that show was weird. it looked awesome, the production was the best of it’s time, to my memory. but there was always a billion things going on and the story heavily relied on watching every episode. I think it came on when I was still riding the bus home, so when I actually caught it I never knew wtf was going on.
I dunno what was up with the (ahem) French connection, but I recently found out that The Lost City of Gold–which I was obsessed with when it ran on silver-ball-era Nickelodeon–was actually an anime, and it was a joint Japanese/French production (yet it was Spanish/Inca/Aztec characters set in Central America.) So I guess the French did anime, too? The term itself suggests a French origin.
How could I forget about The Mysterious Cities of Gold! That series was amazing. I also forgot about Nobody’s Boy Remi. Man that one was depressing: There was some tragedy happening every second episode or so.
France was importing/producing animation (and manga) from Japan before it got big in North America. Jean Chalopin is a producer who created DIC Entertainment and began working with Japanese studios in the late 70’s. He wrote Cities of Gold and Jayce & the Wheeled Warriors, among many others.
I used to get up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to watch an hour of Robotech on a snowy TV station broadcast from the next state. It was this totally amazing cartoon with a continuing storyline, like I hadn’t seen in many other cartoons. I only found out what “anime” was by reading the articles about it in the “Robotech Art” books. Then when I got to college, I found Usenet, the anime newsgroup, and tape trading anime fansubbers. I still have boxes full of old VHS fansub tapes, which have too much sentimental value to me to get rid of even though I could probably download most of the titles online now, and I don’t even have a VCR anymore.
Sailor Moon only got big in the US several years after it came out in Japan, after the first couple of waves of commercial anime had already started coming out, as the early fans from college graduated and started businesses to import and release various Japanese titles. And it was being watched by anime fans over here in fansubs (or even unsubbed; my first exposure to it was visiting a friend in Portland in the mid-90s who showed me an unsubtitled episode while I was there) even before that. Later on, when I had the chance to watch it all the way through in fansub, I found it kind of repetitive, but overall pretty impressive.
It’s really kind of a shame what they did to Sailor Moon when they brought it to the US. From what I’ve heard, the dub wasn’t too bad overall, but they really cut out a whole lot of stuff, especially from the final episodes of the first season. Ugh. Come on, guys, if it was good enough for 8 year old kids in Japan as it was, it should be good enough for them over here. Even Robotech wasn’t cut that badly.
