Site created 12/15/97.	page created: 6/4/07 Back to Page One (Continued) Bill: It seems like the current DVD audience in general just isn't plugging into the idea of guide books in quite the same way that, for example, our generation did - those of us who grew up in the Eighties. I guess all of us are in our late thirties or forties… Andy: Right. And the reason why is because DVD is an electronic medium, the Internet is an electronic medium. So they're getting the same type of information, they're just getting it on websites instead. Bill: And it's much more up to date and immediate. Andy: Correct. Todd: I also think the DVD moniker is a killer. Probably the secret is to release a book that is not about DVD, and then just have all your entries 'DVD available'. Andy: Yeah. The problem I saw with that was that there were lots of guides to animation in general available. And it just sounds boring. Whereas Animation on DVD: The Ultimate Guide! You know? And I had a forward by Mark Hamill, and Harry Knowles wrote the cover copy. It was supposed to be all jazzy and cool. But the good thing that it did was that BCI/Eclipse, who had one whole animated DVD reviewed in the book, remembered me. And when they were starting to work on the He-Man DVDs, they called me up and asked me to come in and consult with them on the discs. Bill: BCI/Eclipse having obtained the rights to nearly all of the Filmmation titles… Andy: Well, at that point they only had He-Man. They actually called me before they got He-Man, because they were looking for titles, and then when they got He-Man, they brought me in to consult on that. They were going to be doing sixteen DVD releases, but they didn't know what they were going to do until both myself and Val Staples, who runs He-Man.org, went in and talked to them. As an interesting side note, Val had edited me on a Dragon's Lair comic the year prior. So we had actually worked together on that. So we came in and we had this meeting with the company, and basically they said, "We want to put out the ultimate fan favorite DVD. We want something that says our company pays attention to what people want." They had done a lot of, shall we say lower end horror movies that you've never heard of in a box set for $4.99 type things. And they were trying to kind of bump themselves up out of that arena. They wanted to become a force to be reckoned with in this genre. So they felt that the best way to do that was to bring in people who know what the fans wanted. With my history in all these different arenas of fandom and the professional work I'd done, they felt it was a nice fit. And Val they brought in because he was the direct connection to the He-Man community. Bill: And this isn't something that was widely being done at the time. Todd, wasn't there one other TV show that was released on DVD with the involvement of the fans? Todd: Freaks and Geeks. But I can't think of any other titles that had that much fan involvement before that. Maybe Fox's Rocky Horror Picture Show, but there's not many. Bill: Especially considering that He-Man is the sort of title that, had any other company or studio released it, it would have just been dumped out on disc with very few extras. Andy: Yeah, that's right. When we were sitting in the meeting, Van and I both were trying to figure out what we could do. Val wondered what we could do in terms of the specific He-Man aspects of the project, and I was trying to look at it in more of an overall picture and say, "How can we make this appeal outside of the He-Man community? How can we make people look at these DVD sets an think, you know… I kind of like He-Man, but these discs just look so cool that I've just got to buy them?" Todd: You get Bruce Timm to do the cover! Andy: (laughs) Well, we did get Bruce Timm involved. I'll tell you about that in a minute. So we were throwing out ideas, and we thought, "Well, let's do a series of documentaries. Let's do commentaries. Let's do side by side storyboard comparisons." You know, can we do all the things that they would do for a Criterion edition or a Disney Platinum title? Can we do all that, but do it with an Eighties cartoon that's twenty-something years old? Now, what we found once BCI picked up the entire Filmmation license and have continued to do that, is that Filmmation as a catalog has been sold and resold to companies both in America and overseas. Todd: In other words, the elements are a mess. Andy: Most of the elements don't even exist any longer. Hallmark, when they owned it, digitized all the episodes - at least the material that they wanted to keep and to syndicate - and then threw everything away. Destroyed it all. Bill: Ouch. Andy: Yeah. And so you have things like, on the Isis series which we're working on, Hallmark felt that the morals that were at the end of it were not necessary. So they destroyed the morals. Todd: You've got to love those forward thinkers. Andy: That's Hallmark destroying the moral fabric of our DVD society. (all laugh) So beyond the fact that the materials aren't there, when dealing with the people who were involved, twenty or thirty years ago is a long time. One of the directors, Gwen Wetzler, said to me during one of the interviews, "I've directed fourteen hundred animated half-hours, and I don't remember these specific twelve episodes at all." For her that was thirty years ago. So it was tough. Andy Mangels, Bruce Timm, Lou Scheimer, and Paul DIni at SDCC July 2005. But with He-Man, we decided that we were going to do sixteen half-hour documentaries. We would just kind of shoot everything we could out there. We were also going to do comic art postcards, and we did get Bruce Timm to do one of those. Bruce Timm, Alex Ross, Adam Hughes - we had some major names doing these cards. At the time I accepted the offer to do these, I had never directed a documentary before, I had never scripted a documentary before, I had never directed any kind of a film before. None of that. And there have been people who have rightly asked, "Well, what makes you the proper person to do this?" Interestingly, what makes me the right person is not my experience behind the camera, it's my experience behind the keyboard. I've been doing interviews now for over twenty years. I know how to interview somebody, whether it's on camera or on the phone. I know how to do an interview. I know how to put an article together from quotes and how to have a narrative thread and make it make sense. None of that is significantly different from the type of script you do for a documentary. Bill: And the production aspect of it is simply a matter of bringing in the right talent to shoot it, to edit it… Andy: Correct. There's certainly been a learning curve for me, and there are certainly things that I've learned that I didn't know when I started this, but at the same time, it's been my experience as a writer and a reporter for so long in the comic/science fiction/Hollywood world that's made a great person for this. And now I've done forty some documentaries and countless commentary tracks and all of that. (laughs) Now I'm an old hack. Todd: How many titles in all have you done with BCI since then? Andy: Wow, I'd have to go back and count. I think there's twenty-some out right now, and by the time I'm done with all this it will be well over thirty. Bill: So you're still working on a lot of it. Andy: Yeah. My contract ends in August for the Filmmation library. I think there's eleven or twelve sets left that haven't been announced yet. Actual work-wise, I think I've got nine more to do. So yeah, I've been… (laughs)… it's a lot of work. The duties that I do as the DVD special features producer have changed from when I started with He-Man to now. I'm much more heavily involved with some of these projects. Val Staples is still on as a consultant, and some of his team - Emiliano Santalucia, who does all the artwork for the packages, is in Italy. James Eatock who, if I don't write the booklet often times he does - he's in England. But by and large, I am deciding what goes into these special features, how it's going to be used. And then BCI tells me whether or not we can do it based on the budget. The documentary film crew (minus Reed Kaplan) - Paul Smalley, Andy Mangels, Vreje Bakalian, Jenny Akbar, Tom Suzuki with Lou Scheimer, at Burbank filming Spring 2006. Todd: Take us through the thinking in terms of coordinating some of these features. You get the contract to do a title… what do you do next? Andy: Well, when we were working on He-Man… there's been two parts of this project. There's been He-Man, and then there's been the rest of the Filmmation library. When we were working on He-Man, we did three total film shoots, where it was my job to find the people to interview, then to schedule everybody to be interviewed - the time, the place… Bill: So you did all the logistics stuff. Andy: (laughs) Yeah. Producer in this case is, you know… not like a Hollywood producer. I was involved in every aspect. I had to track down people. I had to negotiate with them. "What do you want to appear? What day can you come in?" I had to make sure they wore the proper thing or didn't wear something that wouldn't work on camera. A lot of that type of work goes into getting the interviews. And it's much the same type of thing for commentary tracks. A couple of things that made this project unique from say, a live-action feature film or a television series, is that in animation the various departments involved don't generally meet each other. The writers don't generally meet the storyboard artists, who don't generally meet the animators, who don't generally meet the voice actors. There might be some interaction with them, but for instance when we did the He-Man and She-Ra movie, we got everybody in a room together - and I had one of the directors, the producer, a storyboard artist, a writer, Alan Oppenheimer who was the voice of Skeletor, and a couple other people - and most of them had never met! Todd: Wow. Andy: Or if they had, it was just in the hallway briefly twenty or thirty years ago. Todd: So getting them all talking is a challenge, I'll bet. Andy: Exactly. There's been some question from some of the fans as to why our commentary tracks have me as the host. Beyond the whole issue of just getting people talking, when you have a bunch of people talking who worked on the same project but have never been in the same room together, you have to overcome that lack of a comfort level with each other. The lack of history. And given the passage of time, you may need to prompt them to recall a memory. Then there are people who like to talk more, and others who will introduce themselves but sit there silent the whole rest of the time. Bill: There's also a tendency too for people in commentary sessions to just sit there and watch the program and get wrapped up in the story rather than talk about it. Andy: Yeah, there was definitely some of that happening too. Things would go silent for a moment, and I'd be looking up a question, and someone would say, "Wow, I really haven't seen this for twenty-five years!" So there's all sorts of elements to putting these things together that the public doesn't know about. And when you're dealing with an animated project, it just gets even weirder. Mangels interviews writer J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) about He-Man, Burbank Spring 2005. Todd: Has there been other criticism from fans about the special features? Andy: A few people have asked why we don't have more of the voice actors involved. There are a few of our properties that we've been able to get the voice actors in - Defenders of the Earth for instance, we got two of them to come in. For Legend of Prince Valiant we got one. On Bravestar we've got one. And for the She-Ra movie we've gotten Alan Oppenheimer again to come in. But… this is a weird thing for fans to hear, because they tend to identify with the voice actors most closely. If you think of She-Ra or you think of any cartoon character, you think of what they look like and what they sound like. But the truth is that most voice actors have very little to do with the creation of those cartoons. They have a lot to do with what the end result is and what the public sees, but they have very little to do with the actual production process. They may come in and record their lines for three or four episodes over the course of a day or two, sometimes completely out of order, usually one person at a time. It's rare that you get more than one voice actor in a recording session together. They often have no idea what their characters are doing, why they're saying the lines they're saying. The director might say, "Okay, a helicopter is about to drop on your head. Now give me a scream." And so they'll scream. But they wouldn't know what kind of scream to do if the director didn't tell them. It's very different than a live-action actor, who is reacting to the other actors and to things that are real on the set… Todd: Unless you're working for George Lucas. Andy: Yes. (laughs) Except for George Lucas. Right. I guess things are changing more these days even for live action actors. Bill: I also wonder if it isn't… you know today on a major animated film, someone like Robins Williams will come in to do the voice for, say a Disney character, and the animators will draw some of the performance of the character from the mannerisms and expressions of Williams as he was recording the lines. Then you look at someone like Peter Fernandez, who in addition to providing the voices of a lot of the characters, actually translated and produced the English versions of Speed Racer back in the day. But that's really rare in animation, isn't it? Andy: It's very rare, especially back in the Seventies and Eighties. It wasn't at all common then. Plus, they were producing… in one season Filmmation was producing six half-hour shows for the networks for Saturday morning each week. That's an insane volume of work for a small studio to have been producing. And they used almost all the same voice actors for a lot of their shows. So they were really just kind of pushing things through. I'm not saying that they weren't quality voice actors, but I'm saying that when you interview a voice actor, you're going to get then talking about their job and what the recording sessions were like, but they can't tell you anything about what the motivations of the characters were. Odds are, if you put a gun to their head, they couldn't tell you what color their character's hair was. They just don't know these things. It's not their job. Their job is just to give a voice to something that three hundred other people are giving life to - the writers, the storyboard artists, the inkers, the painters and so on. So what happened with the DVDs is that I utilized, in my commentaries and documentaries, a lot of the people who worked in the trenches. The artists more so than the voice actors. And I've gotten a little bit of criticism for that. But at the same time, I've got to tell you that you're going to get much better stories - the people in the trenches have a lot more interesting things to say usually than the actors do. On to Page Three
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