Have you ever messed up so bad that someone named the foul-up after you?\u00a0 Well, it certainly happened in anime.<\/p>\n
Anime started picking up in Japan in the 90’s.\u00a0 The quality had been going up and up; and many considered the 90’s the ‘golden age’ of anime.\u00a0 However, with so many studios opening something of a bubble started to form in which it was difficult to find good animators.\u00a0 Schedules were as tight as the fiercely fought for advertising dollars.<\/p>\n
Now say you are an anime studio in this competitive environment and you’re spinning off a new series called Lost Universe after working on a very successful series called Slayers.\u00a0 Good right?\u00a0 You have plenty of work now that you’re right at the beginning of airing and creating this regular TV show.\u00a0 But now, right around episode 3 – in the middle of crunch mode – a fire breaks out and destroys most of your work. The show must go on – so what happens?\u00a0 You contract off the work to anyone with a spare pencil and ink.\u00a0 In this case, a Korean company. But you don’t even have enough character sketches or time to really educate the company about what is supposed to happen in the episode.\u00a0 In fact, they mix up the characters from one scene to another.\u00a0 Still images stay onscreen for up to 15 seconds because you didn’t have enough time to make the moving versions. \u00a0 It was so bad that the company actually had to pull the episode and re-do it for the DVD version after the one and only airing of the episode.\u00a0 Unfortunately, the rest of the series never really recovers and wallows in a low-quality quagmire that dooms the series to infamy.<\/p>\n
Here’s Lost Universe’s episode 4 – titled Yashigani – which demonstrates just how bad things can get (see especially the amazing smooth motion at 3:20 for example).\u00a0 This clip shows the original along with the re-done version side by side so you can see how bad it got.<\/p>\n