Note: The movies on this site require Quicktime 4.
Note: The movies on this site require Quicktime 4.
Tiny Liner Notes by Peter
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).
Of course, Nadia is completely intended to be a parody of Miyazaki's well-known anime style, so it was no great metal 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.
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 it while we dubbed. 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.
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 got it there in time, and it was viewed to the general enjoyment by 30 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.
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.
"He really does look like that man in Robotech..."
Tiny Liner Notes by Peter
The second production of Seishun Shitemasu Productions, and one of the most artistic and bold fan-dubbing productions of its kind, the impetus for this while 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 is not a terribly demanding activity; you can do it and compose symphonies at the same time. Listening to my Color Heart CDs while working, I instead decided to make another silly Seishun Shitemasu Production.
KOR:TAS was loosely based on the Kimagure Orange Road Role-Playing Game, something I had written a year before. In this RPG, which was made as a joke (since, unlike the other Seishun guys, I was never a "gamer"), I postulate that Akira (of the Katsuhiro Otomo film by the same name) could have been the son of Ayukawa and Kyosuke from Orange, since the age actually works out perfectly (if you base it on the release of the U.S. manga, or something like that -- I've forgotten all the details I knew ten years ago, but trust me, I had it all worked out once).
I remember very clearly, doing the copying 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, the KOR series, the original KOR movie, Akira, Megazone 23 Parts I and II, etc. were all eminently familiar to me at the time) and conceiving of the script as I went along.
Getting more and more into production mode, I rented most of the videos from the Comic Gallery (a cool 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, 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 (ha-ha).
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, even if it's totally stupid. 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...) is also in the same family.
In any event, the result was........a total flop. KOR:TAS was an overly-cerebral 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).
In the final analysis, I like KOR:TAS. It was like a fine dojinshi -- above and beyond the artwork and "mechanical" aspects of any work of art, it was 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.
Tiny Liner Notes by Peter
What I consider my crowning achievement as a "fan-dubber," Robotech III: Not Necessarily the Sentinels was the deepest and most worthy production I did -- if the other members of SS agree, I would say, that Seishun Shitemasu did, although they probably won't.
Again, this production can trace its roots back to a simple conversation had while watching anime. We were at a SCAN meeting (this is the monthly anime club that met at SDSU), sometime in 1988, enjoying the excellent Gainax production "Aim for the Top, Gunbuster," and I started postulating that Amano could be Minmei, Noriko could be Annie, etc. The generation reaction was, "Shut up, Pete, we're trying to enjoy the anime," and so I said no more, for a year or so. But after Seishun Shitemasu was formed, I eventually decided to make the "ultimate sequel to Robotech" a reality.
In a way, Josh and I were just making an anime version of a fan-fiction we had written back in the late 80's called Robosmut. Written on several local San Diego BBS's back in those days when there was no Internet in its present form, Josh and I amused ourselves by co-writing (with several others, with names like Bumblebee, Robin Hood, Werewolf, Captain Goodvibes), in which we detailed the adventures of of the famous Robotech characters after the end of the series. Remember, this was back when Robotech was red-hot, and we were all on the fringe of a great wave of anime fandom, and needed to express ourselves in some way. This was also back when we thought Harmony Gold's "The Sentinels" sequel to Robotech would actually be produced (I remember watching the daily reruns so I'd be able to catch it when it started, bwa ha ha), so our anticipation for the continuation of Robotech was also fueling our fan-fiction. Since we were undersexed teenagers, we naturally wrote about sex. Many of the story element that made it into R3:NNTS (Rick's divorcing of Lisa and going to Minmei, Lancer's homosexuality, Annie and Lunk's sexual relationship), came from Robosmut.
Editing of footage began. We based R3:NNTS on Aim for the Top, and throwing in a healthy dose of Mospeda (we even dug around for footage that didn't make it into Robotech, so it would seem "new"), Macross, and anything else that seemed to fit. It had a "high" story in that it took the "Robotech" characters in bold new places and allowed us to experiment, so it appealed endlessly to all of us. After one false start (a flaky crackwhore voice actress spaced on us, so we had to go back from the beginning a few months later), dubbing commenced.
R3:NNTS was the first thing we did that had a "post production" phase. Basically, we laid the voice track down, then went back later and mixed it with music and sound effects later. We made certain small mistakes, however, which caused an annoying "buzz" sound to creep into the production. Also, because we used the original tape for the voice dubbing, the tape became stretched, causing some video glitches. Well, excuuuuse us.
Robotech III premiered at Anime Con, the predecessor to Anime Expo, back in 1991. The response from fans was incredible, and we got more requests for tapes than we knew what to do with. We got an incredible "ego stroke," and were thrilled with the production. (We even gave a copy to Toshi Okada of Gainax, who didn't seem to care.)
After I'd gone to Japan, the tape started to self-destruct, so Max had to "re-master" it all from scratch. He laid down the audio, got his hands on the original video sources, and put them down in the same order as my original. Two of the music videos were removed due to the inability of getting footage again (which Josh called "rather 'Jetsons the Movie' of me"), and taking out at least one joke that I loved (the original Giant Robo theme song playing at the Gunbuster rises out of the Excellion) due to the lack of the music anymore. However, it was an improvement, with new sound effects, much better video quality, and much less of the annoying buzzing.
Robotech III: Not Necessarily the Sentinels was one of the most successful and satisfying productions we ever did. It earned many laughs, provided many with inventive humor, and even got a pretty girl to talk to me at a con once. It received kudos from many fans, and even caused one of the two writers that made up the Robotech novelist Jack McKinney (the "Jack" one) gush "Wow, full frontal nudity in anime, how did you manage that?"
Produced in 1992 by Seishun Shitemasu
A "Good Enough" production.
Liner notes by Josh
In 1991, USA network started airing a pre-Robotech favorite of mine -- Voltron. I immediately set upon taping episodes, waiting for that perfect one that could be dubbed. It was my creative baby from the beginning, and since nobody else had any good ideas, we threw it into production during the couple of weeks we had between Peter coming back from Japan and AnimExpo '92. I always had mymind set on "The fast red robeast" episode, but kept occasional other episodes on tape as well, just in case. Since USA didn't seem to be airing episodes in order,(I do not think they ever showed the episodes where Sven returned, or the series-ending arc where they finally decide to just go and "kill the fuckers.") it was a continuing saga of hoping for that elusive gift from the "Voltron fairy."
Eventually, of course, I obtained that copy. My original concept was to do what Dynaman had done years before; goofy, irreverent giant robot stupidity. Max had wanted a heavy metal soundtrack (ask him about his dream dub of Iczer-1, sometime) and Peter insisted on mixing together more than one episode of Voltron, eventually settling on one I'd never seen before the USA airings; this is where the "General Leonard" subplot came from. It all spliced together fairly well: it's difficult for me to remember what either separate episode is like. Then again, this is Voltron I'm speaking of, hardly a trailblazing example of tight plotting and anime innovation…
A few liner notes…
If I was unable to obtain the Red Robeast episode, I was actually planning on using one with a robeast that looked suspiciously like a turtle as "Voltron vs Gamera," -- probably just as well for all of us that it didn't pan out.
Some of the dialogue is verbatim from the Voltron episode: Haggar's "My magic can easily change the color to red -- but I don't do windows," and Lothar's "I'm afraid he didn't make a very good landing…if he comes out of that, I don't think he'll be flying again for some time."
At least at one time, I felt I could do a not-shabby impression of Worf, and I figured it'd make a good villain voice. The incessant Shakespeare quotations are a tribute to the highly cultured Klingons of the then-recently released Star Trek VI. For verisimilitude, Max sat in a corner grepping nice lines out of Signet's Three Great Shakespearean Tragedies. The only snag with this approach is Worf speaks very slowly and deliberately, and I had to drop some, nay, all, of the nuances of his mannerisms to sync with the mouth movements. Still, aside from an overly enunciated "and we'll not fail," I don't have many complaints with one of my larger voice roles…
Despite the cheery closing narration, we'd resurrect the Voltron Force characters later, in The Lost Episode…
Tiny liner notes by Peter
Ranma 1/3: Notes from the Closet was our attempt at trying the "other side" of the "good taste" spectrum, and was also our first "good enough production," in which we strove for, ah, randomness and knee-jerk humor rather than quality and consistency of scriptwriting.
It was some months after Robotech III: Not Necessarily the Sentinels, and we were pining for something to dub. We'd long wanted to dub Ranma, and after a trip to Asahi Video, the local Japanese video store in San Diego, we finally got some footage to work with.
I think, in retrospect, that R1/3:NFTC was good, but cheesy. We all were, at the time, not quite "dekiagatteiru" as they say in Japan -- in short, we were not wholly adult, still immature in some areas. Our white, middle-class penchant for mocking AIDS patients, homosexuals, and Carl Macek [editor's note, I am using the "Royal We" here] and so on, was quite funny in 1990, when the words "political correctness" weren't even coined yet (no, really). Now, thinking back, it's kind of silly -- Carl Macek, for example, is an old man now, and no longer worthy of the mocking of anime fans, even Level 10 anime fans like us. Alas.
As in Robotech III, you can see the Twin Peaks air dripping off this production, in our choice of music, vocals, and dramatic motiffs we chose. In 1999, at this writing, this seems silly beyond words...but here we are.
Still and all, I refuse to hate this production. It was the first successful blending of pornographic anime and parody dubbing, and the last, as far as I know. We mocked Ranma and Ranma fans, which getting them to think we were paying them tribute. It was fun, had lots of base, gross humor, and was deep enough to excite the intellects of the Seishun Shitemasu members for a time. In short, it "could live."
Tiny Liner Notes by Peter
Intended to be the Ultimate Production, the bold, ambitious Robotech IV has turned into a bit of an albatross around our necks. Based on the excellent final chapter of Gunbuster (the one in black and white), Robotech IV details the return of the evil Zentraedi Khyron, played by the stupid evil alien from Macross II, who somehow managed to survive the last battle above Macross City at the end of the Macross saga in Robotech, escape out into space, and rally the last of the Zentraedi around him, all while conveniently not letting anyone know of his existence for the past 50 years (contrived, but so is SW:E1 when they conveniently don't have enough energy to escape the Federation, so they go to Tatooine instead).
Again the themes laid down in the fanfiction that Josh and I co-wrote return -- the Lisa/Minmei/Rick and Lisa's revenge themes, the Lunk/Annie having sex themes. And again, the challenge to turn something completely unrelated into Robotech was thrown down before us, and we accepted the task.
I conceived of Robotech IV after I'd come to Japan, and we organized and started dubbing on one of my first trips back. This was before I started working for myself, back when I had excess brain cells available for "creative" processes like this, and for a time I was effused with Seishun Shitemasu energy.
From the start, this was going to be an ambitious production. Having had quite a bit of experience dubbing in the past, we were careful to avoid doing what we'd done wrong in KOR:TAS (i.e., being too high-brow in our concept) while keeping true to the Robotech III-model that had been so successful in the past. Because the last episode of Gunbuster is black and white, we had to make the other footage black and white; because Gunbuster is letterboxed, we had to do the same for all the other footage. The result was something that was pretty cool.
Because we had to have the characters fighting a villain with a face and a personality, Khyron, we had to some fancy stepping to make the footage come off. It was hard, but I think, IMHO, that the basic footage-side of things worked.
We dubbed it once, and had it almost finished, in time for a sneak-preview at the San Diego Comicon Seishun Shitemasu party in 1995 (there are a few "world preview" T-shirts out there, too -- if you've got one, maybe you can get $200 for it on eBay). The music and sound effects weren't finalized, but things seemed on track to get this sucker out the door one of these months.
HOWEVER, it came to pass, that many years would pass before we ever got this fucker (sic) off the ground. I have memories of emailing Max (the post-production guy) and Josh (the director) saying, hey, is R4:KC going to be ready for previewing at this year's Con, or what? and getting a negative answer. So, if you're interested in seeing this production (kind of like Transfer Student, for any JAST USA fans out there), please email Josh or Max and bug them, since I live in Japan and can't do anything about it.
Liner Notes by Josh
Another in our long-mileage series of concepts that we came up with while sitting around in a room asking one another 'So, what're we gonna do this year?'
This particular time, Adam dealt out one LD from his collection after another, and we'd vote on it. I remember now that we had some sort of alternate plans if what would become UC0069 had failed to suggest itself to us, but I do not recall what those plans are now. Now Adam, despite his once huge reputation as the anime source for the San Diego area, does not and did not have much in the way of anime LD's. So the actual list of titles was relatively small. Gundam 0083 was the Big Thing ™ at the time, and while Adam owns all the episodes (plus that ultra-rare bonus 7" LD) I know I for one wasn't too enthused about making a comedy out of 0083 -- and probably most of the Gundam fans (an overly serious lot if there ever was) wouldn't enjoy it much, either.
We did agree that Gundam was ripe for parody use; at the time it was a sacred cow that no one dared touch. Thus any alternate use of the footage would have to be used with some respect, or at least use footage from a Gundam show that no one much liked.
The question you're asking yourself now is, "So why 0080 and not F-91?" Well, F-91 sucks perhaps a little too hard; it remains nearly unwatchable. Further, its isolation from the rest of the UC calendar is problematic; something steeped in continuity of Jions and Feddies feels so much more "right." 0080, on the other hand, fits nicely into the early Gundam universe, contains a relatively small amount of actual mobile suit combat and as a huge bonus, large degree of interpersonal scenes -- best of all, involving children!
I believe it was Phill who came up with the Wonder Years take on the subject, which opened up a whole slew of 60s cliché jokes and music ideas. I later added the idea that it be the story of a young Kou Uraki from Gundam 0083, and if you fudge your UC history a little bit it seems plausible he was of that age in UC0069 -- which, gosh darn it, happens to have a humorous context as a bonus.
So we had our concept and one of our characters. Working in the other characters wasn't that hard; if I knew or cared about the names of the 0080 characters I'd be able to give a one to one name translation, but, well… Using some of my Gundam knowledge (mostly gleaned from Operation X's 0083 subtitles and the two issues of their U.C. Herald fanzine I stole from Adam) I set upon throwing a few background Gundam jokes into throwaway lines -- I know a few Gundam fans get them.
Voice acting proved interesting. First, since I am the standard choice for narrator/voiceover work, we needed someone else with a high voice to play young Kou. Enter our first turn trying it as the Japanese do it, using a woman for a young boy's voice.
One thing that chagrins me to this day is that our voice actress who played Sylvia and Kou's mother (what range!) didn't let Neil Patrick Harris pick up on her. On the first day of dubbing, it seemed he was at the La Jolla playhouse, where she worked during that summer. She claims (I have no proof this ever happened, but it sure makes me feel good to hold this against her forever…) that old Doogie Howser himself was checking her out an awful lot. If she'd only played him into her hands long enough to bring him by to dub a few lines, UC0069 would have one more place in the history books. But she didn't. For the record, I always think of him as being Amuro -- instead he was one of my less inspired performances.
[Peter would like to cut in here to mention that Josh and the actor who played Doogie Howser have the same birthday, June 15th. To make it more ironic, Chis Lockwood ALSO has the same birthday.]
List of explanations
Kou's mom's carrot fixation would, of course, later tie into his aversion of the orange roots in 0083.
"Zaku! Cadilliac of the stars!" -- a result of having seen Empire of the Sun a little too soon before making this.
The Nosehair/"X" dialogue from that park bench scene is partially the result of watching the "X" scene in "JFK" about four times back to back. While it probably doesn't show the influence beyond a superficial level, I still think of Don Sutherland and Kevin Costner when that scene begins.
The entire "Dungeons and Dragons Generation 2" ad was something I'd wanted to do for ages, at least as long as I was aware of Lodoss War. I'm always gratified at the positive responses it receives.
Aside from the Basque Ohm reference, the rest of the news anchor's report comes from a pastiche of Frank Miller comics -- most notably Give Me Liberty and The Dark Knight Returns.
The most obscure reference of UC0069 is the final scene between Bernie and Kou. "Nights in White Satin" plays on in the background, the idea for which we swiped from the final episode of the Sonny Steelgrave arc on CBS's Wiseguy. Despite some inherent 80s cheese in the early episodes ("Dave already killed one frisbee. We kill another, and we all gotta move to 'Tibet for the win-tuh.") -- and some extremely thick homoerotic themes in that particular episode -- the finale between Sonny and Vinnie remains one of my favorite TV episodes of all time -- and like the very best video or movies, it's forever changed what I think of when I hear the song; just like Goodfellas did for the end of "Layla."
Despite the implication, Bernie survives the Sidney Colony drop. In the back of my mind there's always been the room for a 0083-used sequel to 0069, a sort of 'Big Chill' deal where Kou would finally face the disillusionment Bernie apparently does. If that ever is produced (don't bet the farm on it), Bernie would become Lt. Burning of 0083 fame. (The letter Burning receives posthumously from his wife in episode #8 of 0083 was from his wife, Sylvia Burning, thus providing a retroactive name for Sylvia in 0069.)
The last piece of music in the episode proper, "The Song Remains the Same," by Led Zeppelin, was a serendipitous bit of luck. We finished UC0069 in the PARC Oakland Hotel, and we were stuck with a somewhat reduced selection of CDs for music choices; since we only had what Phill and I brought on our road trip up from San Diego. After the afore-footnoted NiWS, is my favorite piece in the whole show.
UC:0069 Shouldn't be a "Good Enough" production, but it was the first SS production developed entirely outside of Peter's influence, so I think we all somewhat consciously didn't want to infringe on the name…yet.
Produced in 1994 by Seishun Shitemasu
Liner notes by Josh
In 1983, popular legend has it that Brandon Tartikoff, the then-president of NBC, scribbled a note to himself during a meeting: "MTV Cops." This would later become fully realized as "Miami Vice."
In 1993, remembering that anecdote, the small thought "90s anime" came to me. I wanted something in the Singles or Reality Bites vein, with grungy music and a lot of 20 somethings jamming around and not doing much of anything.
As Con season approached in 1994, and again with not much else in the way of obvious ideas, we started to scour the earth for footage that would serve our purposes. Something that was well animated and preferably off laserdisc and still met the plot requirements. I scanned the Anime Resource Guide from AnimExpo 1992 (Hey, those things were useful after all…) and came across the To-y entry. I'd vaguely remembered watching it years before; proto-Seishun member Chris Lockwood, now living the high life in Tokyo and wisely distancing himself from us was big on To-y and had loaned me his copy. Upon reading the synopsis anew in the ARG I knew we'd found the footage.
I must admit, To-y looks terrific, and still seems quite modern despite being nearly ten years old at his writing. Nicely stylized music interludes, slick animation. And perhaps best of all, it's an obscure title. I can hope somewhat naively that none of the myriad English subtitle companies ever get the rights to it, so our version remains the definitive English version.
So we worked on it for most of June of 1994; we snipped out a few scenes here and there but by and large kept the original plot of To-y intact. Anime Bites was less a parody dub and more a humorous remake of the original, one that even fans of the original didn't hate much. Yes, we ratcheted up the sex and drug jokes. But it worked, and still does. My I-know-it-will-be-dated-in-five-minutes "Kurt Cobain" joke continues to elicit nervous laughter, some five years later.
Still, the most important element of Anime Bites was the music. Any 90s movie worth its salt requires a good soundtrack, and since we were unconstrained by budget we could use music from any source. Most of the soundtrack ended up coming from the soundtracks of either The Crow or Singles. Both of these discs are full of great (and somewhat obscure) tracks by the big names, though in keeping with Bites' superficial similarities, virtually all the important scenes are scored from Singles. I'd wanted to use some Nirvana for Seattle-scene balance, but, well, but neither track I'd planned on quite worked out (for the record, I was hoping to use Drain You, off Nevermind, and we were planning on using Endless Nameless, the hidden track on the first pressing of that same CD for the "Hey, they're tight tonight" scene. The Deathtongue reference, brilliantly recorded by Max and Phill, works better…).
Voltron: The Lost Years/Episode is actually a prequel to Voltron: Hell Bent For Leather, set on the Earth of the 1970s, far before the advent of Robot Lions and Blazing Swords. Dr. Strangelove, the enigmatic mastermind originally behind the Voltron Force, creates a team of ubermensch for the fuhrer. Dedicated to the New World Order, the Voltron Force must confront that most subversive form of popular music, Disco.
Fox Force Five: They stand for love! And Merchandising! The mega-successful Fox Force Five commands three of the most popular, ratings-grabbing television elements of the 90s: cheaply produced sentai shows, post-ironic dialogue-based humor, and lesbians, lesbians, lesbians. It's a throwback to the Seishun of the early 90s, when Ranma was just coming out of the closet and a battle royal involving aliens, nazis (again!), and that scourge of fandom, filkers.
All text and graphics are copyright (C) 2001 Seishun Shitemasu Productions, blah blah blah.
