The Digital Bits presents... By the Power of Mangels!!

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(Continued) Todd: I would imagine that they also have a lot more material that they've kept over the years up in the attic - scripts and drawings and stuff that you can use. Andy: Oh yeah. That becomes very helpful too, because when you interview people and put them up on screen, they're more likely to give you the seven boxes of things that they've got in the garage. I found even on the live action shows that we did that a little bit. For example, I called up the P.A. from Ark II. He was on Ark II and Isis, and he was a production assistant and then an assistant director, and then they eventually let him direct an episode of Ark II. Well, it turns out that he's now one of the producers on My Name is Earl… (all laugh) so, I mean he's on a big hit show now, but he came in to do an interview for these DVDs. To kind of say, "Hey, this is where I got my start." And the interesting thing is that the A.D.s and the P.A.s are the guys who know where all the bodies are buried! They had to deal with everything and everybody, so if you want to hear the best stories about any TV show or movie, you find the P.A.s and A.D.s! (laughs) They know everything. Bill: All right, hang on a minute. I'm just still boggled by the idea that you tracked down and interviewed a P.A. from Ark II. (all laugh) That's just insane to me. It's awesome sure, but it's not the kind of thing that a lot of people would think to do, especially not for the DVD release of a fifteen-episode Saturday morning kids show from the Seventies. Maybe for Kingdom of Heaven, but Ark II? Nah-uh. Andy: (laughing) Well, part of it is necessity. When you're working on shows this old, and at the time the people working on them were in the thirties or forties, many of them are not around anymore today. So sadly, a lot of the people who worked at Filmmation back in the day have passed on. What that means is that you try to look for the people who were younger - you look for the assistants rather than the key people. It's also been rewarding on the live action titles to try and track down some of the actors. The detective work of that, without any formal training, is a real challenge. One of the funniest instances was when I found out that the casting director of Hero High and Shazam! is now the casting director for one of the major daytime soap operas. So I called her, and not only did she find all the old casting sheets from that time period and fax them all to me, but she also was able to find contact information for half a dozen people. That's the kind of dedication you have to have. You know, if we'd put out the Ark II DVD without any kind of cast interviews, I would have been really disappointed as a fan myself. But you can't interview the monkey and he's long gone anyway. One of the three stars is also gone. So we busted our hump to find at least one of the other two actors. On Space Academy and Jason of Star Command we did the same thing. On Jason, we got two of the main actors. We actually got Sid Haig, who's now more famous for House of 1000 Corpses… Space Academy's Brian Tochi, Jason of Star Command's Craig Littler, Jay Scheimer, Lou Scheimer, and Hero High's Johnny Venokur and John Berwick with Andy Mangels, at Burbank filming Spring 2006. Bill: Oh my god… Sid Haig was Drago! Andy: (laughs) Yeah. And the other guy, Craig Littler - who played Jason - is now the Gorton Fisherman. Todd: You're kidding? That is so great. Andy: And he was one of the hardest people to get to. You'd think that you could just go through Gorton, or that he'd be listed with SAG, but it was more complicated than that. Todd: Of all the special features that you've done, do you have a particular favorite? Andy: I think that some of the best work that I've gotten to do has actually come on some of the live action shows. Well… let me skip back a bit. There's a documentary that we did called The Magic of Filmmation, and it was the tenth He-Man documentary, but we've since reused it on many of the other animated discs because it was basically the history of Filmmation Studios. It has I think thirty-five people interviewed in it. It's a really concise, good history about the what and how and why the studio worked, and the people involved in making it happen. It's a great half-hour piece and I'm proud of that.
I think our best overall DVD set that we've worked on is clearly the Dungeons and Dragons set, which was actually licensed from Disney. Disney didn't want to release it, so we licensed it out from them. And it frustrates me that the mainstream media, such as Entertainment Weekly and so forth, are not even looking at the type of work that we're doing on that kind of material. They're all focusing on the much bigger shows. But we are trying so hard to put out a product that is going to make the fans extremely happy. We want them to feel like if they parted with forty bucks, they've gotten a hundred bucks worth of extras. Bill: Well, everybody has a favorite title like this, but they're all such niche titles. It's extremely rare that anybody goes to that kind of trouble for them. Andy: My goal when we started this was to try to out-Disney Disney. I wanted each of these titles to be as good as a Disney box set. And when you consider what we had to work with - you know if you compare this to Thundercats or Transformers or something like that, on Thundercats they put a twelve-minute featurette with Wil Wheaton on there, about how much he loved Thundercats. I like Wil Wheaton, but you know. And that was it!
Todd: Yeah, but they had fake fur on the cover. Andy: (laughs) Right. But we wanted to do a lot more than that. You know, one of my favorite moments working on He-Man, was when we did a documentary called The Fans of He-Man. So we did a half-hour with - well, we did try and get Seth Green, because he uses He-Man figures on Robot Chicken all the time, but he told us no. He wasn't interested. But one of the coolest moments of The Fans of He-Man was, there was a guy by the name of Josh who had gone blind as a kid - as like a six-year-old or something. But one of his last memories of sight was of watching He-Man. And at the time, Alan Oppenheimer and John Erwin - who were the voices of Skeletor and He-Man - had recorded a message for him that they sent him over the telephone and sent him an audiotape of. Josh is now an adult with his own children, but this was a huge thing for him. He's a huge He-Man fan. So we brought him in as an interviewee. Well, what he didn't know was that Lou Scheimer was sitting there during his entire interview. So he's talking about how important He-Man was to him in his life, and how it really gave him hope, and how much that recording meant to him, and how much he appreciated the moral messages of Filmmation cartoons in general, and how he was now showing them to his own kids… and right at the very end we asked him to sum up his feelings about Lou Scheimer. And Josh says, "Well, I've never met him, but…" and he goes into his answer. And then Lou steps in front of the camera, so you can actually see him standing there behind Josh as he's talking, and says, "Hi, I'm Orko!" which was the character that Lou voiced on the show. And the look of astonishment on Josh's face as he realized that one of his heroes was right there was amazing. Everyone in the room - we were all crying. (laughs) It was just such a neat thing to be able to make happen. And it was one of those things that made me really feel good about working on these projects, beyond the paycheck and the notoriety and just the opportunity to work on such great material. For that one moment, I got to make somebody's dream come true. I got to be Oprah for a day. (all laugh) Bill: Again, it's that kind of effort that's lacking on some many of these other similar titles from other companies. Look at Lionsgate. They had Speed Racer… Speed Racer for god's sake… and they did almost nothing with it. Todd: Except for creating packaging that they thought was the coolest thing ever, which nobody else cared about. Andy: Oh god, the rubber tire cover? Bill: And the tin steering wheel case, and the cardboard cover that played music and lit up when you opened it… until the batteries died a few months later. Yeah. Todd: Then there's that Complete Harveytoons set that came out last year, that was just ripe for thoughtful examination like the Warner Looney Tunes Golden sets, but it was just garbage. Andy: Yeah. It's a shame. The frustrating thing is that as we come to the end of the Filmmation project, we've been a little bit of a victim of our own success, you know? We've got so many titles out there now that there's a little bit of a slowdown in terms of sales, as people pick and choose which titles to buy now and which to buy later. And that's impacted the budget on later titles. But really, some of the stuff we're working on now… I just did the quality control on the Jason of Star Command set. And it's going to be a killer set. And we did Journey Back to Oz, which was a feature film with Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland's daughter, playing Dorothy, and it just kind of disappeared. Nobody knew that it got released. And yet it's the coolest DVD set for nine dollars that you could ever buy. It's so crammed full of cool special features. And for an Oz fan in particular, it's more than they could have ever hoped for. We put more on that single disc than Warner has put on some of their special editions. So we're really trying, but there's a bit of melancholy to it all as well. Fred Ladd, Hal Sutherland, Lou Scheimer, and Irv Kaplan record the Journey Back to Oz commentary track, at Burbank Spring 2006. Todd: Part of the problem is that there are just so many titles being released right now… especially TV DVDs. It's hard for any one title to stand out in the crowd. Bill: Yeah, there's a marketing challenge there too. Is a store with limited shelf space going to stock Lost or Journey Back to Oz? Andy: It is a problem. People of my age… my advanced age of forty… (laughs) Bill: You're preaching to the choir there. Todd: Yeah, you're definitely among friends right now. Andy: People like us who remember these shows from when they were kids. We… I have yet to go into a store and find Ark II or Space Academy on the shelves. I have not seen a copy in any store ever. And that's frustrating, because I know that if it was on the shelf, it would sell. People would find it. I did a convention appearance a couple weeks ago, and I had a lot of these titles sitting out on my table, and people were falling over themselves asking if they could buy them. That had no idea that this stuff had even been released on DVD! They were astonished. And these were fans. This was stuff they never thought they would see again. Todd: Part of the problem is that a lot of the people our age who are fans of these shows, if they're busy raising children of their own and they're involved in their careers, they're not as tapped in as maybe the younger, more Internet savvy kids are, who may have no idea what Ark II is. It's a harder audience to reach in some ways. The challenge is figuring out how to make these people aware that their childhood is on DVD. Andy: There's where I think the entertainment media is failing a little bit. TV Guide did an interview with us about it, and they reviewed one She-Ra volume, but that was it. Why aren't some of the other magazines covering this more? There's more cool vintage DVD releases out there now than ever before, but we're going to have yet another interview with Katie Sackhoff from the new Battlestar Galactica instead? Bill: I think it's all part of the problem with media in general these days. There's just so many more choices now than at any time in the past. There's more cable and satellite TV channels, and thousands of websites, and more magazines, and more DVD releases. The audience has been fragmented into smaller and smaller chunks, and they're harder to find and connect with. Andy: That's definitely true. But I think if the word were just out there, there's a whole audience that would just go, "Oh, my god!" Bill: Well, I remember when we had you down to our DVD producers panel at Comic-Con last summer for The Digital Bits, when you started putting the cover art for all these DVD releases up on the screen… Todd: The audience freaked out. Bill: Yeah, people really responded. The Digital Bits' DVD Producers panel at SDCC July 2006 (Andy's third from the right). Andy: That was immense fun. I was really glad to be asked to participate, first of all. And the cool thing for me was that I was on there with the guys who had done Superman and the Alien box set and that sort of thing - titles that I'm really excited by - and then when I put up my stuff, they were just as excited about Groovy Goolies! (laughs) Bill: You got one of the biggest fan reactions of anyone. Andy: And it was just so cool to talk with other people who are doing the same kind of thing I am, on all these bigger films. Todd: Well, that's definitely part of the reason we wanted to talk with you again. Because these titles you're doing - maybe they aren't as timely, but the impact is the same. This is, you know… this is our childhood. It's important. It's the stuff that made us fans in the first place. It's why the three of us are sitting here talking about DVDs and films and TV shows now thirty years later. Bill: So before we wrap, do you have a dream DVD project that you'd like to do? Something that you'd love to be involved in after you finish all the Filmmation work for BCI/Eclipse? If you could just pick anything? Andy: Well… people who know me or who visit my website will know that I'm a huge Wonder Woman fan. I'm one of the world's top Wonder Woman collectors. I actually also run the Wonder Woman Museum website online. Todd: Oh, I'm well aware. Bill: (laughs) Todd's a big fan of the character himself. Andy: So a dream job would be to be put in charge of the Wonder Woman TV series DVDs. Like a mega-box set edition. I know it's already been released on DVD, but I'd love to be involved in releasing a set that has all the extras that I think should have been on there. I doubt I'll get to do that, but who knows down the road? After August, I'm up for grabs. Any DVD company that wants me can easily find me. (laughs) Bill: Through AndyMangels.com, yes? Andy: Yep. Hey, you know… they're doing the new Wonder Woman movie. Maybe they'll need an outside consultant. Todd: That'd be kinda cool, wouldn't it? Andy: Yeah. Someone said to me the other day, "Hey, you're a big geek, aren't you?" To which I replied, "Yeah, but I get paid to be a geek." (all laugh) Todd: It's nice work if you can get it. Bill: Well… that's why they named the magazine Geek. I mean, come on - have you guys seen Jeff Bond's office? (laughs) Todd: Thanks a thousand times for talking to us, Andy. And for all your great DVD work this past year as well. Andy: That means a lot. Thank you both. It's been a pleasure as always, guys. ---END--- Special thanks again to Andy for his time (for the Tucker!) and for all of the great DVD special edition work he's done with the Filmmation library. Be sure to visit his website at AndyMangels.com.