Today war and anime meet and shake hands. Well, actually they don’t but that’s the best thing I could come up with at the moment to describe the comic.
As mentioned last week, I’ve been in anime for more than twenty-five years. I started with Battle of the Planets (which was the English dub and edit of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), but never really got heavy into it until Robotech came around. For as bowdlerized as it was, I consider it the main impetus for getting me into anime.
After that, I watched as much anime as I could. There really wasn’t that much you could get on television at that time. For the most part, there was Voltron, Tranzor Z (English edit/dub of Mazinger Z), Transformers, and Mighty Orbots, which I believe was an American production with animation from TMS Entertainment (formerly known as Tokyo Movie Shinsha).
Come to think about it, TMS did a ton of stuff during that time. They were one of the first anime studios to do work for American productions (Animaniacs, Tiny Toon Adventures, Duck Tales, Galaxy High School, Batman: The Animated Series).
You could usually tell when TMS did the animation for a syndicated series. You would see one episode with incredible animation, and then the following episode would look like crap (as it was done by a different animation studio). Because syndicated series needed to have 65 episodes, it was not uncommon to farm out production of episodes to five or six different animation studios (this is why animation quality in a lot of these series was very inconsistent).
Not that it really mattered in the end, all of the work probably ended up in Korea anyway.
See you Thursday!
