Anime World Order Show # 64 – Interview With Walter Amos and Rob Fenelon, Part 1

Apologies for the one month delay between episodes. Anyway, we’re back with Part 1 of an interview we conducted with Walter Amos and Rob Fenelon back at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2007.

We were busy this past month. Many things happened. This picture summarizes the situation as it stands in the present:


But THIS picture summarizes the situation as it will be in THE FUTURE:

There are videos that will be uploaded to Youtube once we figure out how to substantially brighten them since they were filmed at night without night vision mode. They involve swords and explosives, possibly used in tandem with one another.

We should probably put up actual, honest-to-goodness show notes and supplemental links for this one, given the nature of the discussion. But that would require me to find some. For now, the podcast promos played in this episode are for: Destroy All Podcasts DX, Rangercast, and Greatest Movie EVER!. Oh right, PT Chapman is a special guest host for this episode!

Next time on AWO, Daryl’s playing catch up to make up for his month of ennui by giving his boring con report on the New York Anime Festival, Gerald’s reviewing Sonic Soldier Borgman, and Clarissa’s breaking through the heavens with Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann! By the way, if people are interested in actually getting T-shirts or hoodies with our hilariously goofy AWO logo, let us know. If enough people want them, we can actually get them made! Here’s some links to stuff that got mentioned on the show:

  • Rob in his Desslok costume at AnimeCon ’91 – check the rest of Walter’s videos for more
  • http://www.starblazers.com/ is a decent source for learning about Space Battleship Yamato / Star Blazers…or just check our review index since we talk about it fairly often
  • The World Science Fiction Convention – and here’s its never-inaccurate Wikipedia entry; you probably also want to look at the homepage for Philcon and its Wikipedia entry
  • We talked about Astro Boy in Show 60 and Captain Harlock in Show 34, but here’s the ANN links for Kimba the White Lion and Battle of the Planets aka Science Ninja Team Gatchaman
  • Ikkyu-san is one we’ve not seen, and Rob is probably referring to the second Cyborg 009 TV series, not the first. Though he probably saw the movie Cyborg 009: Legend of the Super Galaxy, since that was released by Best Film and Video. Where’s my review, DAPDX?! Stop reviewing all those live-action movies and Robotech blah and get ON THE BALL
  • Blackhawks was an old DC Comics release and was recently featured in the Justice League cartoon…and there’s one surviving member currently in the Birds of Prey but we aren’t supposed to admit knowing that
  • It’s not clear from just the audio recording, but when Rob mentions The Six Million Dollar Man, Daryl proceeded to dramatically throw upon the table a copy of Cyborg by Martin Caidin (the book that inspired the series) since Paul was reading it on the flight up. The word “serendipity” was used multiple times for the rest of the weekend as a result. “Kismet“? Not so much.
  • Daleks are from some show only watched by geeks, but at least they’re a disciplined lot
  • Ziv International made some dangerously lame dubs long ago, which we’ve played clips from in the past. We want ALL OF THEM.
  • Marine Boy isn’t something we know much about aside from the clips of it used in assorted Corn Pone Flicks productions
  • Asimov Online is a decent portal for learning about the guy. Daryl for some reason can only remember reading all the Norby books as a kid, without actually remembering what they were about
  • Creation conventions still exist after over three decades and they’re still as lame as ever
  • Omni magazine had a 20 year run of sorts, but this sort of periodical is dying out; more on that in Show 64b
  • Miyako Graham, who informed Rob of the word “anime,” was quite involved with Protoculture Addicts and also translated stuff for Newtype and served as an interpreter for Japanese guests. I can’t remember if she’s married to Toren Smith or not since I’ve met neither of them
  • I think the terrifying nature of the EDF was elaborated upon when we interviewed Dave Merrill. The C/FO still exists as one club and still has 8 hour anime club showings once a month, as you can see from their Tripod-hosted website. Fred Patten used to still attend these meetings up until his stroke a few years ago. That logo should clue you in as to what’s up
  • We’d rather not delve too deeply into this, but suffice to say that Mark Merlino, in addition to founding the C/FO with Fred Patten, was also more or less the founder of furry fandom as the Internet scourge we know it as today by virtue of him and his male partner holding zoomorphic gatherings at their home, which they referred to as “furry parties.” The fandom was eventually split between semi-sane people and the people we commonly think of as furries today
  • Chambara movies (that site lists way more than just chambara) are a subset of jidai-geki. Information on Zatoichi is here; I would have said to listen to Popcorn Samurai since he was going to be reviewing one Zatoichi movie each episode, but that podcast faded away rather quickly. Unfortunate, since I don’t know of any podcasts devoted just to talking about samurai movies or kungfu movies. If there are such podcasts, let us know!

Damn it, that’s just the links for like, the first 20 minutes of this thing. You people know how to use Google; do this yourself!

77 Replies to “Anime World Order Show # 64 – Interview With Walter Amos and Rob Fenelon, Part 1”

  1. Daryl Surat said…
    I am also experiencing CRC failures on the second Anime Zine file. The failure is at the 12th page. Also, bitmaps? If it’s quality you’re concerned about, PNG is a lossless compression format that should hopefully take up less space than BMPs or Comedy TIFF Option (insert joke about Berserk scans here).

    Yeah, I should have thought about that. Some of those formats were still new to me (except TIFF, since I haven’t used that in a long time). I’m still learning the ropes here (of course I also feel I need a new scanner with a larger field too, or stop relying on places like MegaUpload for these deals too if I wasn’t too ashamed to stick it elsewhere). Never had anyone to tell me these things in a long time so I had to figure it out all on my own through trial and error.

  2. daryl: DLW told his dream remake of a live-action Guyver would be with LeTerrier[Transporter, Hulk Reloaded] at the helm.

    Anyway, so Bandai Visual underwhelmed me once again. It was nifty when they were getting cool movies and OVAs like Patlabor and Gunbuster, but now they think that harem shit is going to fly with fans, even though it killed Geneon and nearly crippled ADV. For fuck’s sake, I tell them I want Mind Game and Angel’s Egg on their own boards, and in their e-mail, and they give me another dating sim adaptation!

    Since you AWO’ers occasionally meet industry people, they need to know the following: No American is into that genre! They tried it with Sakura Wars and Thousand Arms, and those were quickly forgotten. Hell, no one even buys the hentai variations of dating sims, because the just get those off Bit Torrent.

    The Japanese have a thing for boring games involving pointless micro-management, which is why Front Mission and FF Tactics are huge over there, but not here. That doesn’t mean we can’t love them for who they are, but we just don’t always have the same interests. There’s nothing wrong with that, since it’d probably be illegal to view Kodomo No Jikan here, anyway.
    But sometimes, you just have to separate the wheat from the chafe….

  3. I kinda have to agree with you. Bandai Visual (in Japan) has such a huge catalog of older stuff but they keep releasing newer stuff that I (or anyone else) don’t care about or haven’t even heard of. I’d so want a Dangaioh
    OVA set or maybe even Robot Carnival from them.

    I hope you guys can do a new episode by the end of the week. Your show is still that good that I keep listening to previous eps over and over.

  4. Chris

    Never had anyone to tell me these things in a long time so I had to figure it out all on my own through trial and error.

    Welcome to my world with the archive. When I started with scanning and such, the PNG format was pretty new and not widely supported so I never really got in to it, and now I found out that it’s really the way to go for scanning (at least I’m told) since it compresses better and is lossless. The 2 gigs of BMPs I scanned for the archive so far doesn’t look nearly as nice as the 150 megs of PNGs. There’s this plugin called PNGOUT that “supposidly” does a better job with compression but it takes 15 minutes to do a single image and it doesn’t look noticeably better nor is the size smaller so again, trial and error.

    Now I’m hoping that 300 dpi PNGs that I’m scanning are doing the job, but no one can seem to tell me one way or another.

    The Japanese have a thing for boring games involving pointless micro-management…

    Not much approaches the level of pointless micromanagement that EVERY SINGLE American non-FPS computer game does. Think anything from Total War, The Movies, The Sims, etc… I think Americans have pointless micromanagement down far better in their games.

  5. You leave Total War out of it! They provide the option to automate everything in that game if you don’t want to be bothered by micromanagement, and it will do a good job at it. In fact, I think it’s the default option. You can even automate the battles. In the Total War series, it is entirely the player’s choice regarding the depth of management they wish to exert. If you don’t want to manage taxes, construction, unit training, title bestowing, and the like on a per-province basis, then you don’t have to. That luxury is absent from most Japanese games. Still, I don’t know if I’d single out Front Mission or Final Fantasy Tactics on the micromanagement front either, since you can automate a good bit in those, too.

    When it comes to gaming, micromanagement is something I hate only slightly less than I hate level/stat grinding, which I hate more than anything. I never cared for the majority of the titles developed by Blizzard Entertainment since they often feature one or both of these elements prominently. Naturally, their games are some of the most popular ones in the world. Yet another case of everyone else in the world being wrong except for me.

    The original plan of getting the episode out by around now has been delayed slightly since we thought it best to add in a news segment. That won’t get edited just yet since TODAY IS GERALD’S BIRTHDAY and he’s doing stuff related to that (as a true otaku, on MY birthday you have my word that there will be no celebratory event whatsoever, it will be another day like any other just like Christmas was), hopefully it’ll be ready by the weekend. If not, I can always stall for time by throwing guest appearances we’ve done on other podcasts into the AWO feed!

  6. “We sing in praise of Total War!”

    Sorry, couldn’t resist. Even though probably nobody’ll get the reference.

    E. Bernhard Warg

  7. Daryl said…
    If not, I can always stall for time by throwing guest appearances we’ve done on other podcasts into the AWO feed!

    Shame on you for having to plug other podcasts in order to decrease the workload.

    Daryl said…

    TODAY IS GERALD’S BIRTHDAY

    Happy birthday Gerald!

    Er, I mean, happy oridinary day, Gerald!

    I mean congratulations on reaching this unimportant day, Gerald!

    I mean, ah crap. It’s too damned hot here!

  8. Gerald said…
    Chris
    Welcome to my world with the archive. When I started with scanning and such, the PNG format was pretty new and not widely supported so I never really got in to it, and now I found out that it’s really the way to go for scanning (at least I’m told) since it compresses better and is lossless. The 2 gigs of BMPs I scanned for the archive so far doesn’t look nearly as nice as the 150 megs of PNGs. There’s this plugin called PNGOUT that “supposidly” does a better job with compression but it takes 15 minutes to do a single image and it doesn’t look noticeably better nor is the size smaller so again, trial and error.

    Pretty much how I look at it.

    Now I’m hoping that 300 dpi PNGs that I’m scanning are doing the job, but no one can seem to tell me one way or another.

    Me neither. I used some cheap program to convert my bmp’s to png’s but I’m a bit put off of trying to upload them anyway unless I do so through e-mail as usual (feel better off keeping these things a little private when I’m not sure).

    Oh, and Happy Birthday Gerald, I only feel sorry I had to go out to Golden Corral for my grandmother’s 91st birthday instead Wednesday. 😛

  9. Okay, so there’s been about ten people in the comments who say they’d buy one of the sweatshirts. But now two questions arise: how much of each size do we get and how much would people pay for such things? These are incidentally the exact same two questions I would have regarding T-shirts, which nobody at all said they were interested in. Perhaps because there’s no pictures posted of folks with shirts.

    I get the feeling that if we ordered equal quantities of all sizes, certain sizes would sell out quickly and other ones we’d just never be able to get rid of. Are the days of 5XL anime fans in the past? Such crazy logistics.

    Yesterday I did no editing, watched no anime, read no manga, played no games, and wrote no articles. This seems to be my normal routine now, and I’m not sure what it is I’m doing to eat up my free time. It’s certainly not housekeeping.

    Sorry, couldn’t resist. Even though probably nobody’ll get the reference.

    Take your damned dirty Doctor Who quotes over to the Ninja Consultant Livejournal where they belong! 😛

  10. Daryl: I’m pretty sure I said before that I was interested in a t-shirt. But then again, I’m stupid, so maybe I forgot. Whatever. In any case, I would definitely buy both a t-shirt and a hoodie.

    As far as sizes go, I’m pretty sure that when the Weekly Anime Review Podcast made shirts, Larges and Mediums were the two most popular sizes (although I’m not 100% positive about that). As for me, I can fit into both a medium and a large, so definitely get plenty of those. I hope that at least somewhat helped.

  11. I’d like a t-shirt as well. Size L if possible. Price wise : $20 for the hoodies and $10 for the shirts.

    Daryl said…
    Yesterday I did no editing, watched no anime, read no manga, played no games, and wrote no articles. This seems to be my normal routine now, and I’m not sure what it is I’m doing to eat up my free time. It’s certainly not housekeeping.

    Lyrics to help with your problem:

    “The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind; the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.”

  12. At the risk of sounding like a total idiot, is there a reason that Cafepress is not an option for this shirt/hoodie? Is it that you’re wanting to use specific brands of shirts?

    I mean, I’m all in favor of deep thick ink hand screened on every shirt, but man, I recall back when I was making some Harlock ‘Dokuro mark’ tank tops back in the day, that gets expensive and takes forever to dry….

    Cafepress offers options I guess, and since it’s print on demand you’re not out a ton of change.

    I suspect offering AWO knit caps would set the world on fire. Me, I’d push for temporary tattoos…

  13. Steve,

    The reasons for no CafePress are

    1) Their quality is generally crap from what we’ve heard, and

    2) Because of the default price that CafePress demands out of things like shirts and hoodies, especially if you want black base ones, we would have to charge you guys much more money for them than we feel is right.

  14. Well, to play devil’s advocate…instead of trusting ‘I heard..’ on the Cafepress quality, why not just order something minor and see for yourself? It’s what I would do. But like I hinted at in my previous post I’m POSITIVE it won’t be as good as if you cut the silkscreen yourself and hand inked each one. Mass production does tend to lessen that quality. I think Caefpress uses iron-ons generated via inkjet printer, but I won’t swear to that.

    Of course, you could do that route as well.

    As to price on cafepress…well, that’s going to be up to the people who want to buy, isn’t it? Remember, what’s a deal to one is a dealbreaker to another.

    Hey, you got people out here who throw money at you just to HOPE that Daryl will dance at a con! Don’t be so worried about that pricing thing.

  15. The shirts will be coming from me…unless AWO changes their minds and have found someone else they wish to use. If I am to do them, they will be silkscreened…and on whatever the hell daryl, gerald, and clarissa want.

    I can say with certainty that I beat cafepress in both price and quality. I’m doing this as a fan of the podcast, so I’m not looking to make much of a profit off of this.

  16. I’d definitely like a sweatshirt and/or a tee-shirt.

    Men’s large for me, and the price should be somewhere around $20 for a sweatshirt and $10 for a tee-shirt, if you can manage it.

    Patiently waiting for the next episode and Daryl’s thoughts on NYAF.

  17. I’ve listen to this show at least 3 times since download. Awesome.

    I’m glad to hear that these hoodies or tees will are becoming a plan.

    How about a few girl shaped tees as well. s – XXL.

  18. Another great show as usual. DAMMIT SURAT! Hurry up and edit the next one! I’m an american and I want it now!

    Sorry for yelling. The Army life is getting to me.

  19. After sitting through some of Megazone 23 II, I’m starting to realize that that “Presence” sequence in Robot Carnival was just a fluke, and that Umetsu is a hack. I already knew that with the Kite 2 trailer, but it’s disappointing that this OVA confirms it.

  20. I liked MZ 23 Part 2. The story wasn’t told nearly as well as the original but I think it has its own bizarre charm. I do love the crazy fluidity of the animation.

    The THIRD however, well I don’t think really anything could have saved that train wreck.

    Oh man, I want a new episode soon too.

  21. Dan said…
    After sitting through some of Megazone 23 II, I’m starting to realize that that “Presence” sequence in Robot Carnival was just a fluke, and that Umetsu is a hack. I already knew that with the Kite 2 trailer, but it’s disappointing that this OVA confirms it.

    Yep, he was only holding it in that one time!

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