The Mister Kitty Story

 

As many Let's Anime readers may be aware, when I'm not writing for this blog I'm usually working on something for the website Mister Kitty. My partner Shaindle Minuk and myself started Mister Kitty in 2006 or so as a website to publish our comics on the internets, which was the fashion at the time. 

 

Since then we've both released hundreds and hundreds of pages of our original comic stories in a variety of genres and media. We both hosted galleries of our artwork on the site. For a few years I put together a weekly audio feature called "Found Sound" where I'd highlight some particularly goofy singles or album tracks from my collection of offbeat vinyl. This has since been replaced by a semi-regular podcast feature, Mister Kitty's Lo-Fi Landfill. 

 But what wound up being the most popular feature has been Stupid Comics, a weekly deep dive into one of the thousands of  comic books that litter our place, a dive into a comic that fails on some level - inept artwork, poorly thought-out stories, shoddy printing, obvious swipes, all kinds of problems can befall the production of an example of the Ninth Art, and in seventeen years of making fun of these comics we've seen and made fun of our fair share of those failures. 

The reason I bring all this up is simple. For years our website was located at Mister Kitty Dot Org. That web address was burned into my brain through countless interviews, podcasts, and convention panels. Name the occasion and there I was, reminding everyone to visit Mister Kitty Dot Org. Well, not any more. It seems that our web hosting company fumbled the ball during an important moment of transition, and our dot org address was snatched out from under our very noses. In practical terms, this means that we're no longer at Mister Kitty Dot Org, and instead the entire website and all its content is now located at Mister Kitty Dot Net. 

I have but one request for you, dear readers. Please take a minute to visit and bookmark Mister Kitty Dot Net. Maybe give the site a visit on a regular basis (we usually post new Stupid Comics late Thursday night). If you happen to come across an old link to something we published at the dot org site, that link probably won't work. At least, it's not going to take you to anything we have anything to do with. 

I realize how frustrating this might be for long-time readers of our site to have to replace a well-known, almost reflexive address with a new, slightly different one, and I apologize for any stress or confusion this may cause. Please be assured we are going to continue with Stupid Comics every week; there's going to be a new Lo-Fi Landfill for you soon, and there will be some new comics from us down the road. Both Shain and myself have really enjoyed working on Mister Kitty,  and we're pleased and a little amazed that we've managed to entertain so many regular visitors for so long. If you could bear with us through this speed bump, we'll do our best to keep delivering the Mister Kitty to you.

 -Dave and Shain 

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!

Annoying Adventures With The Tape Trading Taskforce

this column originally ran in 2003 at Mike Toole’s “Anime Jump” website, and has been amended with minor corrections, slight alterations, and additional annoyances. Names have been changed to protect the innocent and guilty.

Back in the pre-DVD. pre-streaming era, when you had to swap stuff with strangers through the mail to get any kind of decent Japanese cartoons, brave nerd pioneers would find ourselves having to get too close for comfort to certain specimens of the genus “anime-fannus North Americanus.” These are but a few of the many tales that make up the warp and woof of the rich tapestry that is your anime nerd heritage, and they should serve both as amusing anecdotes and cautionary examples. 

actual anime VHS tapes received via the US Mail

 

Oh so many. The person who created his own home-made flyers for our anime convention and posted them around town. The guy who spent weeks arguing on BBS message boards about how Masamune Shirow invented manga as we know it and then tried to track us down at Project A-Kon to argue about it with us some more but got thrown out of the con due to the weed and bong he brought to the staff room he was crashing in. The letters about 60s cartoons that segued quickly into being letters about sex acts. But let’s focus on a few.

1.

Back when I was copying tapes for people through the Anime Hasshin tape traders list, a California fan got in touch with me with an aim to getting copies. He sent his list, I sent my list back, he replied with a large letter back commenting (negatively) on the contents of my tape list and asking why I didn’t make copies in 6-hour EP mode. I replied that (1) EP sucks in terms of video quality, and anyway, (2) they’re my VCRs and I’ll do with ‘em what I want.

lists of anime tapes in the collections of anime fans circa 1990

 

His reply letter more or less agreed with me, or at least admitted that we all have our own preferences. I figured I’d never hear from him again, Well, a week later a tape arrived in the mail from him, along with return postage and a request list that was almost exactly six hours long. A movie, two OVAs, some TV episodes, just cram it all on there, please.

I’m like, whatever. The tape goes on the pile of tapes to be copied. You see, at the time I was copying a lot of tapes from people both through the mail and right at home. I’d come home from the local anime club with a stack of blanks and a list of requests, and I spent a lot of time violating copyright law so Bob McBobbob and his pals could watch Project A-Ko or “Dirty Pair Does Dishes” at their leisure.

One week later, I get a long, pissed-off letter from the guy, asking where the hell his tape is, how dare I treat anime fans in this way, where do I get off behaving in such an obnoxious fashion, HE always makes sure HE gets HIS tapes done quickly, etc etc.

So this gets my full attention. What I do is I dig out my oldest, funkiest, top-loading 2-head VCR that only records in black and white. It was a Panasonic that suffered a drop onto a concrete landing after I tripped on some stairs while carrying it to a Saturday night let’s-copy-anime-and-eat-pizza gathering at a now demolished apartment complex at Lindbergh and Piedmont in Atlanta. I used this Panasonic as the recording deck. Every so often as I passed the machine I gave it a mighty smash with my hand or other suitable blunt instrument. Talk about hashtag VHS Artifacts! They got all six hours of anime, though. Was it watchable? I don’t know. I never heard from them again. 

 

meet you at Zesto's on Piedmont

 

2.

A few years later we were fan-subtitling Captain Harlock though the auspices of Corn Pone Flicks. A VHS, a SASE, and a request for episodes arrived, as per our guidelines. We put the Harlock episodes on the tape, which was placed into its already-stamped return envelope, and mailed back.

 

A month later the emails started – that tape never arrived. Which is a thing that happens sometimes. Mail gets lost. It’s a thing. What made this email special was the demand we replace and mail this person their replacement tape on our own dime. Because, as the email stated, we were running a business and as such had a responsibility to our customers. Since we were most definitely NOT running a business, we actually had NO such responsibility. By that time we’d learned just ignoring the kooks was the best plan of action, which is what we did to the increasingly angry emails that continued to arrive, eventually accusing Corn Pone Flicks of running an elaborate swindle, stealing blank VHS tapes from an unsuspecting public. The perfect crime!

3.

Speaking of copying tapes, it was the custom of the time for anime nerds such as myself to have lists of their available anime titles photocopied and available to send out, because it’s difficult to ask for tapes you don’t know exist. If you were a member of an anime club or two, you might have access to the anime lists of five, ten, twenty anime tape traders. You might not consider these lists themselves a valuable commodity, but a Pacific Northwest outfit known as Kinosei Anime thought otherwise! For a small fee of six dollars, they would send you the tape lists of fans and clubs who were willing to copy anime for strangers! I found out about Kinosei when I started getting letters from people who had acquired my name and address from them. And no, Kinosei Anime never asked permission to send anyone’s name, address, and list of tapes out to the world as part of their low-stakes unethical behavior game. I mean, it’s not a big deal – I’m sure this scheme netted them, what, thirty, forty bucks, max – but ask first, people.

"Dear Dave, I have sold your name and address to strangers. Do you have any Kimba The White Lion. Thanks, Jeff"

 

4.

So back in, like, 1989-1990, our phone rang. It was the operator, asking if I would accept the charges on a collect call from a person whom I didn’t know. I figured it had to be an emergency, or at least really important, so I said “yes”. BIG MISTAKE. The mystery caller is a guy who fished my name out of the C/FO Directory. He figured he’d call me collect and ask lots of questions about Japanese TV shows in general and the live-action superhero show Spectreman in particular. No emergency, no crisis, not even a very interesting conversation. Definitely not worth my dime or my time. 

a mystery with a name

He wanted to know this. He wanted to know that. He wanted me to mail him tapes. He wanted me to mail him fanzines. He wanted everything as free gifts from the goodness of my heart and the bottomlessness of my bank account, the extent of both having been greatly exaggerated somewhere down the line. I gathered from his rambling conversation that his caregivers wouldn’t let him call people unless it was collect, and they also wouldn’t give him any money for fanzines or tapes. So obviously, collect-calling to panhandle from strangers was his only option. I finally got off the phone without agreeing to send him anything. Sure, I should have just hung up on the guy, but I was raised to be polite.

the 1988 C/FO Membership Directory - personal information redacted

 

He called right back the next day. I refused the charges. He called back several times over the weekend. We refused the charges. About a year later he called AGAIN. I heard the operator ask if I’d accept the charges from this guy’s name, and I threw the phone across the room while hollering “NOOOOOO!!” in slow motion, just like the movies.

Found out later I wasn’t the only person to get the collect treatment. A pal of mine in South Carolina also got nailed, and at least one former C/FO generalissimo was on the receiving end of who became known as “The Collect Call Bandit.” My guess is that the guy was in some sort of managed care or group home situation and whenever he got a chance, he leaped to the nearest telephone and started collect-calling people like a maniac until the white coats could pry him loose and get that straitjacket back on him.

Anyway the moral of the story is never, ever accept collect calls from strangers. Those 1-800-Collect people are LYING TO YOU. Oh, and also, never let anyone print your home phone number anywhere.

 

don't do it

Of course, these days we’re deluged by scam calls and robocalls from duct cleaning services and extended warranty salesmen and important messages threatening imminent arrest from the IRS, Immigration or the Social Security Administration. Compared to all this, simply being desperate for Spectreman sounds downright wholesome.

5.

The hands down most annoying guy I ever swapped tapes with was a person I’m going to call named “Bert Ernieson.” He’s another someone I got in touch with via anime club trader lists. Where do I begin? His video lists were handwritten in barely legible pencil on three-hole lined notebook paper. These letters were typically five or six double sided pages filled with scores of trivial questions. Tape requests from Bert would be for odd, hard-to-dig-out titles – in the VHS days this meant fast forwarding to the middle of a tape to find the exact requested episode of Urusei Yatsura or whatever. Let me tell you after four or five tapes, all this cueing time adds up. His mail would include various right-wing pamphlets, for instance the famed, completely bogus urban legend alert about how a cabal of atheists, led by Madalyn Murray O'Hair herself, were going to get all religious programming banned from TV. This right-wing Christian material seemed at odds with some of the selections on Bert’s own tape list, which, to be fair, featured a lot of obscure anime titles, but also included hard-core triple-X American adult films.

But all that was just mildly annoying. Bert, however, took it to the next level. For one thing, he shipped EVERYTHING Media Mail® (Book Rate), the cheapest, slowest, most error-prone way to mail anything. Nothing could induce him to ship things first class, not even sending him the extra postage. Invariably he would use and re-use and re-re-re-use cheap, fiber-particle filled padded mailing envelopes. Items shipped thusly would wind up covered with tiny bits of paper and fiber. This might be OK for books. However, trying to play VHS tapes covered with tiny bits of paper and fiber will result in a VCR mechanism coated with tiny bits of paper and fiber. This is, shall we say, contraindicated by the operating manual.

And then we have the VHS tapes themselves. The tape trading custom of the time was that you’d buy brand new tapes and copy trade requests onto the brand new tapes. But Bert had another plan. He’d copy YOUR requests onto whatever tapes he happened to have lying around. Brand new from the store, or used over and over again, didn’t matter to Bert. Quality brands like Sony, TDK, Fuji or Maxell? Awful house-brand K-mart tapes or clearance bin rejects? It’s all videotape to Bert. He explained his method was to re-copy every incoming video onto 6-hour tapes, apparently to save space in his closet or dungeon or whereever. In practical terms, this meant every single movie or TV show you requested from him had already been transferred to one of his grab-bag mystery-brand video tapes, at a recording speed ensuring the worst possible audio and video quality.

Avoid these brands

 

This tape-recycling meant leftovers at the end of tapes, just in case you enjoy being surprised by, say,13th-generation English dubs of partial Cream Lemon episodes at the end of the super robot cartoon you were showing friends while parents were in the room. Try it, it’s embarrassing and fun! Or when you agree to swap three tapes, and he sends you four, the extra one full of unasked-for junk, just so he can say “hey, I sent you four tapes, now you owe me four tapes instead of the three we agreed on.”

And yet, I continued to swap tapes with him (there were a LOT of obscure titles in his Crawlspace Of Questions), until one day he tried to pull a fast one on a friend, let’s call this friend Lisa Black. He couldn’t or wouldn’t follow Lisa’s simple requests for “new tapes” and “no fiber mailers,” so she refused to copy any more tapes for him. In order to get around her embargo, he started to send her blanks under a different name, utilizing the concept of “sock puppets” before the internet was really even a thing.

I dunno. Maybe it WAS his cousin, like he said. I don’t care. Anyway, she saw through the ruse, because Bert wasn’t smart enough to change his distinctive ordering habits, or his distinctive handwriting. Around this time I happened to mention Lisa in a letter to Bert and his reply was that he was disappointed “I was still dealing with that Nazi, Lisa Black.” Well, I replied that I’d been trading with Lisa for 10 years, that she was, to the best of my knowledge, not an adherent of National Socialism, that she was one of the few truly decent people in a hobby full of obnoxious jerks, and that Bert and I were done swapping tapes. Goodbye to shitty copies of obscure robot anime, to ripped fiberpack mailers, to 4th class book rate, to letters full of questions and demands. Somehow, the anime fan world survived without these things.

 

Life moves on. A fandom of tape-swapping nerds evolves into a fandom of convention-going nerds. Anime became something we watched in theaters, bought at Best Buy, and eventually streamed on computers. Of course, annoying fans still exist, but their annoyances are new and exciting, in ways we could only have dreamed of back in the day. And let’s be honest, the truth is that for every jerk there were and are ten or twenty non-jerks; reasonable, friendly, generous anime fans ready to show up, help out, and bring snacks, fans who send surprises in the mail and bring gifts back from their Japan trips, fans who build friendships that survive decades. Without fandom, my life would have be considerably lonelier, be much less exciting, and would certainly be bereft of many Japanese cartoons and their related paraphernalia and accoutrements.

Yes, there are a few times when I’m exceptionally maudlin or temporarily addled, when I reminisce about the “good old days” of swapping tapes through the mail. Who doesn’t love to get packages in the mail? Those were exciting times, learning about a whole new art form and sharing that knowledge with anyone who’d sit still long enough. Certainly those tape-trading networks proved their worth, educating a continent and forging powerful bonds And yet, if the harsh modern world of the 21st century means I’ll never again get bitched out by total strangers over copies of Japanese cartoons, then I’m all for progress.

-Dave Merrill

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!

Unsafe At Any Frame Rate

Speeding full throttle straight towards the bottom of the barrel, Gattiger was one of Japan's clunkier cartoons, yet achieved inexplicable European success and even burned rubber across a few American UHF stations, confusing viewers for years via the miracle of home video tape. Cho Supercar Gattiger - yes, that's "Super Supercar Gattiger," for that extra bit of super - is a firey car wreck of a show, part of a mid-1970s auto-racing anime fad that crashed and burned almost instantly, leaving shows like Super Grand Prix, Rugen Kaiser, and Tobidase! Machine Flying Dragon in the impound lot. 

Gattiger hits the sweet spot where low-rent robot faddism and combination super-car absurdity combine, leaving a primary colored junkpile of nonsense built of parts rejected from five or ten better shows and super-glued together seemingly at random. A barely watchable parade of sawblade-equipped bugmobiles and machine-gun firing crab-cars bumping around endless, shoddily painted backgrounds, we yawn as legions of stupidly costumed off-brand Galactor thugs man their dork-vettes to be destroyed in masse by our super super car hero Gattiger, which, when combined into its super super-car configuration, looks like that stupid neighbor kid took five of your Hot Wheels and stuck them together with globs of Play-Doh. Usually combination mecha tries for some sort of combination effect that results in something new and exciting, but Gattiger is satisfied to turn five cars into one heavier, slower, less efficient and more cumbersome car. 

A cooperative endeavour of the Eiwa and Nippon Keizai advertising agencies, Cho Supercar Gattiger aired on Tokyo 12 (now TV Tokyo) from October 1977 until March '78. Created by Hitoshi Chiaki, Gattiger's animation was produced by Wako Productions – not the Osaka based Wako that manages comedians and singers, but Wako Pro, founded in 1965 in Nerima, Tokyo. Wako did a little subcontracting out to Tatsunoko and Sunrise but also carved out its own niche, animating the odd cut-paper version of Kazuo Umezu's Cat Eyed Boy, the Euro-insect champ Maya The Bee, one of the many Moomin anime shows, the South American adventure series Pepero The Andes Boy, super-cheap super robot Mechander Robo, Moribi Murano's charming dog comedy Bark! Bun Bun, and Dutch-German-Japanese ducksploitation extravaganza Alfred J. Kwak. Wako Pro is now called "Teleimage" and their modern business is managing old properties, not creating new ones. 

Wako Pro galaxy of super stars

Gattiger's mechanical design was by Design Office Mechaman, who'd also work on masterpieces like Voltes V and turkeys like Ginguiser. The Gattiger manga, because of course there was a manga tie-in, was by Eiji Imamichi and appeared in Terebi-kun. Imamachi drew lots of licensed character comics including the 80s Tetsujin 28, Ultra Seven, Ironking, Transformers, the Red Hawk Yamato (no, not the space battleship, the OTHER space battleship) and the Tsubaraya CB-craze curiosity Emergency Directive 10-4 · 10-10. 

demon motors needs a bailout

Super Supercar Gattiger's plot is confused, gas-huffing nonsense about a Demon Car Company which is run by the slightly more deranged, insanely mustached Henry Ford type Black Demon. Not content with being a filthy-rich zillionaire, he leverages his auto-making expertise into, what else, a bid for world conquest. To do this he needs the top secret super powerful solar powered combo-super-car invented by top science man Dr. Tabuchi. Well, wouldn't you know it, Demon winds up killing Dr. Tabuchi, leading Tabuchi's son Joe to swear eternal vengeance by means of the selfsame solar powered super-combo-5-in-1 Gattiger. Helpfully titled "Center Machine", "Left Machine", "Right Machine", and so forth, this rolling Pick-A-Part lot is driven by the Tiger Team crew of Sachiyo (girl), Kotomi (girl's kid brother), Ken (the big guy), and Hayami (quiet guy), who subsequently pop their five individual clutches and tell the world to eat their five individual dusts. 

our super super car heroes

As the worldwide auto-race battle heats up we learn Black Demon's second in command, Queen Demon, is actually Joe Tabuchi's mother and that Black Demon Mustache himself is Queen Demon's father, which makes him Joe's grandfather, and which also means every once in awhile Queen Demon puts on a Racer X mask and races incognito to help Joe Tabuchi, because that's what mothers do. In a series of nonsensical auto races through rugged, desolate, easily drawn territory, the Gattiger team races and wins against the Black Demon Auto Racing Team, with the fate of the world, or at least several lucrative endorsement contracts, in the balance. 

And no, kids, let's not confuse Super Supercar Gattiger with the hero of Toei's 1975 short film Uchuu Enban Daisensou, or "Great Outer Space Flying Disc War", the proto-Grandizer film starring an outer space refugee who pilots a super robot known as Gattaiger. Because that would be silly. Sure, Uchuu Enban Daisensou is dopey robot nonsense, but at least it features a robot panther, a big-haired outer space Farrah Fawcett, and a mercifully short 20 minute run time. 

know your gattigers

Queen Demon and Eric share the same hairstylist

Our combo-super-car-super-Gattiger super story races to a furious climax as Black Demon general Eric murders his rival Queen Demon with radioactivity. Joe and the Tiger Team face off against Eric in a super car showdown that Eric loses, bringing justice to the galaxy of super-car auto racing. Stricken with the loss of both Eric and Queen Demon, Black Demon himself pilots the massive super attack... just kidding. Black Demon blows himself and his entire Demon Auto Company to smithereens. The end, drain the fluids, put the wheels up on blocks, throw a tarp over it, we're done. 

The show has a flat mid 70s look; you could easily be watching any number of boring Nippon Animation robot disasters (Blocker Gundan 4 Machine Blaster, Ginguiser) or clunky pre-Takahata Zuizo Eizo kidvid starring bears or woodchucks or raccoons or bluejays wearing hats and little ties. The animation is passable at best and that's a generous assessment. Lots of lugubrious male-vocalist songs exhort us to "hear our courage groan" and "get rid of the pain by stepping on the gas," while the audience looks at its watch and waits impatiently for another fuel shortage. 

So why are we even talking about this show? Sure,the show was a hit in Italy, a nation known for its enthusiastic disregard for auto safety, but why did San Francisco's Fuji-TV see fit to translate and subtitle Gattiger and broadcast it to an America that was clearly not ready? Why did the newly-minted Japanimation fans of that era roll tape on what must have, even back then, been seen as a fairly dopey show? How did it wind up tacked onto the end of a VHS of 1990's "Devilman : Evil Bird Sirene"? 

blatant false advertising for the Gattiger toy

To be perfectly frank, Gattiger exists in America for the same reason it existed in Japan – to sell toys. Takatoku produced a few versions of Gattiger rolling stock that must have seemed like a good bet for American retailers, as Fuji-TV's Gattiger broadcast includes a tremendously misleading ad for Gattiger toys and the address you can write down and hector your parents into driving you to. I found my Gattiger Center Machine at a comic shop in Massachusetts, which only goes to show you never know where these anime things are going to pop up next.  

still has that new super car smell

Sure, totally lame anime like Gattiger is always good for a chuckle, and the show is useful in keeping the anime conversation from getting too pretentious. Beyond that, in spite of its many design flaws, we can point to Super Super Car Gattiger as proof of the raw power of Japanese animation, that even the speed bumps and potholes of thin, derivative premises can't slow anime down.

-Dave Merrill

just one last look at that mustache

Thanks for reading Let's Anime! If you enjoyed it and want to show your appreciation for what we do here as part of the Mister Kitty Dot Net world, please consider joining our Patreon!

what I did on my vacation '16

Summer's just about over and that means it's time to look back and reflect on what you did on your time off. Where did you go? What did you do? And how long will you be paying the credit card companies back for it all?

Well even though this year we didn't visit Tokyo, we did get to experience enough classic Japanese cartoon goodness to realize that one doesn't have to cross the Pacific to find old-school anime.  On our trip through upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Quebec, we found them bug-eyed Japanheeno cartoons peeking out at us around every corner, seemed like.

As a French-speaking province linguistically tied to a nation that spent the 1970s and 1980s watching as many Japanese cartoons their PAL television system could cram onto the airwaves, Quebec was North America's go-to region for classic anime. And here in 2016 that's evident everywhere people of a certain age gather, especially in Montreal's hip burger joint La Belle et la Boeuf, where not only can you consume a giant burger named after UFO Robo Grandizer, but you can wash your hands under the protective gaze of Captain Harlock for men and Candy Candy for the ladies.

Get up early the next morning and hit the antique malls, where a selection of Albator (Captain Harlock) and Goldorak (Grandizer) merchandise awaits you! The Goldorak stuff was overpriced IMHO ($10 for a scratched up 45 single of the French theme song, no thanks) but the Albator BD (that's "bandes dessinees", or comic books) were a bargain at twice the price. 

 The fascinating thing about these French Harlock comics is that they took terrific liberties with the original source material, sometimes adapting television stories wholesale, and sometimes going off in crazy new directions involving characters from completely different Japanese anime series.

(and yes I'm aware that Matsumoto shoe-horned Harlock into his Yamato manga. A giant ghost Captain Okita, not so much)

While in Massachusetts, you should definitely visit The Outer Limits in Waltham, a great comic book store with lots and lots of comic books of all kinds, as well as an interesting selection of toys & stuff from the 70s & 80s era of Japanese cartoons. You should also take a trip through Lexington, site of a pivotal scene in American history, and also a place where an auto dealership uses Astro Boy to advertise their excellent service department. No, seriously.

I wouldn't kid about something like this

When visiting New England you owe it to yourself to visit the Fun Spot in Weirs Beach New Hampshire. Not only can you play skee-ball, immerse yourself in the largest selection of working classic arcade games under one roof in the Western hemisphere, and roll your eyes at the Objectivist lecturing thoughtfully provided by the management, you can also revisit your first exposure to Lupin III in the form of the laser disc video game Cliff Hanger.

Yes, it works, and yes, the game play is just as mechanical and unsatisfying as you remember. But hey, game play is still a quarter just like it was in the 80s! Pile up a stack of tokens and play your way through the ninjas and gather a crowd of awestruck 12 year olds around you!

Next on our journey we crossed over into Vermont, where we visited Quechee Gorge, a beautiful spot of natural wonder located providentially next to an antique mall. Antique Malls are surprisingly fruitful locations to find bits of Japanese pop culture hiding among the fake tin reproduction signage and the plastic M&M figures that ARE NOT ANTIQUES, and Quechee is no exception.

Here we see celebrity anime translator Neil Nadelman modelling a lithograph of the Speed Racer cast signed by Peter Fernandez and Corinne Orr. Like the helpful post-it says on the back, "they do the voices." And they do!  When visiting Quechee, head upstairs to their Toy Museum and prepare for your eyes to bug out and your jaw to drop at all the awesome, awesome toys they have on display that you cannot ever play with, ever.

Then you'll want to head over to Rutland Vermont, filming location of the amazing sci-fi drama Time Chasers. If you've ever wanted to learn Japanese, well, you probably own books published by the Charles Tuttle Company of Rutland. Well Charles Tuttle was a real person and he really lived in Rutland and he had his own building right downtown!

Then, and only then, may you visit the local thrift store and freely avail yourself of the 5-for-$1 VHS tapes.

And that was our vacation. Well, okay, it wasn't all ferreting out silly cartoon nonsense. We saw a bunch of friends and ate terrific meals and got some beach time in and even did a little paddling on one of New England's more picturesque lakes. For YOUR next vacation, why not consider the Quebec-Vermont-New Hampshire-Massachusetts region?

top 11 autos named after classic anime characters

Did you know that many automobiles were named after classic Japanese animation characters?  It’s a fact! No no, don’t check up on it, just trust us, automakers around the world chose to name their vehicles after cartoons. Happened all the time and nobody knows why. Were Detroit automakers secretly attending C/FO meetings? Were there legions of anime fans in the ranks of car companies around the world? Science will never learn the answer. In the meantime, we here at Let’s Anime put together the top eleven automobiles that were named after classic anime heroes and heroines. Can you guess which will be number one?

 #3- Windstar, the mid-sized Ford van, had a reputation for safety – meaning, while it was in the shop having the engine or transmission replaced, you aren’t out driving it, and you can’t get safer than that. On the other hand, Windstar from Jim Terry’s localization of Toei’s Planet Robo Danguard Ace was a hot-blooded, decidedly unsafe super robot pilot who had something to prove to his commander, the mysterious Captain Mask.

 #16- The curves and handling, the sleek lines, the spirited movement and the classy chassis all make Nova a delight to behold. And the car’s not bad either! Seriously though, this classic Chevy car was born in the ‘60s as a “compact” but with the addition of a V8 became a favorite on the dragstrip, and with the ’68 third generation, Nova became the muscle car we still see cruising the streets, until a mid 70s redesign left it boring and boxy. The Nova imprint was later used by Chevy to rebrand Toyota Corollas in the mid 1980s, producing a line of functional, seemingly unkillable compacts. Seriously; we set ours on FIRE and still got another 100,000 miles out of it. Similarly, the anime character Nova is both a fully trained medical professional AND a valuable member of the Argo’s bridge crew, handling the all-celestial radar, surviving Gamilons and Comet Imperials and Bolar Commonwealth attacks with ease. Unsure if she was ever set on fire.

#37- The Astro was a rear-wheel drive mid-sized van produced from 1985 to 2005 by Chevrolet, noted for its trucklike hauling ability and its Spartan, boxlike interior that put efficiency ahead of comfort. The Astro Boy, on the other hand, is a robot boy with 100,000 horsepower created by Dr. Tenma, who once defeated Pluto to become the Greatest Robot In The World.

 #9- Not the album by prog-rockers Asia, nor Ultraman Leo’s twin brother, but the Opel Astra, a line of sporty compacts and mid-sized coupes marketed around the world under a variety of brands including Saturn, Chevrolet, and, in China, as Buick. A new, smaller Astra is set to debut at the Frankfurt auto show in September. Meanwhile in the world of imported Japanese cartoons, namely Star Blazers, Astra was the name given to Queen Starsha’s sister, who was sent to Earth with the plans for the Wave Motion Engine, but sadly who did not survive the journey.

#62.5- Whether you want outer space ESP policemen or economical compact cars, Justy is the brand for you! Subaru’s endearing little three-banger charmed Americans looking for cheap, gas-friendly transportation in the late 80s and early 90s, while Tsuguo Okazaki’s Shonen Sunday manga, later localized in the US and animated as a 1985 OVA, is the melodramatic story of Justy, the space cop with the most powerful ESP powers in the universe, whose awe-inspiring abilities are moderated only by his warm-hearted humanity.

#5- Several cars have been named Aurora – you may be familiar with the 90s Oldsmobile high-end sports sedan marketed with the name, or with the bizarre 1957 concept car produced by a vanity Connecticut auto manufacturer run by a priest and meant to be the safest car ever built, and probably was, as the single prototype kept breaking down on the way to the auto show. Anime fans, on the other hand, can watch the cartoon Princess Aurora go the distance all the way to the center of the galaxy as she led her team of SpaceKeteers on a mission to save the universe, in the series of the same name.

 #4- In the far reaches of outer space, the deadliest man alive is Cobra, the space bandit with the unstoppable Psycho-Gun. Meanwhile on the highways, the deadliest car alive is the Shelby Cobra, the unstoppable combination of big American engine and small European sportscar chassis – also the favorite auto of deadly bird-ninja Condor Joe.

#4 (again)- Pronounce “Ghibli” however you like, the fact is that this Japanese animation studio has produced more Academy-award winning feature films than any other anime production outfit. Spearheaded by the one-two punch of Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, they’ve been a museum-building cultural powerhouse for decades. It’s not surprising that automaker Maserati would appropriate this name for that of their mid-sized luxury sedan.

 #88- Speaking of hot desert winds, the boys at Volkswagen will sell you a Scirocco, a six-speed sports coupe that’s sleek yet surprisingly practical. The Gundam villain Paptimus Scirocco, just to contrast, is an evil genius who arrives from distant Jupiter with a master plan to make himself master of the Earth Sphere, as seen in the 1985 animated series Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam.

 #13- The anime about the bikini-clad space princess and the hapless Earth boy – no, not THAT anime, but the OTHER anime about the space princess, you know, Outlanders, the Johji Manabe manga that got an early North American release courtesy Studio Proteus and a stunt-casted English dubbed anime? Yeah, that would make a great name for Mitsubishi to use for their smallish, underpowered line of SUVs, I guess.

#7- Need a space navigator or a minivan? The Chevy Venture minivan was produced from 1997-2005. The 2000-2003 models could be "Warner Brothers" customized with WB branding, a DVD player (or VHS deck), classic WB cartoons, and built in child restraints.  And just like Venture the anime character, which is the American name given to Daisuke Shima from Space Battleship Yamato, the ship's navigator and best friend of deputy captain Susumu Kodai, the Venture is a reliable companion for all of life’s journeys, whether to the Greater Magellanic Cloud or to the beach. 

And hey, as of this writing there are two days left in the Kickstarter campaign to publish Shaindle Minuk’s webcomic Element Of Surprise. Why not check it out?

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