Laputa II: The Sequel

Tiny Liner Notes by Peter

The beginning of SS began with Sheeta, who just got back from the Bahamas after divorcing Pazu (yes, I know...)

Laputa II: The Sequel grew out of a conversation that Adam and I had while watching the first four episodes of Nadia of the Mysterious Sea (which we'd rented from Asahi Video in San Diego, a Japanese video shop) way back when in 1989 or so. To latter-day anime fans who are spoiled by "licensed" anime we snort our noses in humor, since this was even before Tower Records started its vaunted anime section. We watched our anime in Japanese, damn it, and we were so cutting edge no one knew what the hell we were talking about half the time.

Of course, Nadia of the Mysterious Sea was already intended to be a parody of Miyazaki's well-known anime films, so it was no great mental leap to say that Nadia was Sheeta (with a Coppertone® Tan), that her Blue Water was the levitation stone, and so on. But there it was. We had an idea, and I happened to be at a place in my life where I had a lot of free time (I was a poor college student at San Diego State University), so I could devote time to the project. More importantly, my mother had recently purchase a Hitachi (then) high-end four-head VCR with audio and video dubbing capabilities. This VCR would serve as the VCR in "a bunch of guy with a VCR™" until it ceased functioning sometime in 1995.

Goober, Gomer and Iczer 2

Nadia had just come out, so I only had the first four episodes to work with. Fortunately, they were good episodes, and I spliced together a nice 45 minutes of footage, wrote up a script (I believe I was still using my Atari 520ST), and called the group together.

For some reason that escapes me, my mother was out of town for some long period of time, and so we were all pretty much free to trash my house while we dubbed the production. If you're really lucky, you've got a copy of L2:TS that has the "making of" footage tacked onto the end, showing all of us dubbing, amid beer cans, papers, CD cases that we clacked together to make sound effects, and annoying girlfriends we're no longer with. Josh will no doubt disagree with my use of the Royal "we" here, but these are my tiny liner notes, not his.

Of course, if you haven't seen Mr. Miyazaki's excellent film Laputa, you won't understand any of this

Dubbing was finished, complete with sound effects and music. We were in a hurry to get it done in time for the SCAN meeting that Saturday (SCAN is the anime club in SDSU which we all used to care about, back when anime was so fringe -- we wanted to change the name to the Society for the Promotion of Anime and Manga, but it didn't work out). We got it there in time, and it was viewed to the general enjoyment by thirty or so members. Except for a few scenes that needed to be redone (turn DOWN the volume on the 'Star Trek bridge sound effects,' Peter). We made some changes, borrowing the famous Pam Buck in what would be her only dubbing participation in a project of ours, and then it was finished.

The indefatigable Captain Nosehair

I'd say that L2:TS was good for what it was -- a silly attempt at dubbing "just like Pinesalad." We hit on many themes that would come back again and again -- taking an unrelated anime and making it into something else, bringing the "unknown" into the realm of well-known anime characters, As a person, I have a sense (however misplaced) of my own intelligence, and making a production that stretched he mind to see around corners and accept one anime character as another was compelling to me.

Using video titling to make jokes was really cutting-edge for us at the time

"He really does look like that man in Robotech..."