away to swim whenever

“Hope you’re well” “Hey relax I’m not your dad” [Natsuya immediately begins acting like their dad]

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH GO HARU LEADING HIS CATEGORY

“I don’t think he’s all that bad of a guy” that’s Stockholm Syndrome Ikuya

I’m glad Ikuya is finally fucking having a meaningful conversation with his friends

“In the water I’m alone. No one’s gonna save me” Get therapy Ikuya!!!

Wow Haru joining a race purely to have an Emotional Confrontation with Ikuya is some kinda growth I’m just not sure what exactly

“That guy’s the only one anyone ever talks about” to be fair if your sample size is Iwatobi swimmers they are all a little in love with him

“That’s our BOYYYYYYYYYY” Aw Asahi <3 

Ghjkghk I love Makoto teasing Haru for being Ikuya’s hero

“Oh, you’re wise now?” AWWWW Ikuya is fun again good for him

 I know that Ikuya reaching out in friendship to Hiyori is supposed to be a sign of emotional security but I haven’t forgiven him for the way he’s manipulated Ikuya!!! Ur a seawitch not a Prince Eric!!! >:((((

I’m super thrown about them going straight from the qualifiers to the next race what will the last four episodes of this season be about

“I’ve been giving myself pep talks in the mirror. ‘I am a genius. I am a genius.’” HAHAHAHA I LIKE FUN IKUYA

“Looks like you beat me” “Just in free” Haru has released Ikuya into the universe for Hiyori and I don’t like it (for Ikuya’s sake) but that’s how it be I guess

How many siblings are there in the Mikoshiba family lmao there’s a new one every season 

“But gender doesn’t mean anything in a competition” I like u Lady Mikoshiba

“You mean you were Russian this whole time??” this is a lot to digest

I LOVE RIN’S PUDGY CAT STEVE LOL IS IT THE SAME IN JAPANESE

“The water likes you. I can tell” ALBERT PLS, Haru is already FULL-UP on homoerotic swim relationships

It’s killing me that they keep cutting to Makoto like Haru’s cheating on him though

Not to undermine the subplot of these last three episodes but hasn’t Haru... lost races before hgkjhgk

“I thought something soft and cute would help balance out that scary face of yours” omg STOP this cuteness 

Gghkhgk these flashbacks and Rin crying over Sosuke’s surgery are SO cute I never thought I would feel so proud of Rin way back in S1 he’s grown so much!!

Makoto being surrounded by ladybugs and butterflies like a wholeass Disney Prince

WHY are ALL of these swimming weirdos SOMEONE’S UNCLE

“You’re still as weird as ever, Haru’s the exact same way” I should start tracking how long in a conversation it takes characters to bring up Haru

Gnjghkjhg Makoto gets through to Haru in 0.5 seconds after two weeks of him ignoring his own coach. The power of fish metaphors and Love™

Kinda seems like they are setting it up like Makoto will also get to travel the world for swimming and let me say... I’m not mad about it

Update from like 2 minutes later: I WAS RIGHT

“That’s the evil king who wanted the magic lamp” the Arabian Nights references kill me every time 

Djkhdkjhd Ryuji labelling Mikhail in his phone as “Muscle Freak” that’s tru friendship

“You should say, ‘I’m totes hip with the kids, yo’” Ryuji pls 

“You’re so cute, you must be Iwatobi’s famous Kou” KHGKHGKJHKJ 3/3 MIKOSHIBA KNOCKOUT KOU

Awwwww Rei is so nervous for nationals my sweet baby boy

I ADORE that Rin and Haru are literally running across the city right before their most important meet bc they want to see their friends swim 

Rrgjhgr the one and only backstory in this show is former childhood friends and it applies to every single character

OMG Rei get his own flashback but with his boy Nagisa I love it

“I think he’d make a good rival for you actually” Makoto Tachibana: Rival Matchmaker

GOOD JOB BOYS U DID GOOD (ALSO TEAM PHOTO I WEEP)

“Try not to cry when I beat you” SOSUKEEEEEEEEEE

Wow this final episode is already clutching at my heart right out of the gate baby Haru 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

Makoto letting four more boys pile into his one bedroom for the night bc he’s the Best Boy Alive

HJGHJKGH THIS EXCHANGE 

Mikhail: That’s what I call ‘totes hip with the kids’

Nearby youths: [Giggling]

Mikhail: [Soft indignant gasp] Ryuji!!

Natsuya and Ikuya have the cutest sibling relationship gjkghk THEY

The theme of this season is people hugging each other and crying over the lanes and I LOVE THAT 4 THEM

Rin and Haru and Makoto........... are good boys

“What is this, some kind of teen drama” that is exactly it, Rin

“He won’t stop talking about stupid crap like friendship and bonds” I love three (3) boys

Bonus: Out of Order Liveblog of Free! Take Your Marks + S3E0

Haru dropping his pants in Makoto’s apartment without the immediate context of them being near water was the most high stakes moment in this entire anime I had no idea where that was going

Haru leaving his apartment hunting until the day before he moves: Mood

Sidenote: Makoto and Haru going apartment hunting is domestic as HELL I love it

“The two of you are inseparable, huh?” “We’re friends, deal with it.” Let people be gay Kisumi 

Lmao @ Nagisa and Rei’s yoga pose video Iwatobi is the cutest swim team in the world 

“Then one day even those tears will dry out in the Tokyo desert” who hurt you, Ms. Amakata 

“Allow me to welcome you to Tokyo, the city where love and lust intertwine” Free! Love and Lust could really be a subtitle of this anime lmao

“I’m talking about the whole bunkbed situation, you know, top and bottom” lmao shout-out to Sloane for that one art

I love the wordless communication between Makoto and Haru (and for that matter, Sosuke and Rin) I’m so glad they worked things out

I’m also happy Rin and Kou are cool now they used to have quite a gap

“Rin wasn’t that honest with himself” rjghg Rin and Haru miss each other

“This is the one,” said Haru, next to Makoto, His Completely Platonic Best Friend Who Dreams About Them Sharing An Apartment and Dropping Trou

I LOVE STEVE THE FAT CAT. AN ICON. A BEAUTY. CHUNKY BABY

“The treasure is inside the red shark’s mouth” there is DEFINITELY a Rin joke to be made here and the writers knew it

I don’t know what I love about this more that Aii and Momo are TERRIBLE at scheming or that that they are throwing Rin and Sosuke together on White Day lmao

This team vacation... Sosuke giggling bc he was tickled... !!!!!!! THANKS

I’m loving all these teams getting presents for each other jkhgkjg

Oh am I finally going to understand this Momo and Capybara backstory

Lol @ Natsuya pouring his heart abt Nao to Sosuke wholly unsolicited

“What were you about to ask” “Oh, not anything important (I’ll wait for you Sosuke)”

OHHHHHHHHHH THE CHARM BACKSTORY SOSUKEEEEEEEEEE

Oh Christ alive am I about to watch the Arabian Nights recruitment film

Hhhgjgjhg I gather the only reason Haru got his license was to compete with Rin

“I’m the evil king who is after the lamp for his own selfish reasons” I hate this... but also... I love this???

“I am a mysterious peddler. I travel carrying mysterious bundles. While riding atop of my mysterious partner Chappy the Camel” HARU STOP

OH MAKOTO HONEY U POOR SOUL JHGKHFKJGH 

“Makoto. When I’m nervous I think about mackerel” I am going to expire

“I think the three of you should implement your own version of it” Fhjkhgk Haru is telling them to exploit their bodies for school recruitment but also that’s not really anything new so fair enough

Nagisa: Rei is Perfect Killer Muscles Handsome in my heart!!!!!!

“Maybe I’m never going to understand him” Omg @ The Jilted Middle School Exes of Haru Club

“How David had to give up his love.... And then Veronica, knowing they couldn’t see each other anymore” call me crazy but I think Rin is projecting his own issues onto A Rat’s Life LMAO

Tjehjkhkje Sosuke needing to call Rin bc he got lost on his way to the bathroom... Useless Husband Energy

HAHAH Rin is so upset thinking Momo and Kou are dating

At least Rin recognizes that he doesn’t get to decide who Kou dates he can only express his approval or disapproval

“Momotaru Mikoshiba is a man who lives by passion” gjhgjhg stop this

“Rin would never lose to a persimmon, ever!” MAKOTO R U OK

“You are not less than a persimmon!” THESE BOYS. U R SO DUMB BUT ALSO GET U A FRIEND LIKE THE IWATOBI SWIM CLUB

“It’s cool if you need to cry” “If you stay in the pool no one will ever notice your tears” I LOVE SOSUKE AND HARU TEAMING UP TO TEASE RIN

I also deeply appreciate that even though I’ve never heard their Japanese voices I know exactly who is saying what line in this outro just by dialogue and tone of voice

+

“I have a crippling fear of mascot costumes” “Then why did you take this job” kjhgkjhgkjh if that isn’t a work mood 

Wait... if Makoto is going to be the substitute wrestler... WILL HARU BE THE SUBSTITUTE MASCOT AHHHHHHHH

WAIT NO I HAVE GRAVELY AND HILARIOUSLY MISUNDERSTOOD MAKOTO IS GOING TO BE BOTH MASCOT AND WRESTLER

“Iwa means ‘boulder’ and ‘tobi’ means ‘black kite’ so it’s a boulder-headed bird!!” Well that’s more of an explanation for the appearance of the Iwatobi mascot than I ever expected, Nagisa

“You don’t have a crippling fear of mascot costumes, do you?” No but I have feeling Makoto is about to develop one

Oh it’s THIS FUCKPUDDLE who asked u to be here Hiyori

“I don’t exactly hate it” high praise Ikuya lmao

Thkjhtkjh I love Natsuya’s long distance relationship it’s sweet 

HAHAHA is the beak thing supposed to be a ploy so people see Makoto’s face

“I cannot let Haru see me like this” “Hi Makoto” HAHAHAHAH I LOVE THIS WHOLE INTERACTION AND ALSO HOW HARU JUST GOES ALONG WITH ALL OF IT

Also I don’t know how Makoto was planning to hide his identity after he was addressed as “Mr. Tachibana”

LMAO @ MAKOTO BEING RECOGNIZED BY HIS LEG MUSCLES I’M SCREAMING

“Hey Makoto, use a backstroke!!” HARU PLEASE

“Well done, you’ll be a great mascot someday” “Thanks? I think?” This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen and I loved it

Oh my goooood Haru bringing Makoto presents for his siblings.... they have ascended to the college relationship levels of Natsuya and Nao

Man Ikuya could not radiate stronger “leave me alone” vibes 

“Wow you boys make a dashing pair” you said it Suit Lady not me 

[lookbackmachine]

Disney Afternoon History Part 1

Disney Afternoon Part 1

Transcript of: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

[music]

0:00:06 Speaker 1: Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli, The Fonz, was the pinnacle of cool for a generation. The leather jacket, the jukebox and "Ayyy". And in 1981, he hit the cultural height of fame with his own Saturday morning cartoon show. Unlike, say, Mork & Mindy in which Robin Williams was limited by the constraints of reality, there's nothing inherently animated about Happy Days, but that wasn't a deterrent for the Academy Award winning studio Hanna-Barbera, when they created this.

[music]

[video playback]

[music]

0:01:19 S1: The animated Fonz didn't just jump the shark, he time traveled so he could ride a brontosaurus. Jumping the shark seemed baked into the premise of many of the cartoons from this period, because they started as a gimmick and only kept gimmicking. Besides a big hit with The Smurfs, this period, for Hanna-Barbera, was littered with Scooby-Doo knockoffs.

[video playback]

0:01:49 S1: The studio that once produced The Flintstones, Quick Draw McGraw, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi, Snagglepuss and The Jetsons was producing uninspired paint by numbers replicas. The parity was at its peak when the animated Fonz had a supporting role in Laverne & Shirley in the Army. The cartoons essentially amounted to barely animated fan fiction. For years, art and commerce clashed on Saturday mornings and commerce had a far better record. And yet, only four years later, a cartoon would raise the artistic bar for the medium, and strangely, it would be based on the currency of kid commerce, candy.

[music]

0:02:34 S1: Animated television started in 1949, as it should, a talking rabbit wearing a suit of armour, riding a horse toward camera. It was the spectacular opening of Crusader Rabbit, whose other animation wasn't nearly as good as the opening. It was designed, with little to no movement, by Alex Anderson, who was inspired by Baby Weems, from Disney's behind the curtain feature, The Reluctant Dragon. In the Baby Weems segment, there are story boards with a tiny bit of motion included to keep it from being entirely static. There are quick cuts, camera movements, and narration to carry the short all the way to the end. After seeing this, Anderson believed he could use this barebones style to have notoriously expensive animation make financial sense for television. He partnered with Jay Ward and the two created The Crusader Rabbit shorts for NBC. The shorts were successful and ran for several years, which sparked Anderson and Ward to create the cartoons that they were famous for, Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right. Despite their massive success, their partnership didn't end well. In fact, it got worse, even though Ward was already dead. Alex Anderson, animator.

0:03:45 Speaker 2: I was surprised that... To discover that my 50% equity in the characters had disappeared and was not being honored. Yeah, I went to court, sued, got them to acknowledge that I was the creator. I learned about it at his funeral, when I was doing a eulogy and the names of several of us who were doing a eulogy were indicated, and it said Alex Anderson, creator of Bullwinkle and Rocky. And somebody had scratched it out and said, "An artist who worked for Jay Ward." And I thought, "Well, what's this? Why is this in?" Then I started checking and I found that, indeed, Jay had registered the characters in his name.

0:04:31 S1: The show's limited animation technique was taken by Hanna-Barbera and updated with better animation to produce several hits like Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, and eventually the Flintstones, a primetime hit for ABC in 1960. Hanna-Barbera went on to an unprecedented run of hits and non-hits, but when it came to television animation, Hanna-Barbera was in a class of their own. However, things fell off in the 1980s. In those years, The Smurfs were their only big hit. This left a gaping hole in the market that was filled by cartoons based on toys, like GI Joe and He-Man. But their ratings were drooping as well. And then something happened that had never happened before. During the entire history of television animation, from 1949 to 1984, the most famous animation company in the world never produced a single animated television cartoon. That was about to change with a single brunch, but the events leading up to that brunch showed an American titan in peril.

0:05:36 S1: Walt Disney was dead, to begin with, he died in 1966. But he was still running the company from his grave. After all the company's internal motto was, "What would Walt do?" But hypothesizing about what a genius would do is not the same as having the genius actually there. Because when it came to the question of "What would Walt do?" the company wasn't guessing correctly. Even though it was 1984, its last motion picture hit had been The Love Bug, in 1968. And so, because the company no longer had Walt, it figured the next best thing was Ron Miller, an ex Ram quarterback and Walt's son-in-law, who became CEO in 1978.

0:06:16 S1: The best quote to describe Miller's tenure was his own, "Because of Walt, because of his influence, I second-guess myself all the time." Miller wasn't only contending with Walt's legacy, he was also dueling with E. Cardon Walker, who was the chairman of the board. Walker had been one of Walt's right-hand men. He was in charge of advertising and public relations. And in his tenure, Walker launched the Disney Channel, opened Epcot and Disneyland Tokyo, but he also had peccadilloes that were killing the company. Walker was not in favor of a $1 parking fee. "The parking lot is the first thing the guests see. We have to keep our prices low." And despite having been in charge of advertising, Walker did not believe in advertising or marketing. The Disney parks did not run ads or commercials. For some perspective, the first American newspaper advertisement was in 1704. In 1922, Queensboro Corp buys airtime from AT&T to create the first radio commercials in advertising history. The first TV ad was aired for Bulova watches in 1941, which cost $9. Advertising was not new, and yet, E. Cardon Walker wouldn't do it.

0:07:26 S1: In fact, Walker was even stingy on advertising when it came to the motion picture division. Budgets for advertising were growing since the big blockbuster Jaws. ET had cost $10 million in ads alone, but when Disney's TRON came out, they gave it such a minuscule advertising budget that no one knew the film was even out. The film took a $17 million write-down. While all this was going on, there was another heir to the Disney throne who was dubbed the idiot nephew by Uncle Walt himself, who once said, "My nephew will never amount to anything." Thanks to Walt-think inside the studio, Roy Disney was considered the village idiot. It didn't help that he wasn't the most charismatic individual. John Sanford, director, Home On The Range.

0:08:11 Speaker 3: He had this legacy kinda handed to him, and I think he really took it seriously. But on the other hand, he was just a normal guy who happened to have a ton of money. We were in La Verne, California, I think it was, at this movie theater. Doing a preview for Home On The Range, and there was a Bed Bath & Beyond, and Patty suddenly turns to Roy and says, "Oh, Roy, they've got glasses on sale. Do you mind if I go looking?" "Eh, go ahead, Patty." And Patty runs into the Bed Bath & Beyond and he says, "You know, we need to get new glasses. You know, you've got kids and they break all the glasses. And suddenly, it's 20 years later, and you don't have one glass that matches. So Patty wants new glasses." And he's just talking very frankly like that. And I said, "Yeah, I know that. I know how that goes." And then Patty comes running up. "Oh, Roy. They've got a wonderful set of glasses that are on sale. Let's go in and get them." And Roy goes, "Well, I don't wanna carry them all over the goddamn mall." And she goes, "Okay. I guess we'll get them later." [chuckle] It was just fun to watch them, 'cause it was like... Reminded me of watching my grandparents bicker.

0:09:12 S1: Roy didn't like his role at the company, nor constantly being at odds with Miller, so Roy left in 1977, but remained on the board. From afar, he watched the animation division go to hell, which was once the company's crown jewel. On Miller's watch, the Fox and the Hound was almost torpedoed, when soon-to-be-legendary animator Don Bluth left the studio after run-ins with Miller and the executives, and Bluth didn't leave alone, he took 15 animators with him. At the time, Ed Hansen, the head of the animation department, said this, "The whole animation department could have gone under at that time. As it was, we made it, but the release of the film has been delayed, and we lost half of our creative staff." Bluth had his own thoughts. "The thing that would help Disney the most is to have a living profit, not a committee. They need somebody who knows and cares about animation. They won't roll up their sleeves and plunge in like Walt did. They wanna hire somebody to do it. It just doesn't work that way. I think they've found that out now. It was a matter of constantly bumping up against Ron Miller and the older guys, people who wouldn't relinquish authority and who wouldn't make a decision except by committee. It just doesn't work that way. They had some of the best talent in the world there. But if a production head doesn't have talent or push, you won't make it."

0:10:29 S1: In spite of everything, the company did have some good news. Miller had gone against the Disney Brain Trust and was making adult fare with his newly-created Touchstone Pictures, and he had a huge hit on his hands with Ron Howard's Splash, on March 9th, 1984. It just also happened to be the same day that Roy Disney decided to resign from the board. Roy Disney's resignation set off a chain reaction. Corporate raiders tried to take over the company. Miller was forced out. Walker retired. Roy took a vice-chairman and chairman of animation role. Michael Eisner became CEO and Chairman of the Board. Frank Wells became President, and Jeffrey Katzenberg took the role of Walt Disney Studios chairman, and the corporate raiders were turned away. Eisner and Katzenberg had blazed a trail at Paramount and became the talk of the town for their track record and by throwing their names into the press as much as humanly possible. Meanwhile, Frank Wells had been vice chairman of Warner Brothers. They set about using their industry experience to transform a company that was run like a mom-and-pop shop.

0:11:33 S1: The fourth member of their team was assets, and there were assets galore that Disney simply wasn't utilizing to their full potential, or at all. The Walt Disney Company was like the drowning man in the flood who doesn't accept help from a rowboat, motorboat, or helicopter because he believes God will save him. The man dies, and he meets God and asks, "Why didn't you come to my rescue?" God says, "I sent you a rowboat, motorboat and a helicopter. What do you want from me?" Now, Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg would take the rowboat, motorboat and helicopter to the promised land. Under their leadership, the company began advertising its parks. Attendance rose 10%. They raised the price of admission, which led to hundreds of millions of dollars into the company's coffers. Eisner releases Disney classics on home video. It was initially sacrilegious in the company, but money talks. Cinderella alone made $180 million in revenue. Animation was losing money, so they thought about shutting it down. But Eisner didn't wanna piss off Roy, so they kept it around. It was a smart choice because Roy was a little bit more cunning than he seemed. He was no Richard III but he'd just usurped his own brother-in-law. And because Eisner would later fail to keep him happy, Roy would take out Eisner decades later. Roy might have been treated like Fredo, but he was secretly Michael Corleone.

0:12:57 S1: But that was a long way off, now Eisner was simply basking in his good fortune. "Such a bounty has fallen in my lap. Every day a new asset falls out of the sky. The real estate is just gravy, there are 40 unused acres next to Disneyland planted in strawberries." To re-emphasize his life on easy street, he was drinking a milkshake when he said that. And of course, there was another blue-ocean opportunity for Eisner to slurp up, animated television. On Eisner's first day at the studio, he announced he wanted to have a Disney TV cartoon on the air in 10 months.

[music]

0:13:35 S1: Willie Ito, animator.

0:13:41 Speaker 4: We knew internally at Disney that things are gonna start happening. And so, one day, they had all of the Burbank employees meet in the backstage set, we had a big open set area and everyone from the studio was there. And Michael Eisner was introduced and the whole bit. Then he gave us the overall picture as to what to expect in the future now that the new regime is here. And one of the things he commented on was we're going to alt Hanna-Barbera, Hanna-Barbera.

0:14:20 S1: According to the New York Times, he asked someone to find them the six most creative people at Disney to figure out how to make Disney TV animation work, which leads to the aforementioned brunch that started it all. One of the creatives brought to the table was Jymn Magon. Magon had produced story records for Disney music for eight years. Why bring a record producer, with no animation experience, to the table?

0:14:41 Speaker 5: I ask myself that every morning when I wake up, [chuckle] it's a bit amazing. Well, one of the things that Michael Eisner did before he was at Paramount was... I think he was head of ABC children's programming, I think he told me that he was the guy who actually bought the Scooby-Doo franchise from Hanna-Barbera, which of course, is still running after all these years. So, that was very successful, and I think he always had a soft spot for TV animation, and so when he took over the company in '84, one of the first things he wanted to do was to start a TV animation department. So, being new to the company, I think he just looked at different departments and said, 'I wanna meet some of the bright people that are doing things here at the company.' And we had just made a lot of money off of Mickey Mouse disco and a lot of projects that were new at the time in the record business. And so Gary Krisel, who was the president of Disneyland records, and myself, were invited over to Michael Eisner's house on a Sunday morning. Michael Eisner invited a bunch of people... Not a lot, I think there were about 12, in all, that were at this meeting in his living room on a Sunday morning in Bel-Air. And I had never been to Bel-Air, never been invited to someone's house up there, [chuckle] so, it was very fancy-shmancy for me.

0:16:01 S1: And there was also Tad Stones, who began his work at Disney in 1974. He was an uncredited animator on the Fox and the Hound as late as 1981. Now, he too was at the brunch.

0:16:13 Speaker 6: I was in Features, I eventually moved into Story, went to Imagineering and help design rides for Epcot Center, and back in charge of some Epcot Center documentaries that then never happened. Eventually ended up back in Features, I'm not sure they knew what to do with me. And that's about the time management changed, with Michael Eisner coming in and Jeffrey Katzenberg and those guys. And I was... Along my trials through the company, I had done some animation development for the guys over in the merchandising side of things 'cause they felt like the only way to really sell toys is to have some cartoons on TV. You can't wait for these features that come out every four years, or so, 'cause that's what it was at the time. Anyway, those same guys were pitching TV animation to Michael Eisner. I was actually on vacation, but I got a call that said, "We know you're on vacation, we know it's gonna be Sunday, but would you mind coming to Michael Eisner's house to talk about television animation?" So I was like "Yeah [chuckle], I think I can make time." Went there with like 10 people. These were the guys who basically I had worked with before and they were impressed with what I had done. And from the beginning, Michael Eisner felt like Disney is the top in animation, and it should be in every area that animation is in, it doesn't mean that television animation is going to look like feature animation, but it should be the best TV shows in animation on TV.

0:17:39 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:17:40 Speaker 7: Michael revealed that he wanted to start this new department, he wanted us to come up with some ideas and whatnot, and he actually came up with an idea himself, which was his kids who were in the other room eating cereal in the kitchen, in their pajamas [chuckle] on Sunday morning, had just come back from camp and I guess they had told him that they were eating these really cool candies called Gummi bears. And he said, "I just like the sound of that." And he looked at me, which was really weird, 'cause he didn't know me at all, and he said, "Make me a show called Gummi Bears." And I thought, "Why'd he pick me out?" [laughter] And I said, "Oh yeah, cool, great."

0:18:20 S6: So I pitched an old project, Mickey and the Space Pirates, they liked it a lot, but then they said, "No Mickey... We wanna make sure we can pull this off. Mickey is too precious." So there was a lot of respect there going in. No one was prepared to actually pitch shows. I had that artwork left over from stuff I had pitched to the merchandising guys, who were in the room, but it was kind of more feeling what Eisner wanted.

0:18:43 S7: But Tad was at that meeting, and he didn't come over for probably a full season to TV animation, but he eventually did, and thank God he did, because we worked on so many shows over there. But yeah, he was at that initial meeting, and he had a lot of great ideas. But he didn't come join us right away. And afterwards, we all met at a coffee shop, in Brentwood, and I remember us all kind of looking at each other, like, "This guy's crazy. Who wants to do a show about characters that get eaten every week?" [chuckle]

0:19:15 S6: And I remember saying, "Well, he seemed pretty sharp and respectful of animation, except for that idea about Gummi bears, that's like doing pepperoni people, or something. I don't know how to do that".

0:19:25 S7: So I think we all kind of felt like, "He's a busy man. This will all go away". It was about two weeks later I got a call, "So where's my show?" "Well, I'm writing it now", [chuckle] and I typed up something and it was horrendous, but it was the beginnings of development. And so I ended up, at one point, doing two jobs, I was still doing my record producing, but I was also developing two shows, both Wuzzles and Gummi Bears for Disney. And we didn't even have offices for the department back then. I remember we went over to a fellow named Lenny Ripps. Lenny Ripps was responsible for creating Full House and he was under contract at Disney for the time, and Lenny said, "Come on over, let's talk about this." And so there was Gary Krisel, who was going to be the president of the new division. So he was doing double duty at the same time, with records and TV animation. And Michael Webster turned out to be our office manager, and there was me. And that was the four of us sitting there around a card table in Lenny's office kicking ideas around. And that's how that department started, very bizarre and very humble.

0:20:47 S7: I remember having to take pitches from people and we were discouraged from doing that, because Disney became a big company and had deep pockets, and of course, people would come in and pitch, and then say, "You stole my ideas." And so pretty much kept to ourselves and almost all the development was from inside, from people on staff. So we didn't... It was in the time of [0:21:10] ____ and other people pitching their ideas from outside. There was a travel office for Disney across the street from the studio in Buena Vista and it was just a crummy old office building. And I think that's where we put Art Vitello when they brought him in to run Gummi Bears. And they were just sort of makeshift offices, they put some of the artists on the back lots, above the tea room. We were just spread all over. So we all became sort of bastard children.

0:21:41 Speaker 8: This is the great book of Gummi.

0:21:45 Speaker 9: What's in it?

0:21:46 S8: Well, we really don't know.

0:21:49 S6: Well, they actually developed Gummi bears kind of on a candy basis with a villain called Licorice Whip, I think. And they were actually gonna have the Gummi bears give dental hygiene messages at the end of every show. That went nowhere, and they threw it all out and came up with what was on the air.

0:22:06 S1: Instead of candy, the show got a complicated 500-year-old plus mythos. The Gummi bears were descendants of the great gummies, tasked with protecting all things Gummi from human greed and exploitation.

0:22:18 S7: I was very fortune that I got to work with two of my childhood heroes, which were Rocky and Bullwinkle. I found myself staring at Bill Scott a lot because besides doing all the voices of George of the Jungle and Tom Slick and Bullwinkle, he was a fantastic writer, and he had written all of these commercials for Quaker Oats, Quisp and Quake and Cap'n Crunch, and stuff like that. He once said to me, "You know the old story, Jymn, about how do you make a statue of an elephant? Well, you start with a block of granite and you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant". He says, but writing a script is different. You start with nothing, and you chip away until you have a story. [chuckle] And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting. You don't even have the rock to work with." [laughter] And I just thought he was a delight. He died after the first season of Gummi Bears and that was just devastating for us.

0:23:16 Speaker 10: Welcome to the land of Wuz, where nobody is like anybody you've seen before. The people who live in Wuz are called Wuzzle, naturally. And as you've probably guessed, Wuzzles are a little bit, you know, different.

0:23:33 S7: I didn't stay on Wuzzles. Once we got the two shows sold, I stayed exclusively on Gummi Bears. But in the early days, we were trying to put together these shows to pitch to the networks. And we had a show called Jumble Isle, the idea was that there were these animals that were jumbled up, and there were two of each animal. And, lo and behold, it turns out Hasbro has... Already has a project called The Wuzzles, which they had plush animals at the time. And, again, I don't know the ins and outs of the business side, but it was decided, "Well, why create these things when they already exist and let's just do a deal with Hasbro to take our development and put it with their characters." which I'm not even sure they had much of a back story. But once the deal was made, then we'd develop them into talking, breathing, and living characters. [chuckle] And so what happened was that Wuzzles then went on to have its own production department, just like Gummi Bears had, but like I said, my involvement at that point, I had dropped out after it sold to CBS.

0:24:39 S1: Besides Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, Disney television animation had one more venture in its early years. Fluppy Dogs was the first animated Disney feature for television. The show revolved around the Fluppy Dogs going through an interdimensional portal to Earth. It got a 5.3 rating on November 27th, 1986. The numbers were so low that it killed off the idea for a television series based on the special, and with that, Fluppy Dogs was over before it even really got started.

0:25:08 S7: Fluppy Dogs was sort of the... I kinda call it the albatross around the neck. [chuckle] It was a cross to bear. And I think everybody in the department worked on it at one time or another. And so what happened was that we were gonna do this Fluppy special and it was going to be the kickoff for a series and it just never took off, it never... It just never happened, and I think we were all kind of glad it didn't go any further. I mean, they were cute, but I just remember it being like, "Oh crap, I don't wanna go on another meeting about Fluppy Dogs." [chuckle]

0:25:49 Speaker 11: We've been to so many worlds. I don't know how long it's been since I've seen my family.

0:25:55 Speaker 12: You can talk!

0:25:56 S1: I wish you wouldn't keep saying that, I've been talking since I was 3.

0:26:00 S1: I'm sorry, but I mean, talking dog? Fluppy, and doorways to other worlds? I just wanna find one world, my world.

0:26:12 S1: Disney was going in cheap in terms of the price for pristine Disney Animation. Disney knew they couldn't afford movie quality animation and expect to make a profit. But Disney still spent $285,000 on each episode of Wuzzles. That was double what Hanna-Barbera would spend. It was so much, in fact, that it was $35,000 more than it was being paid by CBS. Why spend so much? The reasoning was simple, if it looked better than everything else on TV, then the characters could become part of the parks, and because of the success rate of their recent films, Disney needed characters more than ever. Willie Ito, animator.

0:26:51 S4: When I was at Hanna-Barbera, Michael Eisner was the VP of Children Programming at ABC. So when we were doing presentations and they would fly out here to review what we were working on, Joe would ask us to come in on a Saturday, sit at our desk as if we're busy bees and then bring Michael Eisner and his people through, and says, "Hey, here, look, they're all working on the new show idea," and then see the presentation. So I knew of Michael Eisner. And so, when he says he's gonna hop Hanna-Barbera Hanna-Barbera, I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I came back to Disney to get away from this rat race, and I hope we're not gonna be all caught up in the middle of it." Well, to make a long story short, a few months later, a fellow named Michael Webster, who I worked with in animation, was hired on to be production coordinator for the newly forming Disney TV Animation. Michael got with me and says, "How would you like to come back to animation?" I said, "Michael. No, please don't, don't do this to me. I'm perfectly happy. I'm actually in my new career back at Disney." And he says, "Well, we're gonna have a little boutique operation. All we're gonna do is be responsible for the scripts and we'll do story boards and maybe character design, but otherwise, everything is going to be farmed off to a production house. So we're just gonna have a little boutique operation and let me dangle this carrot in front of their view."

0:28:29 S4: What it was is, he says, "I know you used to make a lot of trips to Japan and Asia, and you know a lot of the production houses over there. So I wanna send you there and meet with these different companies and talk business." And he says, "Well, we'll be sending you first class. You'd stay at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo." And then all that. How could I resist? Plus, the fact that there was a handsome increase because of my position, would be like an executive thing. "Michael, I'm gonna give you three months. That's what I could promise you." So, "Okay, that's a deal." I did the pilot storyboard for a two-minute pilot. The soundtrack was recorded. They cut the exposure sheets, and the whole bit, and with those two copies under my arm, I flew to Tokyo. As I was registering, this American gentleman approaches me, "So are you Mr Ito?" I say, "Yeah." And he says, "Oh, hey. I understand you're here to make pilot films for your fledging Disney TV animation." I said, "Yeah, I am. You could talk to me initially, but the decision will be Michael Webster, who will be arriving here in about half an hour."

0:29:50 S4: So we sat in the lobby, having a cocktail, and then Michael shows up and he's at the desk and I said, "Well, there's Michael now." So, well, we flag him over and he says... The fellow talking to us says, "What we wanna do is we wanna throw our hat in the ring. I understand you're gonna be talking to people at Toei Animation in Tokyo, then you're gonna be flying to Korea, and you're gonna be meeting with Steve Hahn at the Korean studio." I said, "Well, we only have two sets of soundtrack, exposure sheets and copies of the layouts and storyboards." He said, "No problem, they can make copies of all that." "So, okay, what do you think, Michael?" And Michael said, "Yeah, sure, why not?" So we awarded them to also do a pilot. Three months later, the three studios submitted their two-minute pilot. So the three pilots came in. We all go in the sweat box, all the executives are there, I think even Roy Disney Jr was sitting in on it, and all of the newly-appointed executives of the newly-formed Disney TV Animation.

0:31:02 S4: So we sit there and, number one, okay, number two, then number three, then the lights go on, and then now we have to say which one we liked, and it was unanimous. We liked this one, say, number two. Well, it turned out that that was produced by a company named Tokyo Movie Shinsha. It had nothing to do with the other two that we submitted, but this one had the rich, full animation and all that. So they got the contracts. So TMS is the producing company. TMS, they later did the Little Nemo in Slumberland feature also, and so they had access to a lot of young Disney animators with full animation training to work on their project. As a matter of fact, even that two-minute pilot, they sort of farmed out some of the animation to Disney animators, that's why it showed such quality and it beat out the Koreans and the Japanese studio.

0:32:08 S4: They cheated, but, in essence, they... Disney kept striving to get the utmost in animation quality, which is good, because that was one of my concerns. If Disney gets into TV animation, are they gonna lose their integrity by just schlocking it on, doing limited animation, and all that, but the quality is there.

0:32:34 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:32:35 S7: I remember we did a lot of tests with other studios. We ended up with... At least for Gummi Bears, we ended up with TMS, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, and I had to remember, when I was really used to looking at hamburger sort of animation, which is you move across the proscenium left to right, the background that keeps repeating, and that's sort of what we grew up with and were used to. And I remember the first episode of Gummi Bears, I saw Sir Tuxford ride his horse into camera. The horse came to camera, he did a full turn around, which you'd never saw in TV animation, it was like, "Holy cow! Look at what just happened!" And it was a real leap in the animation quality, and I remember talking to Karl Geurs, who was working over at, I think he was at FilmNation at the time, and he eventually came over to Disney to do the Winnie the Pooh show. And he said everyone in other studios was talking about, "Did you see what Disney did on Saturday morning? Oh, my God!"

0:33:38 S7: So the quality really raised the bar. Now, true, it wasn't feature animation, but it was a big jump in quality. Finally, they put us all together over at the Cahuenga Building, which was on Cahuenga, near Universal Studios, and it just got bigger and bigger as we added more and more people. So, on the one hand, we weren't on the lot anymore. The sort of good news was, nobody was looking over our shoulders, so that department started and grew and made its success sort of off by itself. Nobody was actually sitting down reading, our scripts, and saying, "Gee, I don't think this is very Disney, or I don't think... " There just wasn't any interference because they had other and bigger fish to fry. We went off and sold our first two shows, Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, to CBS and NBC respectively. And it just took off from there.

0:34:29 S1: Willie Ito.

0:34:30 S4: We had our own growing pains within the studio, getting people together, finding a crew, a good animator, story, bit people. And before that three months was up, I could see the frenetic pace. We were moving from office to office because it was like we move in and then they say, "You know, it's not enough room because we're expanding our staff." And I'm thinking, "What happened to the boutique operation? Now we're gonna have a whole staff. And then am I gonna have to do what I did at Sanrio, is manage this crew of people and all that." So I started feeling the pressure of that position, but in the meanwhile, I went back to Carson. And Carson van Osten, who was my boss in consumer products, and I said, "Oh, Jesus, it's the same old thing. Before I get too caught up into it, can I come back?" So he said, "Oh, yeah, there's always an opening for you to come back." So I came back to consumer products, but I stayed with the Disney TV, as far as merchandise and by-products and whatever else, but I was now out of the production rat race.

0:35:55 S1: Tad Stones.

0:35:56 S6: Anyway, I went back to Features, and pitched some stuff, and actually was considering leaving the company, and maybe just freelancing and then going into more, actually, science fiction short stories and novels. I met one of the guys who was then the head of the TV department that was just starting, and mentioned, "Hey, do you have any freelance opportunities?" And he said, "Oh, I don't know if you wanna do that, why don't you come and visit?" And I came to visit their very small building and he introduced me around, he said, "Yeah, Tad may be coming over here." Actually, he said, "Tad would be coming over here." And I just was quiet. I didn't know what he was talking about, but they ultimately brought me over to be the creative manager of the department, in which I was supposed to take pitches and come up with stories, and actually, I was supposed to take pitches more than come up with stuff, but I wasn't geared that way.

0:36:50 S6: And we had a gong show coming up with Michael and Jeffrey, which is you do like a two cents description of a show and they either like it or not. And I think we pitched 22 ideas. I think 18 of them were mine. And it's not like they were fully developed, it was like, "Hey, Trojan Birds and Legionnaire Cats, the city of Troy is up in trees, like Roadrunner and Coyote," and they gong. Anyway, Gummi Bears had been through two seasons, it was run by Art Vitello and created by Art Vitello and Jymn Magon. And Jymn had had no animation experience before that, Disney just said, "Hey, if you want the show, this is the guy who's gonna do it." So there was always a contentious relationship there. And by the third season, NBC said, "We want to change," and they tapped me and Jymn went on to, I think, DuckTales development at that point. Anyway, so that's how I got to Gummi Bears, it was just kind of like, "Hey, you, over here". And that started me story editing and producing.

0:37:51 S1: Willie Ito.

0:37:52 S4: But the question always was, "Well, how come Wuzzles and Gummi Bears, when Disney has such a stable of great characters that they could work from?" But I think initially, they says, "Well, we're gonna be making cartoons for Saturday morning, and that's a lesser market quality-wise, and we don't want to ruin Disney's image by turning out the limited animation with Mickey Mouse and all that, so let's go with new characters." But then the shows were a hit and it started to see that Disney TV was getting some recognition, and so Roy Disney said, "Well, come on, let's... Let's use some of our own characters, that way the market and the kids will gravitate to it knowing it's a known Disney character." So we did DuckTales.

0:38:52 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:38:53 S7: After two seasons of Gummi Bears, I moved over to work on DuckTales, which was a big deal at the time, we were doing this as a syndicated program as opposed to a network program, and it had already been developed, Tedd Anasti and Patsy Cameron were always creating episodes.

0:39:10 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti, writers.

0:39:14 Speaker 13: My career in writing really started when I met my future husband, Tedd.

0:39:19 Speaker 14: That would be me.

0:39:20 S1: I was 18 and I auditioned for Walt Disney's new Mickey Mouse Club as a performer, and Tedd was a writer for Walt Disney and chose me at an audition, and I appeared on the new Mickey Mouse Club singing and performing sign language, and then I fell madly in love with him, Tedd, and started writing him love letters...

0:39:42 S1: Didn't spell my name right, though. So, during a union break, I'm sitting on a bench back when I did smoke cigarettes and the guy from the mail room comes by and goes, "Is your name Ashy?" I went, "No, no, it's Anasti." He goes, "Well, I think somebody's been writing you a bunch of letters, we've got in the mail room, didn't know where to deliver them." I discovered that she has an interest in me.

0:40:08 S1: Yeah, and he said... When he called me, he said, "You're really funny." He thought my love letters were funny, and he said, "I think you could be a writer." And Tedd showed me Micky Mouse Club scripts and taught me how to write scripts, and then I moved up here to Los Angeles and my first job was a freelance for Hanna-Barbera on a show called Casper and the Space Angels, and I freelanced for a couple of years and then became a staff writer on The Smurfs, and I was the first woman staff writer at Hanna-Barbera, as well as their youngest at the time at age 23. And then a little bit later, Tedd started writing for The Smurfs and we became story editors together. Margaret Lush, who approved my very first cartoon episode on Casper and the Space Angels, Margaret Lush, noticed that we had fun together when we wrote, not knowing we were dating or anything. And Margaret, she teamed us up as story editors on The Smurfs and then Tedd and I wrote on The Smurfs for three years, in which it won one Emmy. And then the next show that we did was DuckTales for Walt Disney.

0:41:16 S1: DuckTales was based on the Carl Barks comic book stories about the world adventurer ducks of Duckburg, Scrooge McDuck and his nephews. The comics were a hit back in the 1940s and '50s, and their comic adventure styling seemed a perfect fit for what Disney envisioned for its television programs. Barks was never really consulted, said Tom Ruzicka, associate producer on DuckTales. He continued, "Although the show was initially based on the concept of doing Scrooge McDuck and the nephews, we discovered that a lot of stuff that made wonderful comics wouldn't translate into the '80s, or into animation. So we started evolving new characters and other things to contemporize the show. As we did that, the stories got further and further away from the comics, although a few episodes are lifted right out of them."

0:42:03 S1: We had a meeting with Gary Krisel, where he showed us two projects, DuckTales and a special called Fluppy Dogs, and we chose DuckTales. That was a good choice.

0:42:16 S1: They hired us because they knew it would be a big show with lots of episodes. We got known as people who could do 65 half hours in a season and stuff like that.

0:42:25 S1: Or 90 minutes on The Smurfs. Our first year as story editors, we'd never story-edited before, it was 90 minutes, because it was such a hit, or on DuckTales, it was 65 half hours. People would say, "How come you're not freaking out?" Well, I just knew we would get it done, but Tedd, his energy and his dedication, I credit a lot of it to him.

[video playback]

0:43:18 S1: They were definitely based on the Carl Barks books, but the main thing we had to do was, again, bring the heart, bring heart out.

0:43:26 S1: Well, one day, certain executives said, "You're not following the books very closely." And we said, "We have 65 episodes to do and Carl Barks only wrote 16, and they're not that different from one another."

0:43:41 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:43:42 S7: The idea came up, "Why don't we do a mini-series that we can cut into a movie we can then show as a pilot, a kick off to the series?" So what was really fascinating, for me, anyway, was, even though the show was already in production, was to do the episodes that set the tone for the series. So the first thing that the public was gonna see was this five-parter, and we just had so much fun putting that together, because they had to work as five separate episodes, but it had to work as an overarching big story as well, so that it could be shown as a movie. And I have a picture of Mark Zaslove and Bruce Talkington and I standing in front of this chalkboard, we have this gigantic story outline in front of it of all five episodes. It was like, "Are we gonna be able to do that?" And it turned out spectacular, I was very happy with it.

0:44:32 S1: A lot of the episode went to Japan, the earlier ones, and the animation was just exquisite. It was so exciting to have the films come back, especially the earliest episodes. Wow, dazzling animation, like A-team animation. They had a party and they showed one of the fully realized episodes, it was called Duckman of Alcatraz, it was really, really sensational. But I remember even Tedd saying, "I didn't really realize how good this was." I think that no one really understood that, I don't think I did until the episodes started to come back with all the music, fully-animated, everything, and then when it debuted, it was a really, really big smash.

0:45:16 S1: Meanwhile, the LA Times' Charles Solomon was not impressed by DuckTales. In fact, he found it rather distasteful. "Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and other Disney cartoon stars owe their popularity and longevity to the fact that they were so well-animated, they ceased to exist as drawings on screen and emerged as clearly recognizable characters. By breaking with that tradition in DuckTales, the new management at Disney Studio is risking far more than the $20 million it has invested into the series. At stake is a name that has been synonymous with the best in animation for 60 years." But the risk of ruining their name in animation was well worth it, because the show was gigantic. DuckTales was big, really big. The series was in 56 countries and seen by 25 million kids each day. It went so far that it doubled the ratings of kids shows that it was in competition with. Even though each episode cost $275,000, Disney more than made its money back, and Disney television animation had finally truly arrived. Tad Stones.

0:46:20 S6: Well, DuckTales was a huge thing, because a Saturday morning show is just... Your first order is 13, and then maybe 10 the second season, and eight, and eight, and then you're lucky if you're still on. DuckTales, suddenly, it was like, "No, we're doing 65 episodes." George Lucas told us once that DuckTales was to syndication as Star Wars was to movies, I mean, it was huge.

0:46:43 S1: Patsy Cameron-Anasti and Tedd Anasti.

0:46:46 S1: We finished DuckTales and they didn't pick up our contract. The figured, find somebody cheaper, I guess, I don't know.

0:46:53 S1: Well, actually no, let me... I would like to differ with that. It was a smash and that was a wonderful thing for our career. They offered us Aladdin, actually, and we... I think we had always wanted to develop, like kind of be in developing new shows, and when Nelvana offered us vice president of development, we took that, and they were just starting out, kind of, they had done some things, but Beetlejuice really was their first big blockbuster. So I think they did offer us Aladdin after that, and then later, The Little Mermaid.

0:47:28 S1: I was sitting in a restaurant and here are the guys from Disney, the executives, end up sitting behind us, and we were with ABC at the time. When the girls from ABC went to the ladies room, the guys from Disney leaned over and said, "We need you back. We need you back on our show 'cause we can't get anybody that's doing a good job." So we went back and...

0:47:49 S1: Yeah, we spent three years on The Little Mermaid, which was, again, a very, very wonderful experience.

0:47:55 S1: They wanted us for five years, but we said, "Well, maybe just one year at a time." So we stayed there for 14 years, just one year at a time.

0:48:02 S1: Jymn Magon.

0:48:03 S7: I know that I was a big Carl Barks fan growing up, just as a kid, reading the comic book, and so we owed so much to Carl Barks, creating the Beagle Boys and Gyro Gearloose and Magica de Spell, and all these characters. And I felt bad that he never got any credit on the series. So one of the episodes I wrote was based on one of his comic book stories, I actually gave him credit as "Story by Carl Barks, script by Jymn Magon." Because I wanted his name in there somewhere on the series. There were two things that were key to DuckTales. One was Scrooge McDuck was torn between the cold, hard cash and the warmth of his heart for his family, his nephews, that's what was always driving the series, was this man caught between the cold and the heat. The second thing was, young children don't understand money, it's just like the coins, built different sizes, and paper, and they honestly don't have a concept of how money works. But Carl Barks was a genius when it came to, "Well, what do kids understand?" Well, they understand the tactile quality of coins. And so to have a money bin full of coins that you were able to dive into and just swim through like a porpoise, just that's what kids could understand and appreciate. And the fact that he gave Scrooge McDuck that childlike quality to be able to enjoy his money in a very tactile way, I think, was a real breakthrough for the character.

0:49:31 S1: Carl Barks, an except from The Duck Man, an interview with Carl Barks, 1975.

0:49:37 Speaker 15: The office, I think, wanted me to do a Christmas story and so I'm casting around for Christmas stories. I began to think of the great Dickens Christmas story, about Scrooge. It is the classic of all Christmas story. All I did was just peep enough to sort of steal some of the idea and have a rich uncle for Donald. Well, he had turned out to be kind of an interesting character in that first story, and so I began thinking of how to use him again. I guess the fact that he was rich was the thing that triggered all further developments, is just how rich, and the showing of his wealth. I found that that was quite a fascinating subject, just piles of money. It seemed to appeal to a lot of people.

0:50:33 S1: And I just gradually made him richer and richer and then I had to develop a place where he could store the money and all the time, there were the Beagle Boys trying to steal it from him. Those things just grew like building brick walls, you just lay one brick on top of another, and finally, you've got a whole thing built. You can't dive into a pile of money like you would into a snowdrift, so he had to have a trick by which he did. And I don't explain that trick because I don't understand it myself. And he can go out in the desert, and he can smell the presence of gold. Other prospectors would have to dig mountains of dirt before they could find any nuggets, but he can smell them. I think he represents something that nearly everybody wishes they could be, some time in their life, just a little bit too rich.

[music]

0:51:25 S1: Disney had another project that was budding at ABC. Disney had a long, strange history with this character, with lawsuit after lawsuit, but the character was about to become part of Saturday mornings in 1988, with an unlikely candidate to help lead it. Mark Zaslove, writer.

0:51:53 Speaker 16: What happened was I went to Cal Berkeley as a eventually theoretical astrophysics person, but I was also writing at the time, and I had a buddy, we were doing live action. So every summer, he was in UCLA, I was at Cal, we'd come back and we'd write a script or something. And then I wrote my first novel over there, and then it was like, "Well, what am I gonna do also for money?" I was doing magazine work, I worked for Larry Flynt for about seven months, meteoric rise and fall on Hustler and a couple of magazines like that, which was fun.

0:52:25 S1: I used to say, though, I was karmically balanced 'cause I did Pooh and Hustler. By the time anybody even asked about it, it was never a big deal, no one cared, I mean, it wasn't like I was posing or anything, or it was gonna come back and bite them. Not that I couldn't have. Oh, sorry. [chuckle] And I got my first gig in animation while I was there as well. But basically, I went, "I got to make some money." It's like, "Oh, yeah, animation. They need writers." My dad said, "Yeah, maybe try that." And it's like... So I went in, not thinking anything of it, really, and it was very easy to do, and so I was doing some freelance work and I had sent in something... Oh, GoBot, a GoBot script to Jymn Magon, and he went, "Oh, my God, it's the only funny GoBot script I ever read." So I went in, and he'd probably tell you better.

0:53:12 S1: I just had this sort of full of himself attitude, not in a bad way, according to him, but I just look back and it was just kind of funny, 'cause he saw it and he went, "This is really good writing." And I was kind of like, "Well, yeah, of course it is." It was like, "Well, it's animation." I never thought much about it. I learned to very much respect it. I always liked the product, but I was never like a fan of animation because I grew up around it, so it was always the discipline. But you have to understand, my dad was an animator/producer/director, so when I was growing up, animators were guys who were drunk on my living room floor. So I get to Disney and they're all teetotallers, except for a few people. I'm like, "You're not animators. I know what animators look like, and none of you are animators." I had gotten some bad raps there that I didn't do, I was always upset later when people say blah, blah, blah, and you were being blah, blah, blah, and I went, "I didn't do that. If I'd just known, I would have done that." I would have been much more obnoxious. I would have actually caused these problems.

0:54:10 S1: I think I could rub certain people the wrong way, although everybody could. But there was one day where, I don't know why, it was just one of those things where maybe we'd been working too hard, too long, and you're near the end of something, and I started taking tape and I started taping across the hallway. And then somebody threw something on it. It became like a giant spiderweb that stopped the hallway up. And then people started throwing items onto it, so it stuck. And so suddenly there's this whole blockade hallway, and people have thrown knickknacks and this and that. And suddenly, Michael Webster or Tom Ruzicka came by and they just look at me, like, "This is your doing, right?" It's like, "Ah, leave it." And then they walked off, 'cause they knew it was a way to blow off steam. But it was one of those almost MASH moments where you start off doing something silly, and the next thing, the entire place is sort of doing it. But I got nailed for things that other people did a lot. Where they were nicer, and I was more like, "Ah, whatever." I was certainly tolerant.

[music]

0:55:08 S1: And I think ABC wanted a Disney show. And then it became, "What do we give them?" And then Pooh, because they had mechanical rights, I guess, was a safe thing to do. So it was above my pay grade, but I remember that it was ABC wanting, but I think the machinations were, "What can we do that's very Disney that we have?" And then it became Pooh, and then it came down to us. It was funny. I knew it could be really good if we didn't screw it up, and they didn't think I should do it, 'cause I was young and I wore long leather jackets before Matrix. I was, theoretically, a dark character. And so they were questioning me. And I remember sitting at a table. I had to do the entire Bible premise pitch in a three-day weekend, and then go have lunch with Gary Krisel and some other people and explain why this show would be great.

0:55:53 S1: I remember going, "Look, I will bet you a year's salary," and fortunately, they didn't do it. "We will win our time slot, be number one, we'll win an Emmy, I guarantee it. I bet you my whole year's salary." And we did. We were the only show to do that at that time. But it was one of those where you just go, "If you don't screw it up, how can you miss?" The designs are good, great characters. Just don't be stupid. Write really well, and it'll be a good show. I never used anything from the books, because it wouldn't have worked for me. It was always, "How can I become Mill?" And then, "How do I expand that?" For whatever reason, they previewed it on the Disney Channel and then it went to ABC. And then ABC changed their order from 13 to 20-something for the first season. So we were all kinda cranking. That was actually a lot of fun. I loved that show.

0:56:41 Speaker 17: Why thank you, Piglet. It's perfect. What is it?

0:56:47 S1: That was the first time I was in charge of anything, and actually had to have responsibility, and scheduling everything. And Karl Geurs, he was very much pro-what I was bringing to the table. And that was a great learning experience. And it was about professionalism, and a way of looking at things that Karl had without being blighted or too jaded about it. Karl was Winnie The Pooh, just had that sort of attitude. As much as people used to say that he'd walk by and we'd be shouting at each other, I don't think we were ever ever ever angry. We were just loud. We'd circle, "What about this? No, this!" And then suddenly, I guess our voices went up. And people would go, "We walk by Karl's office," and it'd be like, "We hear you guys shouting. Is everything okay?" And I'm like, "Yeah, why? What's going on?" But you couldn't ask for a better person to take you in on your first day. We fell through the cracks at that time. They didn't know we were there, really, 'cause DuckTales was getting up to speed, and I remember, Karl telling me vividly, he goes, "You know, if we're a hit, they're gonna suddenly start caring about what we do, and give us all sorts of terrible notes".

0:57:49 S1: And he was right. Suddenly everybody wanted a finger in it the second season, and we got a ton more notes. "Well, we gotta do this. Is this good? Should we do that? We don't understand this." Anytime you try to do something, whether it's cutting edge, or just very truthful, and I thought the Pooh characters we handled extremely truthfully, they weren't just saying gag-lines. They were saying a line because that's what Pooh would say, or that's what Tigger would say, which is the essence of any kind of good writing, is, "Are you telling the truth?" And so we get people who wouldn't necessarily understand that, so we get notes, and then you'd have to explain it. And then that wouldn't necessarily work. And then it would be weird. I always had a really good relationship with standards and practices, but I remember I wanted Gopher to have a huge cask of black powder, 'cause he's a miner, and he digs, and I wanted to blow the side off of a mountain.

0:58:44 S1: And of course, ABC standards and practices says, "No, you can't do that." And I try to explain why, it's like this, and then kids'll do that. And I go, "I don't think they can get all the dynamite, or black powder." And they're like, "Well, you can do it in fire." And so I thought for a while, and just as a joke, I said, "Well, could you use a thermonuclear device?" And they thought for a while, and they go, "Yeah, that's okay." And so then I brought it to Karl, and Karl thought for a while. And he went, "You know we can't make the bomb look Pooh-ish, so we can't use it." But at least I feel like, "Okay, I got a thermonuclear device approved of for Winnie The Pooh."

0:59:15 S1: There's only one thing left to do.

0:59:18 Speaker 18: You mean?

0:59:20 S1: Yes, Rabbit. We must give Piglet a "staying inside" party. It's like a going away party, only different.

0:59:31 S1: While Pooh was doing well at ABC, DuckTales remained the number one kids show for two years. Luckily for Disney, when the show was finally toppled, it was by Disney's Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

0:59:44 S5: We didn't know this at the time, but I think in Eisner's mind, or whoever was in charge of that, felt like, "Let's see how the department goes first, before we start putting our flagship characters on the television." Because when you look at characters like Mickey, and Donald, and Pluto, and Chip and Dale, and whatnot, they were always on the big screen. So to suddenly take them and put them on the small screen, I think it's, you know, "Woah, we've got a big star. Let's not put them on TV, let's put them in movies," kind of thing. So yeah, we needed papal dispensation just to put Donald into DuckTales as a cameo to explain why he wasn't in the series, [chuckle] because he went off to join the Navy and left the nephews with his uncle. I remember we had to get permission to put him in to explain that.

1:00:29 S1: Tad Stones.

1:00:30 S6: I pitched Miami Mice 'cause Miami Vice was on the air. They liked that a lot because of the name. We called it Metro Mice and did a script for it, never went past that, although the villain of the script was a character called Fat Cat. We brought back and the idea of mice detectives came back as Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.

1:00:49 S5: We had two characters, two little mice called Kit Colby and Colt Chedderson. They were the original rescue rangers. And every time we would meet with Eisner and Katzenberg, they'd say, "That just is not a home run yet."

1:01:01 S6: And then later on, it was like, "Okay. DuckTales is a huge success. Are there any other Disney classic characters that we should be developing for?" And Mickey was still too precious. Donald made an appearance in DuckTales, he's very hard to animate. Goofy, yes, Goofy has always been the every man, definitely develop a bunch of things for Goofy." And then when they got to Chip 'n Dale, it was Michael Eisner who said, "Put those guys in that show," and Jeffrey said, "Home run." And that was Chip 'n Dale's Rescue Rangers.

1:01:29 S5: And that sort of broke the ice for, "Oh, now we can start to put other characters."

1:01:35 Speaker 19: I guess there's only one thing to say then. Rescue Rangers, away!

1:01:41 S6: I felt like, on Rescue Rangers, we lost a lot from script to screen because, one, we were working way too fast, throwing things together and not being able to follow up on stuff. The schedule was the same. The problem was, on the story side, there was just two of us editing. I literally was working 13, 14-hour days, except for Saturday, it was an eight-hour day, and then Sunday, my day off, was four hours. Those hours were at the studio. It wasn't like working at home.

1:02:10 S6: There was this particular point of contention that when it came time to do the multi-part pilot, we were told that we had slipped the schedule in some way, that we had less time to do the four episodes that were supposed to kick off the show than doing any given four episodes, which made no sense to me. It means we were rushing through the most important thing. So we took our shot at it, and we did what we could. And then they took me off the show and I said, "You know what? That's fine. There's only 15 episodes to go. I got to do the pilot, to set things up, so that's good." But then it turned out they were having people rework the pilot, rewrite it, and they were being given more time to rewrite the pilot than we were given to write it the first time, and that was too much for me, and I was out the door. [chuckle] Disney had certain landmarks in your career, give you a plaque or a ring or a statue. And the two statues I really wanted were Mickey as the Sorcerer's Apprentice and Tinkerbell. And Mickey was at... Hold on, I have it right here... I wanna say 15 years. Yes, I was about to get that. I was two months away from it, and it was like, that was somehow stupidly enough to make me calm down, and went back to work.

1:03:29 S1: Jymn Magon.

1:03:30 S7: It was a very strange time. I was busy trying to develop TaleSpin and we got this call that Buena Vista Television wanted someone to look at the pilot show that he had done. I think it was a four or five parter, just like what we'd done on DuckTales. I think they wanted someone to come in with fresh eyes and punch it up or do whatever, and it was like, "Well, I'm in the middle of doing TaleSpin and whatnot." Okay. So I said to Mark, "Look, I'm not gonna be here to help with TaleSpin. This'll go a lot faster if you help me." So he and I both jumped in and kinda reedited the pilot movie. And then I think we edited a couple of individual episodes that had been in the works during that time. And finally, just threw our hands up and said, "Look, we gotta get back on our project." And I think it went to Ken Koonce and David Wiemers next. So our time on Rescue Rangers was very brief. But, again, I never understood why Tad didn't follow through on that. I think it was some decision high above our heads, and I'm not sure why, so it was just like, shrug, "Okay."

1:04:32 S1: By the year 1990, Disney had invested $150 million in television animation, and by 1995, had plans to invest $400 million more. At this point, the output of television animation was prolific. Katzenberg was quoted as saying, "Each year, we are now producing as much animation as was done in the years 1920-1950 when all the classic Disney cartoons were made." These television animation shows had 22,000 full-painted cels per episode. Other shows at the time, of good quality, were averaging 15,000. Once Chip 'n Dale was another bona fide hit, Disney put plans in motion for television domination. And that plan was simple. It would have a two-hour block of cartoons when kids got home from school. Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Rescue Rangers, and their newest offering, TaleSpin. The shows were expensive, and yet, Disney wasn't even charging the networks for the shows. Instead, the deal was that Disney would retain the six minutes of advertisements to sell themselves. And this worked like Gang Busters. Despite the cost of production and advertising, the Disney Afternoon earned the company $40 million a year for a period of time. But this incredible run almost didn't happen because of one pitch. Jymn Magon.

1:05:46 S7: It didn't last long, but we had a process by which Tad would be developing a show and I'd be producing the show. And then I'd be done, so I'd go into development and he would go into production, and we would sort of flip flop as to what our duties were at TV animation. I was at a point of development, and we were creating this show called B players, and B players, I thought was kind of a clever idea. Came out at the time of Roger Rabbit. So the idea of all these cartoon characters mingling with live action people was popular at the time, so we said, "Well, who's the one character who is a star in motion pictures and then never worked again?" It was Baloo, so he said, "Oh, here's a guy who should be doing more movies, and he's not, he's stuck on the back lot. And along with him, is this kid who turns out to be a nephew, I think, of Mickey Mouse, his name was Ricky Rat, and Ricky had stars in his eyes, he wanted to be as big as his cousin or his uncle, whatever it was. And so the stories were all about Baloo and Ricky trying to convince the powers to be, specifically Michael Eisner, as a character in the show. "But it's too Western. Hey, let us do a space show. Hey, let us... " And then every week, they would be... Try in some way to get into the next gig, in that part of the cast, where all of these other people that weren't working anymore, like Horace Horsecollar, and Clarabelle Cow, and whatnot.

1:07:07 S7: Everytime we pitched it, it just never seemed to stick. And, at one point, Kaztenberg said to me, "If you say B players one more time, I'm gonna throw you out the window."

[chuckle]

1:07:18 S7: Well, it's like, "Well, I guess that project's dead." Everything I'd pitched there had pretty much gone. And so we were thinking, "This is gonna go", but it didn't, we'd stopped dead, and we were stuck, as we had to pitch the next series to all the department heads in Florida, and we had no show. And we had to get into production for the next 65 episodes. And on top of which, it was going to be the linchpin of the Disney Afternoon. And I remember Michael Webster, who was not a fan of mine, poked his head in my room and he said, "You better come up with a new show real quick or it's gonna be Tumbleweed City around here," meaning, we're gonna fire everyone."

[music]

1:08:01 S7: And I thought, "How did this fall on my shoulders, that everyone's future depends on me? Am I that important? And if so, let's see a bigger paycheck, [chuckle] if I'm that important." So it was like, "Oh, scratch head, scratch head, what am I gonna do?" And one of the guys that I had hired at TV animation was Mark Zaslove, and Mark had gone onto fame and fortune by story-editing the Winnie The Pooh Show. And so Mark and I did a lot of talking, a lot of collaboration on ideas and whatnot, and I said "Mark, come in here, I have an idea that I wanna chat with you, I wanna use you as a sounding board. "So what had happened was during DuckTales, one of the early ideas about Launchpad McQuack was that he had a courier service, and that he would fly anything anywhere overnight, or something like that, was his slogan, and so, Scrooge McDuck would use him to send things to crazy places like, 'I need a whale sent to Sea World', [chuckle] in Dubai, or something.

1:09:01 S7: And that never went anywhere, because, eventually, Launchpad became Scrooge's private pilot. So I said, "What if we took Baloo from B players, who's a really good character, I believe in him, and we took this air cargo service of Launchpad McQuack's and kind of glued them together so that Baloo is the pilot and he's got this company, and it's failing because he's a jungle bum bear, and he's got this kid, the typical Disney orphan, like Mowgli, who he's gotta look out for." I said "Now, we're starting to get the dynamic of what drove Jungle Book so well, which was here's a guy who is torn between being a big kid himself, and being a father figure." And I said, "I think there's something there." And so Mark and I kicked it around and we had some drawings made up. And in three days, we had TaleSpin. And we went and pitched it, and it was like home run. [chuckle] So whereas we could pull our hair out over B players for weeks and months, TaleSpin came together really very quickly. And so Mark and I ended up as the producers on that show.

[music]

1:10:12 S1: Mark Zaslove.

1:10:13 S1: He had pitched B players and that got shot down and they didn't have that fourth show to put on, which became The Disney Afternoon. I gather it was a $2 billion pitch, eventually, that's what they made off of it, off of TaleSpin. I remember walking in sort of in the middle of something, on Pooh, or on a break or something, and it was like, "Yeah, try this. What can we do with these characters?" And then, three days later, we had TaleSpin.

1:10:35 S1: Tad Stones.

1:10:36 S6: Gummi Bears, it was just... I mean, it was cool. We were a very small team, we were still trying to figure out things. It was just a lot of camaraderie in the studio, there was only... I wanna say like, two shows going, or on a special like, Fluppy Dogs and gummies and Wuzzles had just one season, and development was going on, so it was a very small group and a lot of energy. It was a lot of fun. And then when we got into the Disney Afternoon, it was even better because we didn't have to have network approval for anything, it was basically, if we could sell Michael and Jeffrey on an idea, we then did it. [chuckle] Buena Vista Distribution had to take it, they didn't have any input, and we got a lot of close scrutiny for the first three scripts from our president, who was Gary Krisel, of TV animation, and then he had stuff to do. So you were on your own. You'd come up with anything and then when first footage came back, there was kind of like a little more scrutiny, 'cause is it going the way we expected? How is it looking? What adjustments do we have to do? You went back to doing whatever you wanted, until it's about time to go on the air.

1:11:41 S6: At which time, it'd either be good times or panic, depending on what they thought of your show. I couldn't have done Darkwing Duck and had the show we ended up with under any other situation, because I was just trying all sorts of crazy, goofy things.

1:11:57 Speaker 20: I've just gone crazy!

1:11:58 Speaker 21: Come on, dad! It's not that complicated. Cabbages from outer space are duplicating everybody in the world, so they can take over the planet. And this cow, who's really an alien, has come here to recapture them. Just deal with it.

1:12:13 S6: It started as Jeffrey saying, "Hey, you did this episode of DuckTales called Double-O-Ducks. I want a show called Double-O-Duck." Again, I thought it's just a spy parody, there's no Disney heart to it, but boss said I gotta do it, and that's all I presented to him, and he said the same thing, he says, "There's no Disney heart to this. Do it over. Thank goodness. [chuckle] He should have said, "Get me somebody else, " but instead, I went into, "Okay, what about the Shadow and Doc Savage had a team of guys who worked in secret?" And ideas like that bubbled around Silver Age of comics and he really turned into more of a superhero, a non-super superhero than a spy, but you could look at that pitch and really do a normal show, [chuckle] I guess. And then, as we got into it, it was like, "No, I'm pitching, what if you take Warner Brother shorts and gave them heart in 22 minutes instead of seven minutes of just gags?" And that's what I was chasing, and some hit it better than others.

1:13:10 S6: When I was doing development, they wanted a new character, so I came up with Double-O-Duck, who, at the time, wasn't much more than... Visually, was Donald Duck, white tuxedo mask and a little hat. But, anyway, when we were developing him, Launchpad was not in it. In my head, was Doc Savage, who had a team of guys who worked with him, who were specialists, and then that shrunk 'cause it was like too many people. And for a while, he had a sidekick who was a little guy who wore derby, so it wasn't until Gosalyn entered the picture that we really had a show based on the idea that what if Batman had a little girl who refused to stay at home? Although I don't think we said it that concisely at the time. And we still felt like we needed a guy for Darkwing to talk to. And Launchpad, because he had been there in the beginning, and we knew him, just seemed like that personality is great. So we brought him on to Darkwing, but really changed his design and subtracted many an IQ point from him. [chuckle] So he's a lot dumber in our show.

1:14:10 Speaker 22: I got a whole scrapbook, a few newspaper clippings. Of course, it's not a very big scrapbook.

1:14:16 Speaker 23: Wouldn't it be easier to fly if we were facing the other way?

1:14:20 S2: Oh, yeah, sorry. [chuckle] I sometimes have trouble with that.

1:14:25 S6: The real pilot for Darkwing Duck is an episode I wrote called, "That Sinking Feeling", with Moliarty as the villain, this guy who is based on the mole man, basically, except he really was a mole, stealing objects from the surface, bringing him down to the center of the Earth where he'd reconstruct them into this giant ray that was going to pull the moon out of orbit to block the sun so it would be darker on the surface, and Moliarty and his minions could all live on the surface. That was the first one written, and the first one boarded that we went into and act three of that, for no reason at all, they're in a baseball stadium, and suddenly, everybody's in... Except for the villain, is in baseball outfits. It was that thing where Bugs Bunny would go off screen, come back with a whole new costume.

1:15:07 S6: We actually didn't get that level of breaking reality in the show a lot, although we went crazy in different ways, but that was the one that was testing out everything, it really set up Gosalyn's relationship with Darkwing Duck and how close they were and her relationship to Honker. So that was our pilot. That's the first thing through. Then what everybody considers the pilot, which is the four part, Darkly Dawns the Duck, that story, again, became a little straighter. But the main thing is, everybody always asked about the origin of Darkwing Duck, and I said, "You know, he's basically a Batman, what am I gonna do? Have him sitting in his mansion and a duck breaks through a window and he goes, 'That's it, an omen, I shall become a duck'"? Wait. There was nothing to tell there. I certainly wasn't gonna kill his parents, and have him have this life of seeking revenge. So, I said, "No. Let's address the heart, let's bring Gosalyn." This is the story of how he adopted Gosalyn, and then that story got a little darker, dealing with what happened to her parents. But that's what made you really care about her, so... And care about her predicament.

1:16:17 S2: Yeah, once again, saved by my buzzsaw cufflinks.

1:16:21 S6: Some of the things with Darkwing were very not formulaic, but I had orders for my editors, and I said, "Every show, he has to say, 'Let's get dangerous'". The secondary thing was, "Suck gas, evildoers" when he used his gas gun, and too many people didn't hear the G, and it just didn't come up as much, that one kinda fell away. Originally, he just had one thing that he said, he said, "I'm the terror that flaps in the night." And I, frankly, forget the second line, it was like the third script in, it was an episode where Launchpad had to play the part of Darkwing, and he could never get the line right. He said, "I am the road salt that rusts the underside of your car." He continually screwed up throughout the episode, and we all thought it was hilarious. And I said, "You know what? Rewrite the scripts we've already got done. Let's give that to Darkwing. That's too good to just leave on this one episode," and that became his ongoing thing.

1:17:15 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the jailer who throws away the key. I am feeling really stupid. Boy, I hate it when I'm early. You'd think criminal masterminds would be more punctual.

1:17:35 S1: Dean Stefan, writer.

1:17:37 Speaker 24: So, throughout the entire office, everyone from secretaries to producers and everything, they ran a contest. "Name this character", "Name this star" "Name this guy", and out of all the names, out of all... You know, we each put in dozens. They picked Darkwing Duck, and of course, it was Alan Burnett, who came up with the name and he got the 500 bucks. I would never conceive the name "Darkwing Duck", it just doesn't make sense. But now, how could it be anything else. Actually, Wiemers and Koonce, who were my story editors, who by now, had left Disney to seek their fortune in sitcoms, they sued Disney because they said they had written that Double-O-Duck episode of DuckTales and they thought they should be recompensed or whatever the word is.

1:18:19 S2: Of course, anything to do with Disney, they own anyway, but they did see some kind of settlement, I believe. I don't think it was huge. Then they later came back to Disney, so I guess there's no huge bad blood, or maybe that was part of the deal. Tad really had the whole thing down first, he was really into Twin Peaks at the time. I remember our first meeting, where we all go in to pitch stories and stuff, he had two bagels or donuts in front of everyone, which was like a thing from Twin Peaks. I wasn't a fan, so I didn't really know, but I knew it was sort of an iconic thing and he was very into the whole Twin Peaks thing, and very artsy stuff. And I would later make fun of him, because he would... I guess, it became such a big deal, the show, that he would start giving notes.

1:19:05 S2: Everybody would write out notes and give it to the story editors and stuff, like, he would start cassette-taping his notes like from some undisclosed location, like Howard Hughes, or something, and then the cassette would arrive at the story editors, and then they would play the cassette for you, and I would put this cover under... A lot of that may have been because of his hours, he liked to get there like five in the morning and leave at two or three in the afternoon, 'cause he had kids, and he was an early guy. Most people like me, I'm probably the worst case, but before 10:00 AM, forget it. So I never worked directly under him, where I had to report to him directly as a story editor, but he liked to run a tight ship, I think. But the cassette notes were a bit much.

1:19:49 S2: I am the thing that goes bump in the night. I'm the neuroses that requires a $500 an hour shrink!

1:19:55 S6: I know, when we started Darkwing, they wanted to do a Darkwing Duck movie, and the studio in Paris, that later went on to work on features, they did a bunch of development that was totally ignoring what the show was. I took one stab at it. Again, this is the opposite of being left to do whatever you want. I had to pitch this, and it didn't go, and I just said, "You know, I can't do both. I can't do a movie and get this show up and running. So I'm just gonna do the show". I only found this out recently, they thought that maybe that should be a musical. Jymn Magon was actually gonna have meetings with Barry Manilow, ended up having meeting with another big music guy, not a name you would know as a star, but that was just crazy. And that really showed that, man, they don't understand what Darkwing Duck is, so thank goodness that didn't happen.

1:20:41 S2: I am the terror that flaps in the night. I am the weirdo who sits next to you on the bus. I am the swan prince?

1:20:52 S1: With the Disney Afternoon well on its way, it was time for the first of the fab five to get his own vehicle.

[music]

1:21:02 S5: I think they were going to originally do it as a scout troop to the show, and that's why it's called Goof Troop. I was not there for that development, but when it finally came around who... Goofy's gotta live in Spoonerville, and have a next door neighbor, Pete, that's when we developed the show in earnest. We looked at those old cartoons of Mr. Geef or Goof, or whatever his last thing was supposed to be, and he was always... Lived in the suburbs and would wave bye-bye to his wife, as she would get in a car and drive off, and he was in charge of the kid for the day. Goofy would make mistakes, and the son would just go along with it, and I remember thinking, "Well, we've gotta kinda make it more interesting than that." And you look for the key to the series. And the key to Goof Troop, for me, was, "I don't wanna grow up to be my dad," and I think we felt like, "Yeah, that's what we want. We want this guy who's a single dad trying to raise his kid right, and was next door to this bad influence, Pete and his family." That, to us, was where all the comedy gold was to mine, skateboards and school and working in town, and commuting, and stuff like that.

1:22:11 S5: My forte was always in the comedy [1:22:15] ____ is in Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin kinda thing. Goof Troop was more of a sitcom, [chuckle] more Laverne & Shirley, that kind of thing. Feels like adventure to me because Goofy found a way to mess everything up.

1:22:30 S1: Michael Spooner, artist.

1:22:32 Speaker 25: I was a principal layout designer on the project. We decided to go with the style of 101 Dalmatians, where it was line art, the painter would actually do a watercolor under a cell line, so my line art would be transferred to Xerox to cel, like traditional animation was, and then they would do a watercolor. I had done so much design on the town in which he lived. The studio decided to name it Spooner though.

1:23:00 S1: Jymn Magon, original pitch for syndicators to buy Goof Troop.

1:23:05 S7: So, I wanna introduce you to Goof Troop. And, in it, Goofy is now a man of the 90s. He's a single dad living in suburbia, with his three phones, two TVs, one cat, and a very contrary 11-year old son. Let me take you through a day in the life. An alarm fire goes off. It belongs to good old Goofy, that good-natured klutz whose motto is, "A day without sunshine is like night!" Goofy embraces the dawn like every other obstacle in his life, with boundless and fondling enthusiasm. Now I wanna show you the difference, here is his son Goofy Jr, or Max, as he likes to be called, because he hates being silent with an adjective, like his father. Anyway, as you can tell from Max's enthusiasm, this is a school day. Now, Max loves Bo Jackson, Goofy thinks he's one of the Jackson Five.

[laughter]

1:23:50 S7: Max loves Mario Brothers, Goofy's pretty sure they'd beat him off in the third grade. Max loves his VCR. Goofy can't spell VCR.

[laughter]

1:23:58 S7: Anyway, Goofy heads downstairs to make a nutritious breakfast, or more to the point, a nutritious mess. "Junior, food's on!" Well, Max heads downstairs, shaking his head, wondering, "How does such a radical kid like me end up with such a goof for a father?" And so it would appear that the fruit seldom falls far from the tree. However, this is a curse that Max is determined to break. He desperately wants to swim out of the deep end of his father's gene pool. But you know, through all these crazy escapades, the one thing that Max learns is, "Just when you're convinced your folks are totally useless, they're there for you when you're totally useless." So relax, Max, your father ain't so bad. He's just Goofy. Hell, let's face it, kid, you're a little goofy. Welcome to the Goof Troop, kid.

1:24:47 S7: Yeah, I had done an episode called 'Have Yourself A Goofy Little Christmas', which the idea of the father-son going off and father wants to do one thing that's traditional and the son wants to do something different. That, to me, felt the most like a booby, and kind of set the tone. And, at one point, we were gonna do, I think, a two-parter, that was Goofy and his son on vacation, and somehow, that two-parter turned into the idea to do another... Well, it was called "Movie Tunes" at the time, when we did the DuckTales movie, and that was driven pretty much by Mr. Katzenberg, who told us a really interesting story about how he was losing touch with his daughter, and he decided "We're just gonna take time off and she and I are gonna get the car and just go somewhere." And he says, "I don't know where it happened or how it happened, but we connected on that trip, being trapped in a car together. That became the gist of The Goofy movie, which was father wants it the one way, the son wants it another way, then they finally find each other along the way. That was very rewarding for me, to be able to move from the TV show into a feature film.

1:25:57 S7: Well, I sat by myself for a long time, and then they finally brought in Kevin Lima. Kevin just had a whole plethora of people he trusted, and they were great. The film took off from there, and I think, of all my experiences in animation, that was the most... I want to make sure I say this right, kind of the most disconcerning, because it was so different from writing for episodic television, 'cause in episodic television, the writer becomes king. I'm not sure that that's the correct position for the writer, but just because of the time limitations, you had to have something written and, basically, directed on paper, and then everybody followed it. That's whether you could get it done in time. But when it came to a movie, it was a very flexible thing, and lots of people are involved, and they're changing their sequence, and that sequence is so powerful that it changes that sequence. And suddenly, the writer's, "Huh? I think I recognize one of my lines in here." [chuckle] I think Moss Hart said that. I would come into work and I had written a sequence and then it would be storyboarded, and I look at this and say, "This is genius! I wish I had written this!" [chuckle]

1:27:05 S7: It was terrific. It was such a new way of working for me. So it was disconcerning from the standpoint that, gee, I don't have the kind of control over the project that I used to have on TV, but that's not to say that they weren't doing spectacular work and that I was such a lucky guy to be a part of it. While I feel like I brought the essence of 'I don't wanna grow up to be my dad', I really feel like so much of all the clever little things and the sort of Kelly moments, that was Kevin and his team coming in there with their stuff, and it was just such a delight to work with them, and that's why I think I was upset, because I didn't get to follow through on the movie. I was told in... Go over here and work on DuckTales. We went to lunch as I was leaving the series, we went to Sizzler, of all places, and I just said, "I feel so bad, Kevin, because I wanted to be so helpful and such an important part of this and I feel like so much of what I did didn't end up on the screen." And he said, "But Jymn, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing, if we weren't standing on your shoulders", and it was like, "Oh yeah, I guess so" [chuckle] Made me feel better. That's just a part of the creative process. The first link in the chain sometimes doesn't look like the last link in the chain [chuckle], it's painted a different color along the way.

1:28:33 S1: After the company had dabbled in its most famous IPs, the next show would be a wholly original character, well, sort of. Bonkers was loosely based on the idea of Roger Rabbit, he was a former cartoon star who had fallen on tough times after his show had been cancelled, and became a cop, teamed with a human partner. But its production was mired in reboots and dissatisfaction. Greg Weisman, creator, Gargoyles.

1:29:00 Speaker 26: Well, I mean, Bonkers is complicated. Bonkers was a show that I developed, and got Duane Capizzi, the producer, story editor, Bob Hathcock was chosen to be the director, producer on it. We had real high hopes for it, but, unlike Gargoyles, that was a show where I got it up and running and then I walked away from it, and other people were supposed to be paying attention to it, and the very first two or three episodes that came back didn't look very good, from an animation standpoint, not sure that, initially, the show's art directed very well. We had humans and quote unquote "toons", even though the whole thing was animated.

1:29:37 S2: And I think there should have been a distinct, more kind of realistic art style, not Gargoyles, necessarily, but something, even from a color palette standpoint, that felt a little less cartoony, so that the quote unquote "toons" on the show, like Roger Rabbit, and Jitters Dog really pop, because they were toons in a human world, and I don't think that art direction ever quite came off, but I think we had a really smart show which featured Bonkers partnered with Miranda Wright as a cop. Bonkers drove her crazy but he was her partner, so she'd back him no matter what, and ultimately, they were friends, and we did a lot of smart sort of clever things about what it would be like in a Roger Rabbit vein to live in a world with toons and humans.

1:30:25 S2: And then I think, honestly, that some of the executives, when the first stuff came back and didn't look very good, overreacted. There were certainly problems, maybe even some problems with the writing, but I don't think the problems were quite as problematic as some people thought, and I think, frankly, most of it could have been fixed by fine-tuning the art direction. But I wasn't in charge and I was also in the process of trying to move over to Gargoyles and all this stuff is sort of happening simultaneously. I did get dragged back into it, and at some point, it became clear that... To Gary, that he wanted some real wholesale changes here and neither Duane nor Bob were giving him that, so both of them wound up getting booted off the show, and a guy named Bob Taylor, who had done Goof Troop, was brought in, and Bob made some very drastic and, I think, unnecessary changes to the show.

1:31:19 S2: He did get the art direction better, but Bob didn't think girls were funny, so he ditched Miranda and put in a character who, in essence, was Pete from Goof Troop, and was voiced with Pete's voice by Jim Cummings, and Jim is great. Jim voiced Bonkers. I love Jim. But it was just a dynamic that we had seen before. The story lines were, I thought, way less interesting, and I was really not happy with the change in direction on the show. And then, of course, they wanted this stuff first, so it all got very rushed and they couldn't throw away the dozen or so episodes that featured Miranda, so even though that stuff was made first, it aired last, and they actually created an episode where Piquel joins the FBI and moves away, and Bonkers is partnered with Miranda for the last dozen episodes, which again, were the dozen or so that were made first. But they created a new pilot and basically played it as if the Piquel stuff was first, and the Miranda stuff was second, when it was really the other way around. And so, it became a show of...

1:32:31 S2: It makes me sad, [chuckle] but... 'Cause I think a lot of potential was squandered there, and I think a lot of the changes were unnecessary, and, to be fair, Taylor and I didn't really see eye to eye on anything, and I finally just begged off, and asked Gary to take me off the project, 'cause I didn't think I was helping Bob, 'cause we agreed on almost nothing. And so I was just in his way, and Gary had gone with Taylor, and it was his show now, so I had to let it go, and so Gary said, "Okay." And I sort of stepped away from the project, and had very little involvement with all but the first couple Piquel episodes, which I didn't care for, which doesn't mean they're bad, it just wasn't the show I had developed, and wasn't the show that I wanted to make.

1:33:30 S1: Bonkers hit the air in 1993. It had almost been a decade since the brunch that started it all. In that time, Disney television had gone from nonexistent to the standard that everyone else had to chase. The problem was, by the time Bonkers hit the air, other networks had already caught up and would even take the lead, and now Disney television animation would have to decide if they were going to chase by rebranding, or stick with the girl who brought them to the days.

1:34:00 S2: Here were all these people from different studios, there were people like me that had never worked for any studio, in animation. I was a record producer. So I think it was [1:34:09] ____ and I, we're talking, and we said, "Are we doing this right? Are we doing a Disney TV show correctly?" And then we realize, there's never been a Disney TV show, at least a Saturday morning style TV show. And therefore, because we work for Disney, and we're making these shows, we are Disney [chuckle], what we're doing is Disney. And that, whatever we were doing, whether it was right or wrong, would be a Disney show.

[music]

Subscribe: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-look-back-machine/id1257301677?mt=2

[thenichibro]

Spring 2018 Anime First Impressions

Two weeks into the season - basically on schedule by my standards! This season, as always, has ups and downs as well as popular shows I’m not watching (Megalobox) and shows I immediately regret starting (Devils Line). As a further point, I don’t do impressions of sequels, and in this case I’m including Steins;Gate 0 as a sequel because it is so based on the events of the main show. Regardless, here’s what I’m watching with MAL links and original shows marked:

Legend of the Galactic Heroes - Die Neue These (MAL) Look, I'm not going to immediately say go watch the original LOGH, but I'm kidding that's exactly what I'm going to say. LOGH is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. My issue with this series is not that they will not represent the characters badly, but that 110 episodes shoved into 12 episodes and three movies is simply not enough. LOGH has a scale, a grandeur, a weight that is conveyed as you invest yourself into it for hours on end, from bombastic space battles and the minutiae of day-to-day politics. You need both scales, the imperial and the individual, to really experience LOGH, and I feel like 12 episodes isn't enough time to have both. The LOGH remake looks and sounds fine (though with way too much CG and a bit of same-facing with Reinhard and Kircheis), but I am incredibly nervous about the pacing. This is a first impression, and if Production I.G. pulls this off it will be a classic reimagined for a modern audience that deserves it. But I simply don't think that's going to happen. I'm hopeful, but apprehensive. And again, watch the original. It is pure class.

Persona 5 the Animation (MAL) Play the game first. Please.

Devils Line (MAL) A world where vampires exist under the guise of normal people and some lose control and kill under cover of night. Basically Tokyo Ghoul with less of a vampire "society" and more just individual threats, with more of a sexual twist. Tsukasa is our helpless college heroine, adrift as she finishes school, when she finds out the guy who likes her is a serial murderer who wants blood! So wacky! She's saved by Anzai, a calm, collected member of the agency tasked with dealing with vampires, before unintentionally revealing himself a vampire. Yet we are expected to just accept Anzai forcing himself on Tsukasa because he's the savior? Right. Background sound design isn't bad, art/animation are bland and at times awkward. Devils Line is trying real hard to be a new Tokyo Ghoul, but now with more sexual undertones for whatever reason. Pass.

3D Kanojo: Real Girl (MAL) Ah, otaku love. At least it can't be worse than Saekano, right? That'd be a serious challenge. 3D Kanojo follows Tsutsui, an otaku that suffers the typical ostracization of anime, when he meets Iroha, a blunt girl who for once doesn't ostracize him. The first episode has plenty of the classics - falling into a pool, talking about "3D women" being out of his league, heroics when he knows he can't win. Everything you'd expect. By the end of the episode, things progressed a helluva lot more than I expected, in many ways. It seems thus far that the otaku thing is the impetus for Tsutsui's low opinion of himself, rather than anime being the point of the show. More introspective than I would otherwise think, I think 3D Kanojo holds a lot of slight surprises. It's interesting, for sure, and I hope it continues that way.

Tachibanakan Triangle (MAL) One of two short anime I'm watching this season, Tachibanakan follows a girl who moves into a girls apartment complex and gets more yuri than she bargained for.  We've got the fang-sporting short one, the quiet one, the onee-san, the blonde foreigner, you name it. I don't expect a lot of character development or anything similar, but three and a half minutes of yuri sounds just fine to me.

Uma Musume (MAL) First off, props to the show for making the horse girls' names just as stupid as those of real racehorses. I mean, I know it’s because the girls are named after real racehorses, but still. Uma Musume involves a world where horseracing is hugely popular, only the racers are anthropomorphic horse girls. Our main girl is Special Week, a newbie transferring to a popular racing school in Tokyo. She's your typical genki type - eager, energetic, bright-eyed. Enthralled by one of the top girls Silence Suzuka, she aims to become one of the top horse girls in Japan. Oh, and the top horse girls perform as idols after each race. This sure is a mobile game adaptation, god damn. P.A. Works' art looks solid as always (props to the flowing tail animation); the OP and ED are pretty standard idolish stuff. I prefer the ED. Anthropomorphic racing is fine, yet for some reason the idol part is what makes it weird for me. This show is strange, but if it's not much more than cute horse girls doing cute horse girl things, I'll keep paying attention.

SAO Alternative: Gun Gale Online (MAL) I hate SAO. I have a laundry list of reasons that I despised both seasons of SAO. The reason I'm giving GGO a chance is because the main charater is a girl playing a cute chibi girl in-game and she just wants to make friends. Hopefully, that will avoid the terrible pitfall that was anything relating to Kirito. GGO starts right in the action, with a topical Battle Royale mode putting our pink girl and her partner right into the action. The tactics are good and help set up the basic premises of the gametype, if that necessitated a bit too much monologuing by M, the partner. Also, plenty of pouts. Always a bonus. As always the invincibility of the protag is annoying, but I don't really expect breakthrough plot changes from an SAO spinoff. I mean, SAO S1 was good for the first 10 episodes too. Keep this cute girl and not-harem, focus on connecting with others through video games rather than shanking perverts in a parking lot, and it'll be solid.

Hinamatsuri (MAL) A super-powered middle-schooler falls into the life of a nicer-than-normal yakuza. Nitta is the yakuza, with a penchant for fancy porcelain. Hina is the middle-schooler, your typical otherworldly killing machine set into an unfamiliar world. Hinamatsuri puts a lot of good spins on the taking-care-of-a-supernatural-girl trope, with the main character being a yakuza rather than an "average high schooler." Furthermore, there are some nice father-daughter vibes going between the two, though it's clear Hina maintains the upper hand. Won over by Nitta's refusal to use her as just a tool, their life together begins. The comedy is your standard boke/tsukkomi, but the lightning-quick delivery of the lines had me cracking up regardless. Hinamatsuri looks like it could go darker any second, but if it doesn't I'm perfectly content to stay around.

Comic Girls (MAL) Probably the most classic cute girls doing cute things show this season, Comic Girls follows a group of mangaka girls living in a dorm together. Moeta is the worrywart crybaby, Koyume's the genki blonde, Ruki is the less-than-secret pervert, and Tsubasa is the tomboy. There's plenty of nice compliments between the girls' personalities, and Koyume and Moeta seem like a great fit as the newbies in the group. Furthermore, their personalities being informed by the manga they draw allows for a nice exploration of manga cliches through their interactions. This looks to be more on the character-driven side than a deep dive into the logistics of manga production, but that's just fine. Animation and sound aren't really anything special, but they're by no means bad. As a slice-of-life fan I'm all in, even if this show doesn't turn out to be anything super unique.

[ORIG] Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai (MAL) Tada-kun follows, well, Tada-kun - a student and photographer who runs into Teresa, a rich European while taking pictures. Tada-kun, following the show's title "Tada Doesn't Fall in Love," has a calm, somewhat stoic demeanor, while Teresa is your bright, beautiful girl finally in the Japan she'd only seen on TV. After meeting multiple times as Teresa wanders lost, Tada helps her out of the rain before she finds her hotel, right next to his family's coffee shop. And then, of course, she transfers into his school along with her bodyguard, the fiery-tempered Alec. The art is crisp and animated well, and both the OP and ED have their charms. I personally like romance focused tightly on a single pair (Tsuki ga Kirei and Ore Monogatari are two stellar examples), and I hope this delivers. With a single couple development becomes the key, but if this show keeps it up - increasing interactions leading to discovered feelings, all starting from a photo (sounds a bit like Just Because, don't you think?), this will be a emotionally engaging experience.

Fumikiri Jikan (MAL) The other short show I'm watching, Fumikiri Jikan is about conversations while waiting for the train to pass. The first episode ran the gamut all the way from peppy slice of life to romantic character drama. Being so tightly focused on conversations and with limited time, a show like this needs to nail the dialogue to set up the characters each episode. I felt like I almost watched a movie in three minutes this time, and that's a good thing. The main sticking point is that with individual stories each time, quality can vary wildly. This show is a bit strange but equally interesting, but it will certainly depend on the story being told.

Wotaku ni Koi wa Muzukashii (MAL) Ah, otaku love. It can't be worse than Saekano, right? That would be a serious challenge. Wotaku ni Koi puts a spin on the genre by situating the main characters as adults who met each other in middle school and just now reconnected. The main cast of four and especially the banner couple Hirotaka and Narumi are uniquely quirky and their personalities gel so well with each other. Despite the long gap in meeting each other I feel the chemistry immediately between the two, and as episode one ends with their relationship actually beginning I'm all in. Not only does Wotakoi change things up by having the main characters as adults but it also gets past all the roundabout bullshit that often bogs down high-school romances. Furthermore, the true enthusiasm with which Hirotaka and Narumi can nerd out about what they like is refreshing, kind of like Animegataris before it became the Matrix. Combine that with a crisp art style and great musical themes, and maybe Wotakoi can provide the grounded otaku love story we've been waiting for. Oh, and fuck the Saekano shout-out. Not that I'm going to let that cloud my thoughts on Wotakoi - I just really, really don't like Saekano.

Golden Kamuy (MAL) This season's "a popular manga is finally getting an anime" show, Golden Kamuy is the story of a soldier and an Ainu girl suriving in the north of Japan in the Ruso-Japanese War era just after the turn of the 20th century. The pair aims to find a hidden treasure, stolen from the Ainu and stashed by a criminal somewhere, with the location hidden on tattoos of various escaped prisoners. I enjoy historical shows, and Kamuy is great in that it is more than just feudal Japan or something similar - the snowy, late-Meiji Hokkaido setting is undoubtedly unique. Sugimoto, the soldier, has earned his nickname "Immortal" due to his war exploits, and his personality shows it - confident in his skills yet cautious of threats. Asirpa, the Ainu, is the resourceful, collected partner Sugimoto needs in the wilds of Hokkaido, and shares Sugimotos motivations, having lost her father to the criminal who hid the treasure. The art is clean, and while the main characters look good there needs to be mention of the awful-looking CG of the two bears and the wolf that make appearances in the first episode. It just looks horrible. The dynamic between Sugimoto and Asirpa is great - the contrast between violence and peace especially - and I look forward to see where they're going. I only wish the overall tone was more consistent - the first episode is a great solemn look at the task in front of them, while the second episode inserts a whole lot of "comedic" moments that seem out of place with the action and Sugimoto himself. Regardless, quick shout-out to Man With a Mission for the OP - one of my favorite bands and this song is no exception.

[hysydney]

Now you see it, now you see it again -  part 10

Chinoiserie chic

Orientalism has been a recurring theme in Western decorative arts since the16th century, with textiles and clothing among its most prominent exemplars. Eastern ideas of textile, design, construction, and utility have been realised again and again as a positive contribution to the culture of the West.

1920s’ fashion saw a renaissance of chinoiserie, with heavily embroidered silks, patterned fabrics, frog buttons, cross and Mandarin collars, loose wide sleeves, all of which borrowed significantly from the prevailing Chinese influences.

Phryne’s wardrobe reflects these designs, with her stunning red qipao or cheongsam (see @foxspirit1928′s post here) and a wonderful array of short and long embroidered silk jackets, that we glimpse once only.

But there is at least one that makes a second and third entrance and it is of particular significance for Marion Boyce who spoke of this in interview in the MFMM Costume Exhibition Catalogue (2014):

‘This coat I’ve had for many, many years. I found it in a second hand store years ago  and it’s always been my coat if I’m really late coming home from work and I have a particular event. This is my ‘go to’ coat which then became Phryne’s.  Chinoiserie in the 1920s was quite enormous and very much part of the 20s, and really after the Chinese closed their trading borders that was the last time, so I felt it was a really important part of the history.’

It is an original Chinese bridge coat - black silk, heavily embroidered with white floral motifs, and black frog buttons.  The costume team added cream cuffs and belt to finish off the ensemble.

It makes a brief appearance in Episode 1 of the first series, Cocaine Blues when Phryne attends the hospital. The coat complements Mac’s lab coat and the exchange between them also clearly sets the scene for Phryne’s determination to act on behalf of the disadvantaged and marginalised. Here it is the victim of an illegal abortion.

Phryne: Has she given you any details about what happened? 

Mac: They never do - either fell down the stairs or claim to be completely mystified. This one's not even offering her name. 

Phryne: No clues in her purse? 

Mac: You don't have to save the world, Phryne. 

Phryne: Where are her things?

She wears the Chinoiserie Coat again in Death at Victoria Docks (S1, Ep 4), with a black and white felt hat and white leather gloves, and white pants and blouse beneath.

It is an episode whose plot interweaves families divided and political dissension.  There are two story lines that intercept  where families have come adrift and daughters choose to leave.  The Waddingtons’ daughter Lila has run away from a family secret, and Peter the Painter’s anarchist associations have estranged him from his daughter, Nina.

Phryne first goes to the Waddingtons to confront  Mrs Waddington and her step-son Paul on what she has discovered. Lila ultimately seeks refuge within convent walls, and the black and white of the coat is reminiscent of the cloistered halls:

(need a shot of the back of the coat - stunning!)

Phryne: Of course, I thought it was strange that a man like Gerald Waddington would make a donation in cash, rather than by cheque. And that you were so unsurprised by it, Mrs Waddington. 

Paul: What have you done? 

Phryne: Your sister is safe, Paul. But there is no doubt that she has suffered because of your deception. Hasn't she, Mrs Waddington?... It was the small things that gave away your love affair at first. The touch of a hand. But when Lila discovered you together and knew for certain, the only choice was to make her doubt herself. And what better way than to take her faith and turn it against her? 

Phryne then goes to the docks to address Lila’s father, who is also embroiled in a dockland dispute and murder.  Phryne trades her services and tact for peace on the docks.

Phryne: The Reverend Mother has agreed that Lila can stay at the convent on the condition that she finish her schooling before she makes any decision about her calling. 

Mr W: Thank you. I suppose you'll be wanting your fee. 

Phryne: I'm not sure I need a monetary payment. But I could settle instead for... peace talks on the waterfront... in return for my absolute discretion. 

Mr W: You drive a hard bargain, Miss Fisher.

And a finale in the coat... DI Jack wants to see how reconciliation was achieved.  Their conversation is conducted with a ship’s mast in the background amidst sea mists, the black and white of the police car, the creamy-grey timbers and iron all providing a harmonious palette to the dialogue.  DI Jack references her charm, and she finds there’s a lot more to this detective than meets the eye:

Jack: You'd almost think someone twisted Waddington's arm. In a charming way... I've had my fair share of strike action. 

Phryne: What? The police strike of '23? 

Jack: Mmm. Shoulder to shoulder... (says he, as he and Phryne stand shoulder to shoulder)

Jack: A lot of good men lost their jobs. I was one of the lucky ones. 

Phryne: I would've picked you as more of a fence-sitter. 

Jack: It'd be a tactical error to think you had me pegged just yet, Miss Fisher. 

Phryne: I'm very glad to hear it.

In Queen of the Flowers (S1 Ep6) the coat reappears but this time with black accessories - the black beret, black gloves and black pants and blouse.  This time too we have families at the core of the plots, as parental responsibility and accountability are tested.

Phryne and Jack are on a case with murky undertones, of exploitation of young girls. Power and position provide masks for manipulation and murder.

When the coroner’s report reveals more than a drowning, Jack attempts to protect Phryne from the truth.  She insists, he doesn’t hold back. They work as a team.

Phryne: And Kitty was alive when she drowned. 

Jack: That's the conclusion. But there was bruising suggestive of someone a lot more hefty than Rose Weston. 

Phryne: What kind of bruising? 

Jack: You don't need to know. 

Phryne: Tell me. 

Jack: A man's boot print across the small of her back. 

Phryne initially draws a wrong conclusion about the wearer of the boot.  In her exchange with  young Derek, the Mayor’s nephew, the floral coat foregrounds the floral preparations for the Queen of the Flowers event:

But then the true depths are revealed - of not only the Mayor’s abuse of young girls, and murder to cover his offence, but of a grandfather prepared to sell his granddaughter to repay debts. The true relationship between those with blood ties is questioned.

And running through the background is another thread of parent-daughter dissonance, of Jane’s relationship with her birth mother.  She returns after years of absence to reclaim her daughter, in confused and psychologically unstable state of mind.  Jane is torn, as is Phryne. 

To whom does Phryne reveal what she feels? Who can and does reassure her? 

Phryne: Well, my school of social graces was a complete disaster. 

Jack: There are enough fox trotting young ladies in this town. You taught them to demand justice instead. And no doubt they'll all become firebrands in their own right and try to change the world, God help us. Oh. Janie's adoption papers, a little the worse for wear. 

Phryne: Thank you. But Jane's mother will always be her mother. 

Jack: And what will you be? Her guardian angel? 

Phryne: Much more my style.

[wakabahiguchi]

Continuing my Misfits freakout after having seen the best episode of the series Season 3 Episode 3, I just had some thoughts about television in general, mainly nostalgic feels and other nonsense about my emotional and obsessive love for tv 

Cue nonsense below: 

So the year I really got obsessed invested in television was around 2010/2011 when I was just turned 13 and being a weird antisocial kid in middle school. For some reason, watching Misfits this past month and experiencing All The Emotions™ really brought me back to when I first started loving television and that 2009-2013 era of television that I loved so much.

My first real show was Glee, which I started during the season 2B in 2010. At the time I was also watching Bones in 2010 (all out of order) and also started watching Pretty Little Liars in 2010. I really spiraled out of control when I started watching Elementary in 2011 (yup I started from THE BEGINNING), Modern Family in 2012, The Good Wife in 2012, Hawaii Five-O in 2012, Lost in the summer of 2012, Battlestar Galactica in 2013 (and probably some other show I’m forgetting?). Oh and let’s not forget all the Disney Channel shows I still watched lol. Don’t believe me? Go through my old posts. Actually please don’t. 

But it still makes me feel nostalgic when I remember watching a lot of these shows during middle school/beginning of high school. It still boggles my mind that at that age, I was able to understand complex shows TGW elementary Lost BSG etc. Or maybe I didn’t understand them. But I sure went through The Emotions. It was probably because at that age, I was still “finding myself” or at that age where I was really anti-social and started thinking of Bigger Things in life or something. And so many of those shows (Elementary, BSG, and LOST in particular) were so character driven that I was immediately captivated by the stories they told. And BSG and LOST really drew me into the sci-fi/mythology genre that I’ve come to love so much in the shows I’m watching now like Westworld and Misfits. My particular love for BSG/LOST comes from that aspect of character driven storylines with elements of mystery and humanity I guess? It was the first time I was exposed to entertainment and storytelling that made me rethink the way humans and society worked, and I know that’s Going Deep but it’s really true. In addition, shows like The Good Wife (back in it’s better days) and Elementary really made me smarter in a way, because it pointed out things that I wouldn’t have noticed, and there are so many subtleties and nuances that made for thrilling television (Like the iconic Hitting the Fan?! The Season 1 finale of Elementary, which to this day I still remember as the BEST season finale of any show?)

This isn’t to knock on any of the shows I watch now.  I still remember those iconic 7 days where I binged all 6 seasons of Scandal, completely enthralled with the political twists and turns.  I still remember those first 9 episodes of HTGAWM (still my favorite episodes) where I was literally writing recaps on this blog and thinking about who killed Sam?!?!  I remember falling in utter complete love for a character on Daredevil, Elektra, who I related to more than I even knew I could connect to a character. Being able to appreciate the nuances in her characterization and trying to fight a storyline pre-written for her, and fighting her inner demons and darkness all while putting on a front to appear confident and collected. I remember falling in love with Raven Reyes, a character who goes through too much shit on a trashy show but consistently fights for every breath she takes. I remember being shook by a cartoon show, Avatar the last airbender and legend of korra, and the fact that I literally loved every single character for being complex and wonderful to watch. I remember discovering The Flash and the iconic Iris West develop agency and become 1/2 in the most ICONIC ship to exist.  FINALLY having an Asian American family to watch in Fresh off the Boat, and discovering the incredibly talented and outspoken Constance Wu. Exploring my love for sci-fi with the ever thought-provoking Black Mirror (before it got popular, mind you!) Delving into the world of Marvel with Luke Cage and the world of ancient mongolia with Marco Polo. And that’s not even half the shows I watched, or still watch today! Honestly, if anything, my love for television hit it’s peak once I entered high school and started discovering a plethora of wonderful stories to be invested into.

But at the core, (and evident by the previous paragraph), what really affected me the most in television were the characters and their stories. I was reflecting on how I don’t really ‘ship’ characters as much as I thought, because I mainly loved the character first, and then any relationship they had with others second (WA is the only exception at the moment I think). And that’s why my television phase in 2009-2013 means so much. Because those shows, and LOST/BSG in particular exposed me to what beautiful storytelling could be. And it made me feel The Feels towards characters and storylines for the first time. I still remember how I felt after LOST 1x06, when Jin is waiting the airport line before showing Sun the white flower. I was hit with The Emotions. And it only got worse as the show went on. BSG was the same, with the concept of humanity, survival, and cylons. (I’m kicking myself for writing such a passionate piece on BSG because I still haven’t finished the last season. But that’s another problem for another day).

So bringing this back to focus, what does this have to do with Misfits? Well, as stated earlier, Misfits was a show airing from 2009, so it fits within the timeline of my early phase of television, and to be honest, it feels like it too. Of course I felt The Emotions while watching shows 2013+, but for some reason, after finishing THE episode of Misfits (S3E3), I was hit with The Feels that I didn’t remember feeling since my early phase of television. And I’m not sure why? It’s a wacky, weird, dark, cheeky, extremely british sci-fi show that’s not necessarily as character driven as Lost, not nearly as mythological as BSG, much shorter than both shows, but for some reason it’s still making me feel The Emotions. The ending scene itself just destroyed me. It made me feel nostalgic. It reminded me of my summers binge-watching LOST and BSG, where I was constantly entertained by ideas that seemed larger than myself. And Misfits doesn’t necessarily ask those hard-hitting life questions like lost and bsg might, but it provided such a relatable feeling to it? Similar to how I could relate to the storytelling and characters in lost/bsg, I connected to the characters in misfits in some strange way. It’s hard to sell misfits in my opinion, because you never really get what it’s about until you actually start watching. To me, I connected with how each of the characters didn’t really fit in? They are all odd, realistically dealing with whatever goes their way. It’s not glorifying or heroic. In fact, it’s ridiculously messy. Sometimes it’s just one big wtf. 

So I’m still trying to figure out why S3E3 hit me so hard. Maybe it’s because it was a huge combination of an overarching sci-fi plot (Superhoodie and the time traveling loophole), an emotional core (Salisha? <3), suspense and thrill in the plot (graphic designer guy who isn’t really a villain but just wants to be something MORE, at the end realizes what he wants to do), the combination of superhero and graphic novel/comic storylines that I’m also becoming more invested in, the emotional FEELINGS upon seeing the final drawings graphic designer guy pinned to the wall documenting the final events of Simon, ensuring that he keeps the superhoodie, ensuring that it all works out and realizing how he could help the narrative rather than hurting it. The sheer humanity of the episode (which sounds ridiculous if you’ve seen any of the other episodes) if probably what got to me. Similar to how San Junipero (and to a lesser extent Nosedive) hit with me for Black Mirror.  This show has given me zany, weird, strange, etc. but it’s never given me pure emotion and genuine humanity before. Sometimes it’s so narcissistically cynical that you come across an episode like S3E3 that just punches you in the gut because you didn’t expect a show about telekinetic milk powers, the origins of harambe, or a self-proclaimed jesus to hit you all of a sudden with genuine hope and love (similar to how San junipero was so incredible compared to the lineup of gloomy Black Mirror episodes). Additionally, what made me love LOST/BSG was the incredible score and soundtracks that accompanied each emotional moment in the show, and Misfit’s soundtrack game was STRONG with S3E3, and I’m really starting to love the score so much that I’ll probably download it too. Not all episodes have sweeping orchestral themes, but this one did, and it definitely made me feel more feels. It’s not often that a television show relies on scores rather than soundtracks, so maybe that’s another reason why Misfits gave me nostalgic and emotional feels.

So after the episode ended, of course I was an emotional mess. But it was the kind of emotional mess I didn’t remember being in since watching LOST, BSG, S1 Elementary, or those older shows I watched when I was transitioning from middle school to high school, still trying to find my voice or who I wanted to be.  I’m still puzzled to exactly why, but I enjoyed thinking back to the shows that really brought me into the world of television and how I still need to finish bsg. It makes me so thankful for these shows that I grew up with and are growing up with now, because those stories really helped to shape me into the person I am now.  It’s probably why I’m so selective with tv shows now, because I’ve seen so many great things and have felt The Feels from so many impactful shows that at this point, I have standards lol. (one of them being well written WOC but that’s besides the point).

Anyways, I told myself I’d stop watching misfits after S3 since that’s when all the originals leave (and truly, I loved all the original ASBO 5 characters, and Rudy is kind of growing on me even though I find him kind of pointless and annoying most of the time), but if the show continues thrilling me and producing quality episodes like this one, I might give S4 and S5 a chance. Hell, I’ll probably still watch it because one of the new characters is kind of cute.  But basically the whole point of this post was to express all my nostalgia and how my television habits have evolved over the years. And it took the best episode of Misfits to trigger these feelings. But it’s crazy to see how far I’ve come in my television. To see how some shows have fallen off my radar after previously loving them (TGW, Bones) and how some shows are STILL going strong (Elementary!!!). And of course all these new shows I now have to deal with. But Misfits really gave me the ultimate TBT, and the whole vibe really reminds me of the shows I cherished back in 2009-2013. It was a good feeling, and it was nice to go back and document what really made start investing in television and how I’ve evolved in that sense.

Beyond that, I’ll look forward to all my shows I’m watching now, and of course, the rest of Misfits (which sadly will never upstage the glorious S3E3).