Off-season, 2005.

It's been a long summer, filled with great anime conventions from coast to coast. This year we managed to get to all of the major ones, from Expo to Otakon, and the points in between. And then all of a sudden it was over: summers fly, winters walk.

Now it's time to look ahead to next year, working on new projects and hopefully giving a bit more attention to the blog. There's a lot of time where there's just nothing going on, and when there is, we're too busy. Blogger's remorse.

The first thing on our plate is getting a finished version of City Hunter on Fire. After its less-than-stellar reception at ACen (I seem to recall "Well, it wasn't the worst thing I've ever seen," being the best review), I've been hesitant returning to it for cleaning up. It has several flaws, though fundamentally it's not the material so much as the presentation. Most prominently is that the muddiness of the audio, especially on a large-room system but equally damaging are points left from the original where there is just no action: things like ten-second pans across a view from a window. Looking at the problem with fresh eyes makes you begin to understand why Macek cut bizarre snatches of apparently-inconsequential shots from Robotech's parent shows.

To this end, we sat down with the FCE files over the weekend and made some cuts, mostly non-dialogue snippets that probably won't be missed, or even noticed. When that version is done we will clean up the audio with a mind for better-than-home-tv play. These are the important lessons; it's been a long time and so many rules have changed since the titular Bunch of Guys with a VCR days.

We'll also be working on new projects for 2006...

Moving right along

Just a new post to let you know we haven't abandoned the site. We do get awfully busy with the con scene in the summer, and this year was really a mess, with A-Kon, Anime Expo and Comic Con, which went really well. This year we'll be at Otakon too, so if you read this in time, do stop by.

If you're looking for a site with more regular posts, mosy on over to my personal blog. If you want to drool over a ton of cool Gunbuster anime stuff, we also recommend this fine site.

Come see the Seishun Shitemasu staff in person at Project A-Kon 16!

We'll be at A-Kon soon, will you? A-Kon is one of the longest-running anime conventions in the U.S., in its 16th year, and we always make a special trip all the way from San Diego, or in the case of Peter, from Japan, to enjoy the excellent fan atmosphere there. We hope you'll be there this year! You can get all the information you need on their official site here -- don't forget to see the official A-Kon TV commercial here, too!

In Production: City Hunter on Fire

The eleventh production by Seishun Shitemasu. Currently in-progress for a summer '05 release.

This one has been a long time coming. We'd made period pieces for the 60s, 70s, and 90s. An 80s riffing was inevitable, though rife with delays. There are few shows set firmly in a "real" 1980s setting (and Megazone 2-3 has been almost literally to death) . In the early 90s, I'd heard of these great episodes of City Hunter 2 chockablock with betrayal, angst, and a fine mexican standoff in the end. With the proposed title (Max's idea, apparently) of City Hunter on Fire, we were set with source, concept, and style. To paraphrase another icon of the early 90s: Everyone else is aping Tarantino, why can't we?

Back then the only source of such an (at best) second-tier series of length was somehow getting an LD set from Japan. It never happened, for various reasons. Years passed. Anime became a huge almost-mainstream sensation in America. Like plutonium, it's now available at every corner drugstore. During one of those weekend impulse-buying sprees I saw that ADV had helpfully released City Hunter in their economy format used for vintage releases that no one in particular is clamoring for. I rooted through my old email and found the note that listed the episodes from CH2. With no sense of urgency, I watched the source for this long-backburnered project.

Good thing. The episodes in question were not at all what I had in mind. The Mexican standoff is closer to a bushido standoff. The villain, an old friend of Ryo's, looked like Macaulay Culkin playing Fred from Scooby-Doo. And then there are the ever-present liabilities of the show: lecheries, mokkori, and hyperspace hammers that fans of this show cannot get enough of.

Still, while nothing in that set of 25 episodes particularly interesting, I was really fond of the title. I thought maybe something else could be used. Over the ecourse of several months I bought the rest of the dvd sets. Having finally caved in and bought a mac like the rest of the SS alumni, I saw it was now fairly simple to splice footage from across the two series into one coherent episode (City Hunter 3, cheap and off-model, could never pass for the same show).

After another 75 episodes, I found the right episodes for the core plot in the two-part closer of City Hunter (first series), the one with the Lodoss Mafia. The tone of the script shifted a lot, but became more firmly 80s. It's become much more of a Stephen J. Cannell-style show. With a lot of John Hughes thrown in.

Playing around with Final Cut took up a lot of the last six months, but I learned something about the production end of digital editing. I spliced in scenes from four other episodes for footage that casts a different light on the Kaori-Ryo relationship. Mulder and Scully have nothing on these two for unrequited tension. Be that as it may, out of a hundred episodes there's a scant five usable minutes of them conversing politely without aid of a mokkori joke or hyperspace hammer.

Real production began in January, and principal photography (read: dubbing) was completed on April 6th. It is now figuratively in the hands of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and remains on track for a premiere this con season.

We have finished the voices and music post, and it should be burned to dvd by wednesday.

Welcome to Seishun Shitemasu Productions!

Welcome to the Seishun Shitemasu Productions. Seishun Shitemasu (a word we picked up from anime) is a group of fan-dubbers, who take mild-mannered anime edit it, dubbing in our own voices to make something hopefully more fun and bizarre. We hope you like our newly redesigned website. For information on our productions, check out the links on the right side of this page.

How can I get copies of Seishun Shitemasu Productions?

How can you get copies of Seishun Shitemasu Productions?

That's an excellent question. We're not sure what the answer is, but "sometime, somehow, soon" would be a start. Currently, all of our productions are remastered on DVD and are in a form we could actually distribute them to fans who would like copies. At the present time, we're going to do a little more fine-tuning, and we also plan to add directors tracks to our productions -- god we love Final Cut Pro. Watch this space for more information!

Seishun Shitemasu Influences

All the good ones. All the other ones.

Of everything, two influences have to stand well above the rest. The direct, and if I may be somewhat hyperbolic, life-changing factors.

Robotech: It's full of atrocious dubbing and horrible editing, pacing, and writing choices, and doomed to die slowly as the sequels were mismanaged. Yet at the time it was as good as any anime could ever be. Most of us would never have met without it.

PineSalad Productions: Imitation, meet flattery. Not the original parody dubbers, but the first we ever saw. And the work stands the test of time; all of us laugh out loud when watching "How Drugs Won the War" for the 923769th time. It led us directly to what you see here.


Major influences

Airplane!
Dynaman
MTV
Star Trek
Star Wars
Twin Peaks




More information coming soon!