Pioneers in Comic Art
Scholarship
The Multi-Varied,
50-Year Career of
a Fan-Researcher of
Comic Art
Fred Patten
reprinted from IJOCA Vol. 19, No. 1 Spring/Summer 2017
John Lent has asked for my “experience getting involved in
anime and animation events, writing and scholarship. What was it like in
the beginning, how was interest generated, drawbacks, support, etc.
How has anime studies developed and your role in the development.”
Since this is for the International Journal of Comic Art, I am
including my experience in comics as well.
I was born
in Los Angeles, California, on Dec. 11, 1940. My parents taught me to
read by reading to me the comic strips in the Los Angeles Times and
Herald-Examiner, and buying me a subscription to Walt Disney’s Comics
& Stories. I don’t know just when this was, but it must have been
around the end of World War II because the Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse
stories were still about victory gardens and fighting the Nazis and
Japanese.
I discovered science fiction when I was
nine years old. During my adolescence, I built a large collection of
s-f paperbacks and magazines. I joined the weekly Los Angeles Science
Fantasy while I was a student at UCLA, in 1960, and immediately became
active in s-f fandom. I published my first s-f fanzine in 1961, and
became active in comics fandom in 1963, just when it was starting.
One of the weekly UCLA film programs around 1962 was about
two months of international animation features, from France, Japan, and
the Soviet Union, mostly. I met several other animation buffs at these
screenings. In the late 1960s, one of those buffs invited me to a
series of casual weekly screenings at the nearby home of Bob Konikow.
Konikow was another animation fan, and he also worked in the profession
(I forget for which studio) with many contacts. Our attendance was
from a dozen to 20 people each week, crowded into Konikow’s darkened
living room to watch 16 m.m. prints of whatever the attendees owned or
could borrow from a studio’s film library. Mark Kausler and Milt Gray
usually ran our Bell & Howell projector. Victor Haboush brought the
just-completed K-9000: A Space Oddity in 1968, and someone from Disney
brought the studio library copy of the then-rare Victory Through Air
Power. Bob Clampett brought an old print of his Republic short It’s a
Grand Old Nag that was so ragged it barely went through the projector.
“Jack Warner’s personal print of Bob Clampett’s Coal Black and de
Sebben Dwarfs” was shown by popular demand at almost every other
meeting. I still don’t know why I was invited, because all the other
attendees seemed to be either young professional animators (with an
occasional visit by a “legend” like Bob Clampett or Frank Tashlin) or a
published underground cartoonist. Bill Stout, Dave Stevens, John Pound,
George DiCaprio, Robert Williams, Bill Spicer, Richard Kyle, Tim Walker,
Art Vitello, John Bruno, Bob Foster, and others were regular attendees.
The screenings ended in 1973 when Bob Konikow moved away from Los
Angeles. By then I considered myself an animation insider, if not a
real professional.
Richard Kyle, whom I met at these
screenings, and I were both also fans of comic books and newspaper
strips, but neither of us cared much for costumed superheroes. We met
frequently. He talked about the classic newspaper strips, and I was
enthusiastic about European comics magazines like the weekly Spirou,
Pilote, and Tintin. We gradually decided to start a specialty magazine
and a small mail-order bookshop to promote the best comics that weren’t
costumed superheroes. The magazine, Graphic Story World, would feature
articles and reviews about famous American newspaper strips and “the
best modern comics in Europe that nobody in America knew about”; and the
mail-order bookshop, Graphic Story Bookshop, would make available
through the magazine the comics that we featured in it. Richard, who
lived in Long Beach, California, about 25 miles away, would write about
American comics and edit and publish the magazine from his home. I
would write about the foreign comics and their artists (mostly Belgian
and French like Hergé, René Goscinny, Jean Giraud, and Peyo), review the
then-rare American books about comics, conduct our correspondence with
European publishers to order small quantities of the comics that we
covered in the magazine, and prepare advertisements in the magazine for
what we were selling.
In 1970 I discovered Japanese
manga, and promptly added Japanese publishers to those from whom I tried
to order books. My letters, in English, were ignored by the Japanese
publishers except for one, Akita Shoten; so all of our Japanese manga
were from that one publisher. I later learned that my letters to Akita
Shoten were all answered by one employee, only because he wanted to
practice his English.
The first issue of Graphic
Story World; the Newsletter of the Graphic Story Arts was dated May
1971. Richard was corresponding with other comics fans throughout the
world who didn’t gush over costumed superheroes, and many of them wrote
for the magazine. Hames Ware. Dan Stryker. John Benson in Australia
wrote about Australia’s famous (in that country) cartoonists. The
magazine grew larger and more artistic; the first page was replaced by
illustrated covers. I was ordering current comics in Dutch, French,
Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, and storing our stock under my bed in my
apartment in Culver City (a suburb of Los Angeles).
Both Graphic Story World and Graphic Story Bookshop were bigger
successes than we could handle. Richard Kyle needed more space than his
home to prepare each issue. The books I was ordering were filling my
apartment. We decided that we needed an actual store, both for the
magazine’s workshop and to store the foreign comics. Property rentals
were then extremely cheap in downtown Long Beach, so we opened Graphic
Story Bookshop there at 346 East Broadway in January 1972. We had a
small gala opening with several of Richard’s comic-artist friends like
Scott Shaw! congratulating us. Jack Kirby was the main star. One of my
s-f artist friends, George Barr, designed our business card.
We had intended the store to actually be mainly Richard’s
workshop for the magazine, and a storage place for the foreign comics.
But people kept coming in and asking whether we sold American comic
books as well? We felt that we were missing an opportunity, so we
quickly set up to carry American comic books with Richard as the
proprietor. A few months later we added current American s-f
paperbacks.
The bookshop became more and more
Richard’s baby. I became a silent partner, handling our
foreign-ordering correspondence from my apartment in Culver City, and
driving to Long Beach on weekends to process the mail orders for our
books.
As the bookstore grew, Richard became so busy
running it as an American comics shop that he no longer had time to
produce the magazine. (There were two final issues under the
Wonderworld title.) He had to hire an assistant. For me, the comics
shop had never been more than a hobby, with my nine-to-five
Monday-Friday profession as a catalogue librarian. I couldn’t afford to
quit it to work in the bookshop; it didn’t earn enough to support both
Richard and me. Without the magazine to advertise our foreign comics,
mail-order sales disappeared, leaving me nothing to do. We agreed that I
should sell my partnership in Graphic Story Bookshop, now Wonderworld
Books, to Richard and drop out, which I did in December 1975. He soon
changed its name again, to Richard Kyle, Books. I continued to drive to
Long Beach each weekend to buy my American comics, and for long chats
with Richard about comics, s-f, animation, and other subjects, until he
closed the shop in 1996.
The bookshop led to my
interest in Japanese anime. We had one customer who asked if we could
get the Japanese comics versions of the Japanese TV cartoons that had
been shown on American TV in the 1960s? Astro Boy. Gigantor. 8th Man.
Kimba the White Lion. Speed Racer. Marine Boy. Prince Planet. The
Amazing 3. The customer was Wendell Washer, who was an animator and
storyboard artist for Filmation and Marvel Productions. Richard
introduced him to me, and I tried to get the manga that he wanted (plus a
copy for myself).
Washer had built a personal
collection of animation shown on American TV, which he had taped on an
industrial Sony U-matic video recorder. He held occasional parties at
his home to show off these. I met several animation fans at Washer’s
parties. Some who were particularly interested in the Americanized
Japanese TV cartoons of the 1960s were Mark Merlino, Robin Leyden,
Judith Niver, and Chris Balduc. Niver was the only other one who was an
animation professional.
I was still attending the
weekly meetings of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS), so I
arranged for Washer to present a program of Japanese s-f & fantasy
TV animation in July 1975. This was probably the earliest screening in
America of TV anime for a non-Japanese audience.
Mark Merlino also became a regular attendee of the LASFS for a few
years. When the first home video recorders went on sale during the
Christmas 1975 season, Merlino bought one. He started recording anything
science-fictional on TV. S-f movies. Star Trek reruns. In February
1976 the first Japanese giant-robot TV cartoons came to American TV.
These were unmistakably Japanese; they were shown on L.A.’s
multi-cultural Channel 52, in Japanese with English subtitles. During
1976 Merlino often brought his Toshiba V-Cord to LASFS meetings when
there wasn’t a program, and showed an hour or two of what he’d recorded.
This led us to start the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (C/FO), the
first American fan club for anime, in May 1977.
The
C/FO quickly grew. Merlino traded tapes with fans in cities like New
York and San Francisco with Japanese-community TV that showed different
programs. In 1980 we began organizing C/FO chapters in other cities
around the U.S. and Canada. But most of these anime fans were teenagers
who soon wandered on to other interests; then during the late 1980s,
the fans switched to computer anime websites and corresponding without
needing the C/FO. By 1989, the club had shrunk so much that it was
dissolved as an “international club,” and the “Los Angeles chapter” went
back to being the only C/FO. It’s still meeting on the third Saturday
of each month.
I hardly noticed, because beginning in
1979, I began writing articles on anime. These were for professional
fan magazines like Comics World and Starlog at first. In 1980, the San
Diego Comic-Con (today, Comic-Con International) presented me with its
Inkpot Award for helping to introduce Japanese anime to America. Later
as anime became more popular in America, I wrote for anime specialty
magazines like Anime Invasion and Protoculture Addicts as well. By 2004
I had written enough to collect my articles into a book: Watching
Anime, Reading Manga: 25 Years of Essays and Reviews.
I was a catalog librarian for Hughes Aircraft Company for over 20
years. In the late 1980s, the Cold War ended, Hughes stopped getting
government defense contracts and began downsizing, and I was laid off in
1990. Carl Macek and Jerry Beck had started Streamline Pictures in Los
Angeles in October 1988, one of the first American professional
companies to license Japanese anime and distribute it theatrically and
on home video. I had been providing free consulting advice from their
beginning, and when I lost my library job, Carl and Jerry persuaded me
to become Streamline’s first employee, in January 1991. I was a
Streamline Pictures employee until the company went out of business in
March 2002.
To backtrack, furry fandom -- the fandom
for anthropomorphic (mostly talking) animals coalesced out of s-f fandom
and comics fandom during the 1980s. I became an enthusiastic furry fan
from its start. Many furry fans were amateur and professional
cartoonists and animators. Through associating with them, I became the
writer of a few comic books, and of more articles about comics and furry
fandom, such as “Talking Animals in World War II Propaganda” (Flayrah,
Jan. 5, 2012) and “An Illustrated Chronology of Furry Fandom, 1966-1996”
(Flayrah, July 15, 2012).
After Streamline Pictures
closed its doors, I became a freelance writer specializing in anime. I
was writing articles about anime, and three monthly anime columns for
Animation World Network, Comics Buyer’s Guide, and Newtype U.S.A. when I
had a major stroke in March 2005. I was hospitalized for over a year,
and I have been paralyzed, bedridden in a convalescent hospital ever
since. I keep busy via a laptop computer, writing a weekly animation
column, and writing and editing animation and furry fandom books for
several specialty publishers.
But enough about me! Here are some memories from my longtime love affair with animation (mostly anime) and comics.
My first comic-book hero, when I was five or six years old,
wasn’t a costumed superhero but Amster the Hamster in DC Comics’
funny-animal titles. I wanted to grow up to be just like him! He was
shorter than everyone around him -- Dizzy Dog, Doodles Duck, Bo Bunny,
McSnertle the Turtle -- but he was a fast-talking con artist who could
convince everyone to see things his way. As I was a little boy
surrounded by taller adults and older children, I felt that this was an
ideal “power” to have. (I later learned that Amster was a funny-animal
imitation of the comedian W. C. Fields.)
I especially
loved all the funny-animal comics drawn in that “world,” in that art
style. I gradually learned that they were all written and drawn by
Sheldon Mayer, a lifelong DC Comics staffer. He became one of my first
favorite cartoonists, along with Carl Barks and Walt Kelly. Many years
later, I participated in a special feature on funny-animal comic books
for an issue of the fan magazine Amazing Heroes (#129, Nov. 15, 1987).
I was given the chance to interview several veteran funny-animal
artists, and I lost no time contacting Sheldon Mayer, who was then
retired. “Why do you especially like funny animals?” I asked. “I
don’t! I think they’re stupid! But DC management said we needed some
funny-animal stories and I was assigned to write and draw ‘em, so I
did.” Oh.
When Richard Kyle and I turned our Graphic
Story Bookshop into an American comics shop in the early 1970s, we soon
discovered that there were problems in dealing with Los Angeles’
magazine-distribution monopoly. As a comic-book specialty store, we
would get a request for something we were sold out of, say the latest
issue of New Gods. We would assure the customer that we would order it
and place the order with the distributor, but a copy of Little Lulu or a
Western would be delivered instead. When we complained, the
distributor’s truck driver would answer, “You ordered a comic book,
didn’t you? Well, we delivered a comic book.” The distributor also
didn’t like orders for single copies. Another problem was that the
comics were traditionally delivered each month in bundles tightly
wrapped in twine or wire. The top and bottom copies in each bundle
would be cut by the binding; not much, but our customers wanted copies
in Mint Condition.
Our solution to these problems
was for me to drive to the distributor’s warehouse each Saturday and
pick up the special orders myself. I also went through all its copies
of each title to high-grade them, picking only those with perfectly
centered covers and color registration. The distributor’s employees’
attitude was that they were glad to let me come in and do their work for
them. I gradually realized from overhearing their partial
conversations that the distributor was owned by Organized Crime! Its
main value to its bosses was as a legitimate front for laundering the
profits from their less-legal activities. I kept quiet and didn’t say
anything.
From practically the moment I discovered
manga, I became a rabid fan of Osamu Tezuka. I learned in early 1977
that Tezuka had just created Unico, a new full-color comic serialized in
a girls’ manga magazine published by Sanrio Ltd., which by coincidence
had just opened a girls’ shop called Gift Gate in nearby Gardena. I
hurried there to see if they had it. They did, in issues of Lyrica, a
fancy girls’ comic magazine. I bought all the issues of Lyrica, and I
returned to Gift Gate every month to get the future issues; not just for
Unico, but for a beautiful fairy-tale strip called Metamorphoses by an
American artist, Don Morgan.
A couple of months
later, a friend told me that some Japanese executives had come to Los
Angeles and were planning to publish an American version of Lyrica for
girls. Since I was probably the only American to have ever heard of
Lyrica, maybe I could present myself as a marketing expert to them and
at least get some free samples. It seemed worth a try, so I made an
appointment with the Sanrio editorial office in Santa Monica. I had
hardly opened my mouth when I realized that they thought that I was a
professional comic-book writer come to propose a feature for their
American Lyrica. This was too good an opportunity to pass up, so I made
another appointment to return in a week with some story ideas to offer
them. They bought two ideas. They also hired me to develop a concept by
someone else about a young princess of a post-atomic barbarian kingdom,
into a 60-page serial at $60 a page. They would hire an artist to draw
it.
For the rest of 1977 and early 1978, I spent my
spare time divided between the C/FO anime fan club, and hanging around
Sanrio’s rented executive office. Angela, my story, was being drawn by
Doug Wildey, the writer/artist of the Western newspaper strip Ambler and
comic-book Rio, and creator and writer of Jonny Quest for
Hanna-Barbera. Sanrio was paying Wildey $120 a page to draw Angela,
which included watercolor-painting each page since Lyrica was to be
printed in full color. Mark Evanier, who was writing a serial about a
teenage girl who was an 19th Century Mississippi riverboat captain, said
that my sale of Angela qualified me to join a club of professional
comic book and magazine writers and cartoonists living in the Los
Angeles area; the Comic Art Professional Society (CAPS). I did, and I am
still a member although I’ve only written a couple of comic-book
stories since then. Evanier’s story, Riverboat, was being drawn by Dan
Spiegle. The prolific Evanier had also sold them The Time Twisters,
drawn by Pat Boyette; and Keystone, drawn by Will Meugniot. Dave
“Rocketeer” Stevens was there; he was drawing a s-f story that he may
have written himself. Evanier vaguely remembers stories that others were
doing; something about an Indian brave, drawn by Rick Hoppe, and
something drawn by Willie Ito, a veteran Hanna-Barbera cartoonist. One
that was turned down was “Queen Cutlass,” about a female pirate captain
in a sword-and-sorcery world, by writer Don Glut and artist Rick Hoberg.
The Sanrio editors didn’t like it.
As time went on, I
and most of the American comics professionals got the increasing
impression that the Sanrio executives were completely out of touch with
the reality of the American comic-book industry. The 100+ page Lyrica
could not be printed by any regular comics printer. It would have to
cost a lot more than the then-standard 15¢. It would presumably contain
advertising for Sanrio’s merchandise for girls, which would particularly
turn away any boys who might otherwise buy it. Would it fit onto
newsstands (comics specialty shops were just beginning) along with other
comic books? What would the regular newsstand distributors think of
such an oddball comic book? They had recently killed Martin Goodman’s
1974-’75 attempt to create a new line of Atlas Comics, by declining to
distribute them because they felt that the comics racks were already too
crowded. The Sanrio executives casually dismissed all these concerns,
saying, “We will take care of that. You just do what we are paying you
to do.” We shrugged and, as the saying goes, “took the money and ran”.
We could not help hearing about Sanrio’s other big project,
to create a theatrical animated “modern Fantasia.” Sanrio had set up a
fully-staffed animation studio nearby, and some of the animators
occasionally visited the Sanrio offices. Don Morgan, who was drawing the
Metamorphoses strip in the Japanese Lyrica, was a layout artist on the
feature. The animators had allied concerns. Some of the animation did
not make any story sense. The animation had nothing to do with the
music, which was often too short or too long for the scene. One scene
had the boy walking and walking and walking and walking, for no reason
other than to “use up” all the music. Some said bluntly that the
director, Takashi (no last name) had been appointed only because he was
from Japan, unlike the Anglos and the Japanese Nisei and Sansei born and
raised in America. Everyone complained that Takashi did not know what
he was doing, but would not admit it. Again, the Sanrio executives said,
“Don’t worry about it. Just animate like we’re paying you to do.”
Business Week published an article in its May 22, 1978 issue
about Sanrio’s plans to take over the American animated film and
comic-book industries. We shrugged, took their money, and didn’t say
anything.
Metamorphoses premiered to great fanfare in
NYC on May 3, 1978. If it wasn’t the biggest bomb in cinematic history,
it was close. The animation was smooth and rich, but B-O-R-I-N-G! If
the story were any more arty/intellectual, it would have been
condescending. The reviews were not kind.
I was
invited to an “exclusive premiere screening” at a swanky Century City
theater on June 14. The theater was packed, largely with the film’s
production crew and their families. Each attendee got a fancy press kit
with a cover full-color reproduction of the movie’s poster showing wild
horses galloping out of the ocean’s foam, by Western Printing artist Mo
Gollub, the painter of many of Western Printing’s Gold Key comic book
covers. The screening was a special disaster, because in addition to the
movie’s other problems, the sound track was turned up to full volume.
The orchestral pop-rock music was so deafening that it literally drove
some of the audience out of the theater. It was rumored that it was so
loud that plaster was flaking from the ceiling, while Takashi was
complaining, “Can’t you turn up the sound any louder?” The lack of
dialogue and having the same Boy and Girl as cartoon actors portraying
the protagonists in each story confused many people. They thought the
Boy and Girl were supposed to be the same characters throughout, and
“why is the Boy dying over and over again?”
I don’t
think that Metamorphoses was ever shown again. Columbia Pictures had
given it a limited release in Los Angeles on the same day, and the
comments from the few other theaters that showed it were the same
(except for the overly-loud music). It was quickly pulled from release.
Nothing was seen for over a year, then in May 1979 it was released in an
entirely new form. It was retitled Winds of Change; it was cut from 89
minutes to 82 minutes; the arrangement of the five sequences was
altered; the Boy was named Wondermaker; the orchestral rock score was
completely discarded for a new disco score by Alex Costandinos that was
composed to fit the action; and narration by Peter Ustinov was added to
explain, often sarcastically, the action. In October it was released in
Japan in a third cut, retitled Orpheus of the Stars, with singers Arthur
Simms and Pattie Brooks replacing the Rolling Stones. RCA Columbia
Pictures Home Video released Winds of Change as a “Magic Window”
children’s video in the 1980s, which was rereleased as a regular home
video in January 1992, but no version of Metamorphoses is available
today.
By this time, the Lyrica project was long
dead, along with Sanrio’s other American filmmaking plans. All that the
Sanrio execs would say as they closed their Santa Monica office was, “We
have done more market research, and we have decided that the time is
not right for a Lyrica-type magazine in America. But you have done what
we asked you to do, so you may keep the money.” They even gave the
artists their stories back to sell elsewhere. (If they could. I know
that Doug Wildey complained that no American comic-book publisher was
interested in buying a 60-page romantic s-f story designed for young
girls.)
I treated my $3,600 ($3,700 including my
second idea, which they were going to have me write once Lyrica was a
success) as a windfall that gave me enough with what I already had to
buy a brand-new car. So I can’t complain. It would have been nice to see
Angela published, though. Doug Wildey’s art was excellent.
As a writer of articles about anime, and as secretary of the
C/FO, I wrote to some of the largest anime studios requesting
illustrations that I could use in my articles. This apparently caused
some consternation in at least one studio, Tatsunoko Animation Company.
I received a letter that said approximately, “We understand that your
club is showing video copies of our animation without permission. We
cannot permit this for legal reasons. But as long as you are showing
them, would you please show them to the executives of American
television companies who might license the American rights?”
Unfortunately, the C/FO had no professional contacts. Or maybe
fortunately -- if we had come to the attention of the professional
studios, we might have gotten into more serious legal conflicts.
The 1984 Summer Olympic games were held in Los Angeles. Both
the United States Olympic Committee and the Los Angeles Olympic
Organizing Committee agreed that there was only one man, or company, to
design the 1984 mascot: Walt Disney Productions. Disney assigned one of
its cartoonists to the job, C. Robert (Bob) Moore. While Moore was not
quite ordered to make an American bald eagle the mascot, the vast
majority of the organizers felt that the mascot should officially
represent all America, not just Los Angeles or California. The only
other choice seriously considered was the American bison (buffalo), and
Moore pointed out that when a buffalo was anthropomorphized to stand on
two legs, it looked top heavy. The eagle had its own problems. It
looked too stern or martial, and it lacked hands. Moore was asked to
design a child-friendly “cuddly, patriotic eagle,” and he successfully
designed the wings so they could double as arms and hands. Sam the
Olympic Eagle was unveiled to the public on Aug. 4, 1980.
Sam the Olympic Eagle’s popularity from 1980 until Summer 1984
should not need repeating. If he was not merchandized more heavily than
the Soviet Union’s 1980 Misha the Russian bear cub, it is only because
both were so heavily merchandized that the difference is
inconsequential. A major problem that Sam never overcame was that his
head of white feathers made him look like a senior citizen. He may have
been cuddly, but he came across at best as a kindly old man. Whether
Moore ever tried to design Sam as a child or an athletic youth is not
known, but despite being shown as participating in all of the Summer
Olympics sports, he was unmistakably an adult. Although he was designed
by a Disney artist, there was never any demand in America to animate
him. Sam was withdrawn according to IOC rules within a year after the
1984 Summer games were over, and was soon forgotten.
But Sam did become a star of a weekly TV cartoon series -- in Japan.
“Eagle Sam,” 51 weekly episodes directed by Hideo Nishimaki and Kenji
Kodama, at Dax International; broadcast on Tokyo Broadcast System (TBS)
on Thursdays from 7:00 to 7:30 p.m., from April 7, 1983 to March 29,
1984.
“Eagle Sam” never played outside Japan. Those
who have seen it have wondered how it ever came to play IN Japan! The
obvious answer, whether true or not, was that someone must have decided
to get revenge against America for World War II.
Eagle Sam was a gun-waving private investigator. (Everyone knows that
all Americans are gun-happy.) He had a human secretary, Canary Karina,
who may or may not have been supposed to be pretty -- with character
designer Yoshio Kabashima’s simplistic art style it was hard to tell --
but there was no doubt about the amount of cleavage she showed. Sam and
Canary were always accompanied on their cases by Gosling, her
slingshot-wielding kid brother. Sam was portrayed as the only one in
Olympic City (a thinly-disguised stereotype of Hollywood) who could
solve any crimes or catch any criminals, because the police were too
busy eating doughnuts, playing golf, or beating up innocent people. The
police uniform’s badge was a Star of David. Naturally, Chief Albatross
and Officer Bogie (or Bogey) don’t like to be shown up, so they -- with
Albatross’s daughter Chichi -- were always trying to sabotage Sam.
Usually Albatross thought up the schemes and assigned Bogie to carry
them out, but Bogie seldom got farther than being distracted by Canary’s
cleavage. When Sam got into a tight spot, he would toss his Olympic hat
with the five glowing rings into the air, reach into it, and pull out
whatever he needed. The character who gave Sam the most trouble was the
jive-talkin’, skateboarding, shades-wearing cockroach, Gokuro, who drove
him crazy with his sassy mockery. (Cockroach in Japanese is gokiburi.)
Other characters were Mr. Pelican the hippie, and Thunderbird the
weight-lifter.
A lot of people do not believe this
existed, but anime fans got sample episodes. But despite its momentary
incredulity value, “Eagle Sam” is for little children. It’s shallow and
boring.
Anime got me into the biggest fight that I
have ever been in, with Bill Scott of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” fame, at
the meetings of ASIFA-Hollywood. Scott dismissed all Japanese animation
as unimaginative costumed-hero stuff, in horribly limited animation. I
rebutted, “You should talk! Rocky and Bullwinkle may be brilliant, but
it’s hardly for the quality of its animation. You have it animated at
one of the cheapest studios in Mexico City. As for the giant-robot
stereotype, there’s much more variety in Japanese animation than there
is in American animation. It’s that the anime fans don’t want to watch
anything besides giant robots.” But it was a lost cause. I was drowned
out by Scott and the other American animation-industry veterans at
ASIFA-Hollywood chanting, “Poor animation! Awful animation!” I dropped
out of ASIFA-Hollywood for several years.
My record
as a comics-fandom fanzine writer-publisher got me a job with
Fantagraphics Books’ twice-monthly Amazing Heroes magazine. I have
already described my (very short) interview with Sheldon Mayer. Another
memorable moment was when I got press credentials to cover a press
conference on Ralph Bakshi’s “Cool World,” which was just finishing
production in 1992. There were about a dozen in the press party. We were
given a tour of the busy animation studio, set up in a rented
warehouse; and then Bakshi came out to say a few words about how
imaginative “Cool World” was and how confident the producers were that
it would be a hit. Any questions? A large man immediately asked how many
cels had been made for the movie, and what arrangements had been made
to sell them through a collectibles gallery? Ralph tried to steer the
conversation back to “Cool World” as cinematic art, but the man insisted
on asking about the commercial market for the cels, as though the movie
was just a scheme to manufacture saleable movie memorabilia. You could
see Ralph fighting to keep his temper. (My article on “Cool World”
appeared in the final issue of Amazing Heroes, #204 in July 1992.)
In April 1993, UCLA’s Animation Workshop hosted a birthday
party for animation veteran Walter Lantz, then 94 years old. (I think
that it was at this party that Lantz announced that he had recently
found his birth certificate, and was shocked to learn that he was a year
older than he had always thought. He was born in 1899, not 1900 as his
parents had told him.) Lantz was wheelchair-bound and very weak, but his
mind was still sharp. He died the next March, just before the Animation
Workshop could hold a 1994 birthday party for him.
Someone at that party asked Lantz, who worked on his first cartoon in
1915 and directed his first cartoon in 1924, what he thought had been
the greatest technological development in the history of animation. The
addition of sound to silent cartoons? The multiplane camera? The
replacement of hand cel coloring by computer coloring? Lantz surprised
everyone by insisting that it was the introduction of home VCRs in 1975.
I don’t know if he was recorded, but he said approximately:
In
1975 animation was a dying art! All the theatrical animation studios
were closed except Disney, and by 1975 even Disney was moribund.
Animation for TV was all toy and cereal commercials, and was so bland
that nobody but little children watched it. The very few festivals of
animation were glorifications of the past, attended mostly by animation
veterans and cinematic scholars, not the public. Then in 1975 the first
home video cassette recorders came out. They took about a decade to
become widespread, but suddenly the public was asking TV stations to
show more classic cartoons so they could record them to watch whenever
they wanted. Movie studios and whoever owned the rights to old cartoons
found that there was big money in putting them out on video. The first
video releases of old prints were later upgraded to remastered prints
with original title cards. Today new animation features are being made
because the studios know that they can make as much or more from video
sales as from theatrical screenings. Animation that hasn’t been seen in
decades is available again, and permanently for whenever anyone wants to
see it, not just when its studio re-releases it theatrically or on TV.
The animation industry was just short of dying when the first VCRs came
out; now it’s bigger than ever!
In late 2013
I was asked by a reader of my weekly anime column what I knew about
Blue Sky Studios’ “Robots 2”? I answered that it didn’t exist. No
sequels were ever made to Blue Sky’s 2005 animated movie, and as far as I
knew, none were planned. In reply, I was sent its trailer on YouTube as
proof that it was real!
Duh! until I looked at
“Robots 2” more closely. From its credits it appeared to be an
unauthorized sequel made in Thailand for release in India during 2012.
The voice cast was audibly American, but there was a reference to the
Ramayana which was unlikely for an American movie. The giveaway was the
title of “Yak, the Giant King” buried in this trailer. Sure enough;
Wikipedia says that “Yak, the Giant King” was an October 2012 release by
Workpoint Pictures, a studio in a city near Bangkok,” for distribution
in Thailand, India, and Malaysia. I can believe that the Thai animators
may have been inspired by the robot character design in Blue Sky’s
feature, but “Yak, the Giant King” is no “Robots 2.” I assume that some
Asian distributor got it and retitled it without authorization.
So this is where I stand today. I don’t get out of the
convalescent hospital much except in my wheelchair, but I’ve had two
books already published during 2017, with two more planned. I keep
busy.
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