Hey everyone, welcome to more than meets these guys. We have a very special episode this
week. We have a guest star with us, Michael Charles Hill. He is the writer of some of
my favorite episodes of Transformers, The Gambler, The Starscreams Brigade, you have
Bernard Hardness the Bear, The Killing Jar. He also wrote one of our favorite episodes
of anything that we reference a lot on the show. And we just did a review on Cold Slyther
from GIGM, amongst many other things you've done. So it is a pleasure to have you here
today. Thank you so much. Thank you. Ed, would you like to start us off here? Yeah, actually,
before we spin off into a bunch of nerd stuff, we want to know a little bit about Mr. Hill
himself here. I'm very curious how you got into writing for television in the first place.
Just doing a search through your IMDB entries, it goes into the episodes of TV that you wrote,
but how did you initially get into that whole line of work? I kind of just stumbled into
it. It was never an ambition or goal. As a kid of the early 60s, I watched a lot of Saturday
morning cartoons, but it was mostly boonie tunes or fighting mouse or something. By the
time I got into high school, I wasn't paying attention to any stuff anymore. And I grew
up in a very small town in Vermont where I loved watching movies. We had a small theater
in town that would usually get stuff six months after it opened in New York City. And I used
to say that on Saturdays I'd watch Westerns and war movies, the film Noir is with my father,
and on Sundays I'd watch musicals and comedies with my mother. But it never occurred to me
that that was a job to have, behind the scenes stuff. So eventually I moved to Southern California
and then moved to Hollywood with the ambition of being a writer-director. And the first
thing I did was I got involved, I started working in film production, mostly TV commercials.
And I worked on short film projects with people I was friends with. Anyway, long story short,
I ended up meeting and becoming friends with Flint Dillard. And Flint and I had a writer's
group that would meet every Monday night and bring in ten pages of script that we were
working on to distribute to the other members and then discuss last week's ten pages that
everybody had read and had noticed. And he, thanks to his grandfather, Flint's family
owned the rights to Buck Rogers. So Flint and his agent were shopping that property
around town to animation studios. And when they got, and everyone turned them down, but
at Ruby Spears, they liked Flint and hired him straight away to write on Mr. T. And probably
within a few weeks, Flint calls me up and says, hey, how would you like to get paid
for writing? I said, sure. So he introduced me to the story editor on a show called Dragon's
Lair, which was still a Saturday morning cartoon on the ABC, but based on Don Blue's video
archival. They only did 13 episodes, but I ended up writing four of them. And I thought,
wow, this is kind of cool. I don't have to get up at four o'clock in the morning to be
on the station at six or soundstage at six and just stay home and write all day. And
so I just, I, after my stint with Ruby Spears, I started contacting other animation houses
and story editors and looking for freelance work. And that snowballed into Sunbow when
they had decided to open a West Coast office and take over more creative control of Transformers
and G.I. Joe. They hired me on staff to be a writer producer. So very nice. So building
on that, I have a bit of a background in film. I worked in Los Angeles for a few months,
years ago, but I had, I was more technical, like camera department, but I had some friends
that worked, that were writers for television. And which is, that is more of a sort of a
committee type arrangement when you're writing for sitcoms and that kind of thing. What is
it like writing for animation? Is it the same kind of thing or is it, is it more of a one-man
operation per episode?
It's less than that. You don't have writers rooms, but you still have, we didn't even
call them showrunners, basically story editors. So you still have to, whether you're a freelance
or on staff, you still have to generate premises or episode ideas that you would submit to
a story editor. And hopefully they'll like at least one that you submitted and you'll
get to go ahead to write that. The next step would be writing the outline. Figure premises
maybe a page, page and then the outline would be 10, 12, maybe even 15 pages where you break
down the story scene by scene, act by act. And then once you get to go ahead on that,
then you go to script. So it's less involved. And unlike a live action show, you're not
plotting, we were not plotting out the entire scenes, especially in syndication. And we
ran up against this all the time with GI Joe Transformers. There was no way that it could
be guaranteed that the episodes would run sequentially. So most of the episodes with
the exception of obviously the mini series and maybe a couple episodes that sort of dovetailed
together, they were all standalone episodes. Okay. Yeah. We actually saw a bit of the,
the non-sequential airing, especially during Transformers. There would be episodes that
wouldn't have certain characters that would that had certain characters too early. So
it was all a mishmash. And you kind of, you can kind of figure out how they were supposed
to have aired originally. So that's, that's kind of neat to have that, their perspective.
Oh no, that's that I was done with that part. So go ahead.
The whole reason I thought to ask you about coming on the show was the, was because a
week and a half ago we recorded our episode with of the gambler, which fun episodes. One
of the favorite episodes I remember from childhood even it was, it was really neat because I
like, I like TV shows, movies, stories with characters with a odd moral compass, not,
they're not very, they're not, they're not white nights. They're not very evil. They're
not very, everyone kind of has their own, you know, shades of gray. And so I really
appreciated that. But I have to ask you, because I've heard stories, I believe from another
a panel or something you had done, the name Lord Geikini, the, the basically the kind
of the mob boss. What you, what I've heard is that that came from some friends of yours
at the time, Gary Gygax and Dave Marconi. Can you give us a little background there?
Sure. One of the things that we would love to do is create new names by either changing
the spelling of them. So they still sounded the same or mashing up to me. So at the time
I wrote that episode, Flint was working with Gary Gygax on a series of say guard books
and Gary had rented this huge house on this estate at the top of the hill overlooking
Beverly Hills Hotel. Once upon a time was owned by King Beaver. And it had an old horse
stable that was just converted into a barn where Flint and I would set up these chainmail
games that we play every Sunday night, but also a couple of little rooms for offices.
So I was writing the script up there and David Marconi was a friend of ours. So anyway, yeah,
I just took Geik, Geik, and it's actually pronounced Geikoni.
Oh, okay. Geikoni. So Gary Gygax, David Marconi, Geikoni. Now, what didn't, this was the very
first Transformer episode I ever wrote. So it didn't occur to me that I needed to spell
out phonetically how the name should be pronounced. And somebody on their own decided it was Geikoni.
And also I wasn't on staff yet, so I wasn't supervising the recording sessions as I did
later on. So had I been in the studio with Wally Burr, I would have corrected it. But
yeah, that's the story of Geikoni.
I was going to ask if while you were hanging out with Gary, if you actually got to play
Dungeons and Dragons, but you threw it way back bringing up chainmail. That's pretty
awesome.
Ed and I go back with Dungeons and Dragons quite a bit. So it's really nice to hear that.
Well, I will tell you that the only time in my life I ever played Dungeons and Dragons,
Gary was the Dungeon Master.
That's absolutely amazing. Very cool.
So yeah, actually, one of the most well-known, I guess, tertiary characters in all of Transformers,
the original Transformers show is Devcon. And honestly, it was a really interesting
deviation for the classic dichotomous nature of Autobots and Decepticons being on Earth
or Cybertron. And so that was really nice. It was a nice change thrown in there. And
it kind of built more backstory about what may have happened. Was there an inspiration
for the character?
Well, the truth of the matter is, as I said, it was my first time writing the Transformers.
I had written a Gobots earlier, so I'll give you a little backstory. The story I wrote,
again, I submitted three to six premises. They picked one. But the story editors had
rewritten me enough that I didn't recognize the story. I think the basic premise was there,
but they told it differently. So when I was generating premises for Transformers, and
again, I didn't really get the tree. And so I really struggled coming up with story ideas.
Even though I had read the Bible, I had read a few sample scripts that had already been
written. I watched probably a couple episodes, maybe the first season, it was a meat soup.
I still didn't really get it. I didn't know what I was doing. So to satisfy the number
of premises I needed, the minimum number I needed to spit, I just threw in the same premise
I wrote for the Gobots. And that's the one that bought. So when I was going through the
list of all the characters, and I had this bounty on the character, there were no Transformers
I thought that would fit. So I just created my own Transformers. And nobody told me that
I couldn't. He said it has to be a pre-existing Transformer. So I just made up my own. And
for whatever reason, nobody blinked an eye, not even Hasbro, which kind of surprised me
based on some of the reactions I got from Hasbro once I was on staff, mostly to do with
titles that they would object to. So yeah, and I never, to me, he was just a throwaway
character. I tell that particular story. I was making it up as I went along, because
I just didn't wrap my head around the whole idea of the Transformers. And unbeknownst
to me, he had become a fan favorite. So the very first Transformer full convention that
I had done was last year in Toronto. And the night I arrived, I was informed that Hasbro
has finally come out with a DevCon action figure. Which I was simultaneously thrilled,
but also at the same time thinking, it only took 40 years for Hasbro to acknowledge his
existence. The other thing is, people have asked me, why did he only appear in that one
episode? And I tell people, well, you can blame me, because by the time I was working
at Sunbeam, I was working on the Transforming shows, it never occurred to me to bring him
back.
That's actually funny. We brought up in the episode, we would have watched the Slizzardo
and DevCon buddy action show after that, because they were great characters.
Yeah. And apparently, another writer, and I don't know why I don't remember this, because
I supervised the recording sessions of almost all the shows. Another writer, Bruce Slizzardo,
in another episode. I have no memory of it, but I recently discovered that, oh yeah, I
remember the name of the episode. I think it might have been one written by Paul Davies.
I think it was a season three episode. Yeah.
Oh, he does show up again?
He does, yeah.
Oh, I didn't realize that. So yeah, I don't know if you're, you're probably not familiar
with our show, but the kind of the hook of our show is that Evan is a lifelong Transformers
fan. He knows, he's like an encyclopedia of Transformers. And I know nothing about Transformers.
And so I watch these episodes with a fresh 40 something year old set of eyes here. So
I'm learning this thing as we go along. I was a GI Joe kid when I was growing up. But
you mentioned Hasbro having oversight over the shows. How did that work? Do they mandate
what needed to be pushed in certain episodes?
Yes and no. I periodically would get faxes from Hasbro listing all the new characters
and toys that were, that were coming out and we're going to be hitting a shelf by a certain
date. And they would ask us, maybe even instruct us, start writing episodes, including these
characters, which is how Starscream's Brigade came about. Because when they, when they listed
the combiners, I was the first person, at least in our office, to see this information.
And so the Combaticons and Budapest was the most interesting to me. So I said, well, I'll
write their story and I'll create an origin story because I don't think we were really
doing anything. But mostly, well, and why I brought them up in the first place, it was
also that particular episode where the original title was not Starscream Brigade. It was 30
seconds over Megatron. I was a riff off of the old World War II movie. And Hasbro, you
know, I got another fax saying, no, it sounds too much like a war movie. And my first response
was, have you guys seen the show? But they would not, they would not budge. So I came
up with Starscream Brigade.
They're okay with that, but not 30 seconds. Okay. All right.
I actually, it's kind of interesting though. I was like, one thing I wanted to ask you
about during that episode of Starscream's Brigade, which Ed has not seen yet. So it's
gonna be fun for him. I mean, did you have, was it in the show Bible, they wanted those
characters pre-existing or was that something you just kind of came up with on your own?
And also on top of that, I kind of get the feeling that because of the original title,
you wanted to have the World War II style vehicles being used were really on purpose.
And I don't know if that was, what vehicles that you used were your own purview or if
that was on purpose?
Yeah, no, I chose those. You know, good, bad, or indifferent. Those are ones that I chose.
Yeah. And the whole Guadalcanal thing, that was all me. That wasn't anything at all. I
mean, they had no say in how it would tell the story. They just said, these are new characters.
I had model sheets. I had names. Maybe I had a little sample dialogue, but I'm not sure
about that. And so that's all I had to go on. So everything else I just said, oh, I
can do something with this. And I just knocked out a story.
Nice. Yeah, actually, they've become some of the longest running favorite characters
also in the show, which credit to their, I think their backstory makes them that much
more interesting. And I don't want to give it too much away for Ed before he sees the
episode because I'm going to experience that too.
I think that one's coming up pretty soon too.
Yeah, it is. I can't wait for that. But yes, speaking of that sort of thing though, one
of my other favorite episodes that you worked on is The Killing Jar, which will come up
in season three. Did you have, I don't know if you kind of maybe sort of answered this
already, did you have a predetermined ideal of how the characters would react to each
other or did Hasbro have a say like, we want them to be like this? Because the whole point
of the episode was you put in different characters who may or may not like each other into this
small area and see how they react to each other. And it really was a really good character
building episode for season three. So I mean, did you have a, I guess, guidepost how to
run that or is that all you as well?
All me. Yeah, Hasbro had no saying that whatsoever. And in fact, with that particular one, you'll
notice a share writing credit with a really good friend of mine who since passed away.
But we were samurai brothers and we saw films together, we wrote feature scripts together.
And he had been working at United Artists in the Story Department. And for whatever
reason he found himself unemployed. So I thought I would help him out. Because I was already
getting a salary as a producer on staff, so I was getting script fees on top of it. So
I offered him a chance to write for animation with me and we'd share the credit and the
fee. And if he enjoyed it enough, then he could go out on his own with two or three
scripts as samples and try to get work on himself. I also liked the idea that because
he didn't, he wasn't steeped in transformers or anything like that, that he would be not
restricted on the kind of ideas that he would pitch to me. Now some of them were just too
far out there. But some of them were interesting enough, I said, okay, I know how we can make
this work with this show in this universe. So the killing jar was an idea that started
with him. And then we literally sat together in my office every night, side by side, counting
out the script. Actually, it plays like what I would think classic science fiction, hardcore
science fiction, old Star Trek, the original series kind of premises, those ideas that
it can be in any kind of setting, but the character premises are the same. And the whole
point of the plot is like a universal plot. And I think that's why it played so well.
So yeah, actually, one of the kind of fun things about that episode is Marissa Fairborn
is in that episode, who is in lore, the daughter of Flint and Lady J. Yeah, which is kind of
neat to bring once again, there's these little bridges between GI Joe and transforms and
actually Jim, that link the whole universe together. And I really appreciate that Sun
Doe universe having almost its own continuity at that point. And one of the best things,
one of our most enjoyable episodes we have put out is our one on Cold Slither. I know
that Ed has some questions about that. We had such a good time.
I did. That was one of my favorite episodes when I was a kid. And I hadn't seen it since
I was probably 10 or 11 years old and until last Sunday when we watched it and reviewed
it. And I had an absolute blast that has aged like wine. It was so much fun to watch. But
I've got to know man, who wrote the Cold Slither song? Because that was a gym. That was so
much fun to listen to. That's great. That's off to you. I got a text from my ex wife who
listens to the air every week. She goes, thanks to you, that song is stuck in my head. It
is one of the best worms. Yeah, we had such a good time watching it. It was half of the
episode was like a David Lynch movie. I swear it was the greatest thing to watch. We had
such a good time. Ed, you want to bring in anything else with that?
Yeah. Well, go ahead. Oh, no, that was all I wanted to say about
Cold Slither. I mean, it was like I said, there was just too much going on. That broke
my rating scale. It was so much fun. It was just an absolute blast to watch it. But no,
I know. Go ahead. Go ahead. I was going to say that was another... This happens to me
a lot, even in working in live action, is always my throwaway ideas are the ones that
get chosen. I'll work really hard on five or six ideas that are really well developed.
And then I'll just add one last one. It might be two or three lines and that's the one everyone
says, oh, I like that idea. Let's go with that one. So it was a throwaway idea. It's
basically a pie pie for sport. And I turned the script in and Tom and Joe... Well, if
you don't know already, Sunbow was a division of an advertising agency out of New York called
Griffin Bacall. So Tom Griffin and Joe Bacall were our bosses on everything. And probably
every four to six weeks, they'd be in LA for some business and they'd always drop by the
office. So on this one Friday afternoon, I think it was Joe came into my office and said,
yeah, we like the script of words of song. He said, well, you wrote in the episode that
there was going to be a song. We're not going to pay somebody to write it. Now we were already
doing Jim and I knew that he had contracted songwriters to write all those songs. And
so I went, oh crap, I got to write the song. So over the weekend, fortunately at the time
I was married to a woman who was a songwriter. She specialized mostly in writing English
lyrics for Brazilian songs. Did a lot of work for Sergio Mendes, Manhattan Transfer, a bunch
of songs on Sarah Bond's last album, which was a Brazilian album that Sergio produced.
So I'd run all the lyrics by, and then she wrote the music. I gave her an idea of the
sound I heard in my head. And when we submitted it, then Joe says, well, we don't want to
use your wife's music, because we already have Rob Walsh under contract right now. So
she was not happy about that. But then I had to do the same thing with Rob, is put together
a demo tape, a lot of different music that I heard in my head that I said, this is the
sound I'm looking for. And then he wrote the music, which I thought was perfect. Now, what
a lot of people don't know is that I was deliberately making fun of heavy metal music, because I
was not a fan. I think we both picked up on that. I was in high school in the late 60s.
So that's when I came of age, of all the music that was coming from. And when I first moved
to Southern California, and I'd come up to, before I moved to LA, there were all these
great clubs on Sunset Strip, where the kind of music that I listened to growing up in
Vermont, the actual artists were playing. And then sometime in the mid-80s, all those
clubs became heavy metal bands. And so it was my intention to write a bad heavy metal
song. And I only recently realized that I failed miserably.
Actually, those lyrics are great. Those lyrics are, I mean, you can look at me and say and
tell that on some level I'm into heavy metal music. And I read those lyrics and I was like,
I want to cover this right now. This is so, it's very over the top. And I like that. So
it was very cool. I mean, you may have failed parodying metal, but it definitely works.
It's funny in that way. I think that sometimes the things we lampoon, we try to lampoon the
most actually end up being hits or working really well because you understand it to a
level that you can make fun of it. But once, like you said, you failed miserably. And I
can honestly say that was one of those episodes of Gia Jo when I was younger that of course,
when there's the bad heavy metal being played, my dad would walk in and wonder, what are
you watching? Like, oh no, it's kind of embarrassed. But it worked so well for that. It aged amazingly
well too.
Yeah. And as far as Transformers and Gia Jo, I've been out of the loop for so many years.
So you and most all the other fans know far more about this stuff than I do because my
area of knowledge was limited to just a few years. And it was so long ago, there's a lot
I don't even remember. So I wasn't aware of what kind of following that that particular
episode had until I stumbled on Bandcamp. I saw people doing covers. And then I started
seeing people making t-shirts. And then I find out that people are making custom cold
silver action figures. And so my very first Gia Jo convention was last November in Des
Moines, Iowa, as assembly required. And every year, I think last year was the 12th, they
do a theme. And the theme last year was Dreadknives. Friday night, it was cold slither. So they
made cold silver t-shirts. They made cold silver demo tape. A friend of the organizers
who's a copywriter at an ad agency, big fan, he wrote a couple additional verses, which
were great fit right into the verses that I wrote. And then they recorded a brand new
version. And I mean, it was surreal experience for me because I didn't anticipate it. The
kind of fandom that cold silver is created, but also just being confronted with seeing
cold silver everywhere that I went in the convention. But I had a great time. And when
we were talking on the phone about my coming out, I came down to, I just think it would
be a missed opportunity for both of us if I wasn't there. But I had a great time. And
it kind of inspired me to want to do more conventions in general, but specifically Jo
and Transpo. I've got a couple more lined up this year.
Nice. Very nice.
I just did another transformer a couple weeks ago.
Yeah, TFCon.
And then I'm going to TF Nation in Birmingham, England.
Very nice. Did you have, I'd say input, but did you have any kind of creative input with
the Transformers, the motion picture or the G.I. Joe and their motion picture?
Definitely. I don't remember having any, as far as G.I. Joe goes, I don't remember having
any discussions with Buzz at all. But with the movie, Flint is really big on crowd source.
And so occasionally he would ask us all to come into the conference room, sit around
the table, and just spitball ideas. Basically ask him anything you've ever wanted to see
in a Transformer episode. And he would just pick and choose that stuff. We found something
interesting and he'd put his own spin on it. But that was really the extent of it. I didn't
even, even though I was supervising all the recording sessions for the series, I wasn't
even there for the movie. Which in a way I was kind of grateful for because I certainly
didn't want to be the one to tell Horace and Wells that he was playing the planet.
Okay. Well, I think we're actually running over the time that we agreed on there. We
don't want to keep you too much longer. But I did want to ask though, how does it feel
that people, 40 years after you've written this stuff that are still making costumes
and nerds like us are doing these cultural archaeology podcasts and just delving into
those? I mean, how does that feel after 40 years?
Well, it's a mixture of validation, a little gratitude, but also just kind of overwhelming.
And the number of people who come up to me and tell me how much a particular thing that
I wrote meant to them and got them through a difficult time. When we were doing a panel
at TFCon Los Angeles a week and a half ago, I forget what the question was asked of me.
But I mentioned a particular episode that I had said not many people asked me about
and that was the Burden Artist Bear. I said, for whatever reason, that seemed to resonate
less with people than some of the other episodes I wrote. But this guy made a point of coming
up to me afterward before I even left the day to tell me how important that particular
episode was and it was going through a difficult time and it's kind of heartwarming. But at
the same time, when we're writing these shows, we never imagined anything we were doing would
have any impact on anybody. All we knew was we were doing well in the wait-and-see. And
that was it. Our goal, if you want to call it that, was really to entertain ourselves
and entertain each other. Usually when we pitch a story idea, we start with, wouldn't
it be cool if? We were just making it up as we went along and we did not imagine that
it would sort of become the foundation for generations of stories to follow. We just
assumed once they pull the plug on this, something new and cool will come along and that will
be the new thing and nobody will remember to make that.
I have to say, our generation was essentially the latchkey kids and cartoons and TV shows
were kind of, in a way, they were the babysitters. They were there keeping us company when our
parents were working or whatever happened. In a way, you wrote the entertainment of our
childhood. I can say definitely I appreciate that. Even to the point where I realized when
I was looking at your credits that you wrote for the Bozo Show. From a young age, those
things that were part of my everyday afternoon life. When I was really young and went to
a daycare center, they'd have the Bozo Show on and they'd have G.I. Joe Transformers on
after that. All these kinds of things all intermingled together. It's almost like you
as well as Flint and many others were integral and really kind of building our imaginations
and our creativity from a young age. I can definitely say I appreciate that.
The Bozo Show was kind of an interesting story. Flint and I and all of our friends at the
time, we wanted to write scripts for movies. The big goal and validation was to become
a member of the writer's group. That would really prove we're now part of the club. At
the time we were doing animation, none of the animation studios were signatory to the
writer's skill. We didn't get health benefits. We didn't get the message awards. In fact,
I think the only union that any one who worked in animation studio was with the team. In
some markets, Chicago was one of them, every day on the Bozo the Clown show they ran one
act of G.I. Joe. Because plaster television distributed G.I. Joe and Transformers, well
I guess all the shows move there. They also were the distributors for the Bozo Show. That
was the connection there. So one day I get a fax, a producer on both G.I. Joe and Transformers,
that I have to write dialogue for Bozo to recap the episode, the act you saw yesterday
and tee up the act you're going to see today.
I saw a little bit of that actually. That's great.
And because Larry Harmon, who is the original Bozo, owned the rights to Bozo, Larry Harmon
Productions was signatory to the writer's skill. And that is how I was eligible to join
the writer's skill, which never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would happen for writing
dialogue for Bozo.
That's amazing. That's pretty genius though. That's a great way in.
I definitely want to thank you for coming on here and sharing your stories. These are
things that we only guess at over the years and to hear the stories that you have, it's
priceless to someone like me and many others like us. And even to the point, you're talking
about chain mail with Gary Gygax in a barn, or talking about how you came up with things
for the Bozo Show, the Transformers, all of this is really foundational for our generation.
So with that, I have to say thank you very much for your time. This has been wonderful.
And that is why you prepare everything ahead of time. Ask the guests how long they have
and how long they're willing to give you. And as you can see, Michael Charles Hill,
he's very generous. And I wish I knew him ahead of time over to the buzz while I'm down
the show, but I was so glad he stayed along with us. So keep in tuning to this episode
and hopefully we'll keep entertaining you and learning more about past of the Transformers
in GI Joe. Thanks everyone. Bye.
I thought we were going to go much longer.
I did have, there was stuff that I cut out that I thought we had you for 30 minutes.
I had to do at least a full hour.
By all means, then I will let you continue, Ed. Okay. So I had a question about Space
Adventure Cobra. Okay.
So did you do the English translation for that? Is that correct? Yeah. Okay. When was
that? Because I can't find a solid date. I think there are multiple English versions.
Yeah, there might be. It seems to me, I cannot remember the name of the company that distributed
that. So it would have either been Streamline or it would have been Manga Entertainment.
Streamline. Streamline. That was with Carl Masek, right?
Right. Carl was a friend of mine. I had worked on a show that he was a co-story editor. I
think it might've been Cops. Okay. Loved Cops.
And so I'm guessing I wrote that in 95, 96. Okay. Okay. Because there was a lot of conflicting
stuff about, like the date that I found on it was 82, but I think that was the actual,
the original Japanese version. And then there was a UK version that Manga did around the
same time. And I think it was a different translation or something like that. But I
was a fan of that because there was a, in the early nineties, there was a singer named
Matthew Sweet that used a bunch of clips from that movie in a video that he did prior to
it coming out. Yes. I think I remember that. Yeah.
Great song. Fantastic song. Not heavy metal. Yeah. He was a real sixties pop sounding kind
of guy. And I'm, I'm, I was, I'm still a fan of him to this day. But when I first saw that
video, I was like, like, I was like, what, what movie is this from? I've got to say,
I have to find this. This looks amazing. Cause that was from a weird time when anime was
still, I don't know, it was still kind of underground at that point. It was hard to
find and you know, it wasn't really, you know, there was like, you know, there were a few
things like Robo tech and Carl Masek did a lot of that kind of stuff around then.
But yeah, when it finally came out, I was like, Oh, this is finally the movie from the
Matthew Sweet video. I was real excited. I was real excited when I finally got my hands
on Cobra. Yeah. I think I wrote a few things for Carl for the feature. I know I worked
on another Japanese anime show called the Saber Rider and the Star Shares. Yes. Okay.
Actually, I'm sorry, go ahead. And then I also wrote the pilot episode for Sailor Moon,
the English language version of Deet. But you won't find my name on the credits. They
had, they knew that, that I was capable of doing this kind of work, which is really labor
intensive, but you got to go frame by frame. You have a rough translation of the Japanese
dialogue, but you've got to come up with a version of it that sounds like something that
somebody would say in the same time frame and make sure you hit the box, right? So Deet,
because they're kind of their American French company, they do a lot of their work in Canada.
They had already contracted with Canadian actors and writers to do the Sailor Moon show,
but none of their writers could do it. So they asked me, or they hired me to write the
pilot episode and explain to the Canadian writers how to do this. And they paid me more
money than what their normal rate was, which was never very good to begin with. They said,
but we can't give you credit for it because we've contracted with these Canadian writers.
So even though you wrote the episode, your name is not going to be on it. And I said,
yes, I didn't necessarily at the time needed to be associated with Sailor Moon. That's
not my thing. Just like Jim was not my thing, but I was coerced into writing an episode.
I didn't know until today that the, I've never seen Sailor Moon, but I didn't know until
today that the character's name on that was Usagi because of her pigtails. I had no idea.
But you also worked on a show called a movie called Space Usagi. That was the samurai rabbit
in space. Is that, that was supposed to be a series. And I worked at Mirage studios.
That means the name is the home of Ninja Turtles. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The Kevin Eastman, Peter
player. Is that right? Okay. So initially I was working at DC comics as an editor and
they hired me as a consultant because they, their agreement with Fred Wolf films was that
they got to review every script and make notes. Now, whether Fred actually ever followed those
notes or not, I don't know. Here, Kevin didn't know anything about animation or writing.
So they hired me to be their consultant. So every script that came out of Fred Wolf studio,
they would send to me, I would read it and I'd make my notes based on what Peter and
Kevin told me that they want from there. Less about what they want to see more about what
they didn't. And then I would give the notes to Peter and Kevin and they would review it
and then boom, it was watched by the world. So, and they paid me an obscene amount of
money to do that for a script. And then they had me write a new Bible for the show because
they were big fans of the Batman animated series. And I felt like, oh, that's the turtle
show we want. It's like that. And that ultimately went nowhere. Fred Wolf was not happy about
it because most of the world knew Turtles based on Fred Wolf's animation design. All
the licensing was made for Fred Wolf animation, not Peter and Kevin's original Black and
White. And Fred also was getting a nice percentage of licensing as the creator of the animated
series. But Judy Price, who was running the Juris Department of CBS, finally had a meeting
with her and made my presentation. And she said, you know, right now, she says, I'm only
paying $250,000 per episode for the Teenage Mutant Ninja series. Warner Brothers spends
$500,000 an episode for the Batman series. And we're already the number one rated show.
So why would I want to spend $500,000 to be the number one rated show when I could spend
$250,000 to be the number one rated show? So that went nowhere. They also hired me to
write a Tristramen special that we ended up never doing, but it was based on one of their
original comic books. So anyway, at some point, they decided it would be less expensive to
hire me full time than to pay me as a consultant. And they still offered me a lot more money
than I was making at DC Comics. So I said yes and moved up to Northampton, Mass. So
while I was there, I was under the umbrella of Mirage Studios with Mirage Publishing and
Mirage Licensing. So I had two titles. One was Creative Director for, I think, for License
and then Director of Special Projects, which I think is for the publishing part. So they
had a half dozen in-house artists who were working on either directly on the turtle books
that we were publishing or working on their own titles that Mirage Publishing. So I initially
started out helping them pitch their projects around Southampton with no success. At some
point, I was asked to come up with a lot of develop ideas for future live action turtles
movies, making them A, evergreen and B, international. New Line wasn't interested in the reverse
that I came up with. So then the next, the other thing they wanted me to do was just
come up with new non-turtle projects to pitch to the networks. And the entertainment attorney
for Peter and Kevin really thought the way to go was sci-fi, space stories, but Star
Wars was so huge. So Stan Sakai was already a friend of people and Kevin. So we came up
with this idea of doing space and science, which I think existed a little bit in comic book form.
So Stan and I took some of the characters that already existed in this universe and
then I created some new characters. And we put together this pitch. I got all the artists,
in addition to Stan, inside the studio to ship in and do model design for new characters.
And then working with Fred Wolf, we came up with a three minute promo piece of animation to shop
around town. And so that I think is still available on YouTube, but that's as far as we got
because we ultimately never ended up selling the show. I think we did get maybe a tournament
license on board, but we didn't sell the show because everyone kept saying Bucky O'Hare.
That's exactly what I was about to say. It's real close to Bucky O'Hare, which I liked also,
but around that time when that came out, I was a massive fan of independent comics. And I love
Sakai's stuff. It was something about the way the stories were. I don't know if you ever read those,
the original Usagi books, but the stories were real down to earth, period accurate samurai dramas
that just happened to be, everyone just happened to be drawn like a rhinoceros or a bunny or
something like that. I thought they were great. How was Stan to work with?
Well, Stan and I already knew each other from animation days, but Stan is, he's just a wonderful,
beautiful person and I love working with him.
Nice.
Well, I kind of wanted to kind of go back a second though with the Sunbeau stuff. I know you said,
obviously at the time it was a lot of throwaway episodes, the characters and whatnot, but there
was a fun theme that joined Colt Slyther and the gambler together. And this is all about working
with, I guess, almost like a mob boss. In Colt Slyther, there was a very, it's a little person in a
back of a CD, Bill Yersole or like, let me see if I can get this right, Lord Guy Connie. Yes.
They were both, basically like, they would give them, we'll give you a loan at a very horrible
interest rate. Were there any other elements you liked to include with your episodes that you did
between Jem, G.I. Joe, Transformers?
You know, if there is, I probably do not remember them. I mean, it seemed like most of the time,
well, probably not fair to say I was making it up as I went along, because obviously before I
could get to the script stage, I had to plot out everything in the outfits. So I knew what I was
going to be writing before. But maybe any influences I had, one conversation that Flint and I used to
have a lot was the kind of backgrounds that we brought to the table. So just with Sunbeau alone,
we had Steve Gerber who had a comic book background. So he kind of brought that to the movie.
Flint was more of a games guy, so he brought that to, and I was a film guy, so I brought that.
So, you know, it's something as simple as, you know, the titles for my episodes. You know, my first
idea would always be based on a pre-existing film type or a twist on a pre-existing film,
like 30 Seconds of a Megatron, or, well, The Gambler had nothing to do with a few films.
Forget the Kenny Rogers film. It was a James Conn film called Gambler.
I think it might have come out before I wrote it. And the one gem episode I wrote was called Out of the Packs,
one of my favorite film writers, even though it has nothing to do with that.
But because I'm visually oriented, you know, I just have a stockpile of film images in my head.
So maybe, you know, I draw from that more than most people might with their
hardwired to a different kind of background.
It makes a lot of sense with your background. All right. Well, as we are in an hour here,
let's go here. I appreciate all your time and the very generous with your time.
Like I told you before, you and many of the writers were instrumental in our development
as creative people in our own right. So we appreciate that immensely.
And where are you? What would your next conventions coming up on? Let people who listen know that.
I'm scheduled to do a one day event at SoCal JoeFest in Temecula, California on,
I think it's May 19th. And then JoeFest in Georgia, June 21st, 22nd, 23rd, somewhere around.
It's a weekend. I don't remember the specific date.
Where in Georgia is that? That's not far from us at all.
Yeah, I'm in Auburn.
Good question.
Augustans? Okay.
Augustans. Then also in June, I'm doing a one day event here in LA called Robo ToyFest.
In August, I will be in Birmingham, England for Transformation. And then in November,
I'll be back in Des Moines for Assembly Require. Excellent. I'm glad you're finally seeing what an
impact you had on a lot of people. And what may have just been something to do and something you're
trying to do as a job back then, impact a lot of people. So I'm glad you feel that validation.
Yeah, again, I was just completely out of the loop for so many years. And also,
while I was doing Transformation, I never read the comics, because I didn't want to be influenced
by their storylines, even subconsciously. And I also found out they never watched the episodes.
So after I left Sunbeam, my tour of duty was done. I just went on and did other things and never
really... I didn't run away from it. I was embarrassed about the work. It was just a job
I had a certain era in my life. And I went on to other things and I didn't... I didn't
look back on it. There was nobody in sort of my life that was interested in... If I had casually
mentioned, I had worked on these shows. Really? So it just became a subject. And I wasn't paying
attention to all of that. And I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just... I was just
a subject. And I wasn't paying attention to all these conventions that were there. So yeah, I'm
still relatively new to it. But it's kind of cool. Yeah. 40th anniversary of Transformers this year.
It's been a franchise that's really stood the test of time. And I know no small part from you as
well in there because a lot of the episodes you wrote are big favorites of mine and many others.
So I'm glad of that. So I hope you have a wonderful day there. And I'm going to let you
get on with your day. So thanks so much for being here today. And Ed, if you want to say
anything here too? I got nothing. No, just thanks for your time. That was amazing. Yeah,
you had a great time just talking there. Great. Well, before we go, I just want to make sure
was there any questions you didn't get to ask that you're... Honestly, I went beyond what I had
ready for you. Same. Same. Yeah. I mean, is there anything else that you want to plug? Do you have
any other projects or anything that you want to promote or anything while we got you?
I am working on this sort of right now secret project for an upcoming convention. But
I don't feel... I'm not sure I can talk about it yet, but that's really about it.
Okay. Perfect. Hopefully that works out well for you then. And you have a wonderful day and
thank you so much for being here today. All right. Thank you. All right. Bye.