Kimagure Orange Road: The Akira Story

Tiny Liner Notes by Peter  

Welcome to my "Star Wars Christmas Special"

If you ever have instance to direct a film, be it live action or animated or whatever, I hope to God you don't ever turn out a KOR:TAS. This production is to me what the Star Wars Christmas Special is to Lucas, what 1941 is to Spielberg, and what Robotech: the Movie is to Carl Macek if I may be forgiven for including myself on this list. A direct result of my fixation with Orange Road (one of the finer anime series to come out of the 1980s) and my desire to so something "intellectually satisfying" within our chosen medium.

The second production of Seishun Shitemasu was conceived while I was working at a bank (Great American, who got swallowed up by Wells Fargo back in 1990), xeroxing copies of some important document or another. Xeroxing documents for 8 hours a day is not a terribly demanding activity; you can do it and compose symphonies in your head at the same time. Listening to my Color Heart CDs while working (ah, natsukashii...), I got the idea for our next production, and off I was running again.

Kyosuke and A-ko are related to each other, which is why she has powers -- get it?

KOR:TAS was loosely based on the Kimagure Orange Road Role-Playing Game, something I had written a year before. Unlike the other Seishun guys, I was never a "gamer," and thus had no business trying to create a dice-and-paper RPG, but this didn't stop me in the least. In this RPG, I postulate that Akira (of the Katsuhiro Otomo film by the same name) could have been the son of Ayukawa and Kyosuke from Orange Road, since the age actually works out pretty well, if you use the timeline from the manga rather than the animated series, or something like that. If they got married and had a son, he'd be born with powers, and, my theory goes, could have been the Akira that takes out Tokyo in 1999.

Mother Madoka and her son Akira (played by Kyosuke's cousin Kazuya)

I remember very clearly while starting on my "creative arc," imagining how the story would have to be, picking out of my memory what footage I'd need (since the anime we used were all eminently familiar to me at the time) and conceiving of the script as I went along. Fresh from our success with Laputa II, I was unstoppable, and never thought to consider that it all might just suck balls.

Getting more and more into production mode, I rented most of the videos from the Comic Gallery (legendary anime & comic shop in San Diego), and I laid down the footage. It was an extremely "deep" production, consisting of the widest spread of unrelated anime footage in ever production we've ever done, or in any similar anime-dubbing production I've ever seen since. Orange Road (both the series and the movie), Akira, Project A-Ko, MZ23 I and II, Patlabor, and other footage, all stewed together in a highly cerebral production which, to my mind, perfectly expressed the "high concept" of what we wanted Seishun Shitemasu to be (but it still sucked).

A semi-interesting side-story: Hikaru-chan enlisted in the SDF and learned to drive a Patty Labor

Besides the "Akira is the esper son of Kyosuke and Ayukawa" theme, I built on another aspect of the KOR RPG, the postulation that all anime characters that have any special abilities whatsoever are actually related to the Kasuga clan. Thus, A-Ko is really a long-lost member of the Kasuga family, and that's where her powers come from (by extrapolation, Superman and Wonder Woman are somehow related to the Kasuga's esper lineage, too). Mai the Psychic Girl (god, does anyone remember that? What crap...) and any anime character that has supernatural powers is likewise related to the Kasugas or Orange Road.

Holy Robotech the Movie, Batman -- BD is going to take over Japan and capture espers!

In any event, the result was........a total flop. KOR:TAS was an dog of a production that looked good on paper, or summarized in a paragraph -- but which utterly fails as a 45 minute production. The jokes are too hard to get, the edits are too harsh, the footage I drew from too different -- and in the final analysis, I've only met a few people who said they gave a damn about KOR:TAS, and I'm including all the other members of SS when I say that. Not being a very good production, KOR:TAS threatened to set Seishun Shitemasu on a dangerous "reverse Star Trek" path of having every other production suck (every even production, instead of every odd one). Looking back, what we should have done was create a 2 minute trailer, like we did with The Liberal Fist (Kenshiro as George Dukakis, the guy who lost to George Bush I in 1988, in case you weren't born then). But we didn't.

Akira is gone -- a call from BD

In the final analysis, I don't totally hate KOR:TAS, although I'm disappointed with my inability to tighten things up before going ahead with the production. It was like a fine doujinshi -- an expression of love and respect for the target work -- since "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" (although I've been an expat in Japan so long it took me about four minutes of deep thought to recall that idiom). In a way, KOR:TAS is the perfect production: if you don't like it, I can say, too bad, you're not deep enough to "get" it, and go off feeling "exclusive" because I'm part of a small group of people who can understand this difficult production. Very convenient, really.

Destiny can't be averted, and Tokyo is destroyed

I have just one regret about KOR:TAS, which is that I didn't think of a good joke I could have put in it. In the Orange Road Movie, Kyosuke and Madoka go see a movie (the first Touch movie, a funky anime-within-an-anime vortex to delight the senses). Meanwhile, in Project A-Ko 4 there's a hilarious spoof of the Orange Road Movie in which the Hikaru-character goes berserk when the Kyosuke-character breaks up with him, throwing him into the water in high anime style. I've always wished I'd tied these two scenes together, having Kyosuke and Madoka go watch this movie with shock on their faces at what they're seeing, but the stars weren't aligned.