Merchandising & Rights

Was it that different from what had gone before? There was no shortage of Gunbuster or Nadia merchandising, and General Products did a lot of merchandising for other series.

Yes, it was different because, to the best of my current knowledge, Gainax owns a piece of Evangelion, and that was the first time that happened. As I recall, all of Gainax’s work prior to Eva, at least, was strictly work-for-hire. Hence, Gainax has had that much more incentive to merchandise Eva in any and every way it can, and to keep doing so. Eva has been licensed for use in pachinko slot machines in recent years, among many other properties from many other sources, to cite just one example. I haven’t been paying attention, but if any other titles that Gainax has worked on have been so treated, I’m not aware of it. And then there was the theatrical revival of Eva a few years back, which is also unique to the best of my current knowledge.

I did not know that. I remember watching Eva the first time and thinking, ‘geez, how much did Yebisu pay these guys for this product placement⁷?’

Yes, Anno modified the brand name on the cans slightly for broadcast, but changed it back in the video release. And I saw Anno and these Ebisu sales-guys sitting in Gainax’s conference room, watching the episode in question and drinking that particular brand of beer. If Gainax or Anno got any other compensation, I’m not aware of it.

That makes sense… I’m not sure Gainax sold the rights to all the previous stuff -

You’ve got it ass-backwards. To the best of my current knowledge, Gainax could not have sold any of the things it worked on prior to Eva, because it never owned any of them in the first place. The companies that put up the money to make those shows own them.

- Gunbuster, Nadia, and Wings of Honneamise I know were owned by Bandai or someone else -

Bandai bankrolled and owns Top o Nerae! and Royal Space Force, and probably Top o Nerae! 2 (Diebuster) for all I know or care, NHK brought Nadia to Gainax to produce, with assistance from Toho. As an aside, Toho then proceeded to overreach in its assertion of foreign distribution rights, as it had previously done with Macross: Ai-Oboeteimasuka. A dispute over just such rights between Big West and Toho prevented AnimEigo from getting that movie when Toho’s original international rights agreement lapsed. Instead of burning a single development house, Toho got in the bad graces of NHK, in effect, the Japanese Government, with Nadia.

- as well as the obscure stuff like Blazing Transfer Student (which was pretty funny, I thought) or Money Wars, but even Otaku no Video? Then again, I can’t imagine there being much money in merchandising ONV. Certainly nothing like NGE, where they could publish that entire E-Mono book listing Eva merchandise!

Toshiba EMI put up the money for Honoo no Tenkosei and Otaku no Video, first through a subsidiary called Toshiba Video Softwares, then through Youmex when it dissolved the former unit. So like I said, yes, Gainax has incentive to try to milk Eva for all it can get, because it’s the first Gainax production that Gainax has a stake in.

From an excerpt of a 1996_28ya discussion between Hideaki Anno and SF critic/translator Nozomi Omori:

Anno: “Even if I received complaints from the perspective of Westerners about the equation of [the terms] ‘apostle’ and ‘angel’, I don’t think it would make any difference [to me?]. Well, there is a single American in our company, and he scolded me about various things. ‘You can’t do this.’ As I had expected. But I did those things [anyway], I think, without taking any notice of that.”

There’s your answer.

Right around the time when I started at Gainax, around April 1995_29ya, when Eva had started production on the first 4 episodes or so (and was already behind schedule), I vaguely recollect bringing up what seemed to me to be a question of word choices and meanings in this regard, as I understood them as a budding translator at the time. I’m an atheist, and didn’t attach any more significance to this beyond that. I don’t think Anno did either; as these remarks signify, it was artistic license, as with just about all the other terminology thrown around in the series, whether pseudo-theological, pseudo-technological, pseudo-eschatological, pseudo-psychological, or whatever else. I think these obscured what the thing was about. But I digress…

What was the thing about?

To paraphrase a Japanese essayist with whom I was acquainted at the time: it was about the inside of Shinji’s (and by extension, Anno’s) head.

Censorship

The rumors have always said there was censorship. I have never managed to track this claim down to anything more reliable than a 1996_28ya Protoculture Addicts editorial attributing the PTA and TV Tokyo censorship to “someone who worked on EVANGELION”, which is really frustrating.

This is news to me. The series’ first-run ratings increased the more dysfunctional it got, especially starting around episode 14, as I recall. The last episode was the only one to break double-digit ratings, which was a big deal for TV Tokyo. And they re-ran the series at least once that I can remember. So there might have been some complaints (and there are grounds, I think, but because it’s not that good, not cause for censorship), but I don’t remember any being part of the phenomenon at the time, which was dire enough as it was without any such talk. But I digress again. I have doubts about such censorship stories. I expect it had more to do with Anno realizing by the midpoint of production that the characters he’d created couldn’t bring the story to the end he originally had in mind.

What do you think were the original goals/end of Eva, and how did Anno mess up?

To paraphrase Anno’s own words, he wanted his characters to start from a damaged place and change, presumably maturing and becoming better, more self-sufficient human beings through their struggles and interactions with each other. But he created characters that were too damaged and insular for that to happen in any believable manner. And instead of getting better, they got more screwed up as things went on.

Your doubts about censorship are news to me—I think this is the first time I have found a source who dismisses it entirely.

Again, I don’t recall hearing anything about censorship, either inside or outside Gainax, at the time. By contrast, I remember watching a report of the tax evasion incident⁸ on the NHK Evening News. The production fell further behind schedule as the series wore on, and I suspect that TXN (TV Tokyo’s call sign) was just happy to get something to show in the allotted weekday early evening time slot. I don’t know all there is to know, and I don’t pretend to, but I don’t recall hearing anything about it concerning Eva, though I now recall that some busybodies had dragged Gainax into court, claiming that some of their computer games (I couldn’t tell you offhand which ones) were not fit to sell to children, an argument that Gainax was fighting at least partially on free speech grounds. I don’t think that had anything to do with Eva, however. And even if there had been any such pressure, I doubt it would have worked on Anno, given his attitude as demonstrated elsewhere. For better or for worse, he wasn’t listening to anybody but himself. He didn’t have to.

As far as airing, you seem mostly right although I’m not sure the last episode was ‘the only one’. Checking what I have on the TV runs, I see Carl Horn says the last episode ran >10 million viewers, which sounds right, but expat Bochan_bird says “Early on it was getting ratings in the mid double digits, and the 25–30% or more figures came later in the series as the general public started to catch on and see what all the fuss was about.” Oh well. I don’t care enough to look for the old Newtypes!

I remember Gainax posting the weekly ratings at the time, and ratings in the mid-to-high single digits for the bulk of the series are my recollection. And these were considered pretty good for TV Tokyo. Bear in mind that TV Tokyo is the smallest of Japan’s 4 commercial national TV networks. At the time, at least, I believe it only had 6 stations, and thus, was not seen in some parts of the country. By contrast, MBS-TBS, for example, already had 25 stations in the early 80s when Macross was first broadcast. And I recall reading in other quarters that 10–15% ratings were accordingly considered very high for TV Tokyo, perhaps on a par with 20s and 30s for the other networks. So it could just be a question of perception.

Also, the rerun doesn’t really say anything—Hitoshi Doi’s schedules say the rerun blocks were aired at 3 AM, which, if anything, could be construed as evidence of reaction to controversy/censorship.

I couldn’t tell you the exact time, but yes, the rerun was late at night. How much significance one wants to attach to such a move would probably depend on how much of a conspiracy narrative one wanted to create concerning cries of putative censorship, I think. I note, however, that TV Tokyo aired the entire series in first run in its original time slot, except for one episode that was bumped to early morning during New Year’s 1997_27ya because of holiday programming scheduling, whereas shows such as Gundam X and Turn A Gundam were moved to pre-dawn and late-night time slots, respectively, during the middle of their first run prime-time broadcasts, albeit because of low ratings on one of the bigger commercial networks. The only instance I can recall offhand that might have appeared to be network interference would be TV Tokyo asking Anno not to give free advertising in the show to his favorite brand of beer, because Ebisu didn’t advertise with them, if I recall correctly (though Ebisu sent a couple of salespeople to hand deliver a couple of cases of the beer brand in question to Anno as a way of saying thanks for his unsolicited efforts on their behalf, and I seem to recall that he may have been in similar good graces with canned coffee maker UCC at the time for similar promotional consideration; I also remember others in the office noting that Anno would sometimes complain of an upset stomach due to getting most of his caloric intake from the canned coffee on the one hand and beer on the other, but I digress yet again).

If Eva had really been a problem for TV Tokyo and its advertisers, I suspect they could have found some way of making their displeasure known. TV Tokyo also aired Kareshi Kanojo no Jijo in a relatively prime time slot as well, however, and I believe was still part of Project Eva when the movies came out. So I don’t think they were too ashamed of their connection to Gainax in this regard, at the time. Come to think of it, TV Tokyo also aired Gurren Lagarnn (or however they ultimately decided to romanize it) some years later, if memory serves. All in all, I see by a preponderance of the evidence that there isn’t much cause to conclude that there’s been bad blood between Gainax and TV Tokyo.

Though management posted messages telling workers to forward media inquiries about the tax evasion to authorized spokespersons, I got no hint of censorship pressures or responses thereto. The atmosphere around Gainax at the time was one of racing increasingly tight deadlines as the production started off behind schedule and fell further behind as it went on, as I said.

I spoke with people working as closely as anyone with Anno during the latter part of the production and broadcast in particular, and they volunteered the information that Anno was just trying to find some way of putting a smile on Shinji’s face by the end of the series, after he was brought to the hard realization around Episodes 12–13 that the characters he’d created weren’t capable of whatever positive change and outcome he originally envisioned. I think the break is first made explicit with Gendo’s remark out of nowhere around that point to the effect that the ultimate end of evolution is self-destruction. From even my somewhat peripheral insider perspective at the time, there was already less there than met the eye, Time has only reinforced my impression that the problems were with Anno and Eva itself, and that their failures cannot be reasonably attributed to malevolent outside influence.

Hm. As far as I am aware, that conversation was there in most of the drafts for that episode.

Note the key words ‘I think’. All of this has been an attempt at my best recollection. I could be wrong on this and other points, especially the finer details. It was a long time ago. I recall the people working closest to Anno expressing their own uncertainties from about this point on during the latter part of production about just how much of a grip Anno had on the proceedings when Anno was out of earshot, though.

A number of fans have argued that the ending is devious and 1984-style with Shinji succumbing to the hive mind or whatever, and actually the worst outcome for Shinji; you would seem to put the kibosh on that—good riddance, I never liked that theory, a flagrant violation of Occam’s razor.

But that brings up more questions for me: why would he realize that only by episodes 12-13 (nothing really special about them; episode 13 in particular is filler), and if the end of the TV series was aimed at ‘putting a smile on Shinji’s face’, then what on earth happened with End of Evangelion? (Of the 3 known endings to EoE⁹, none involve smiles or anything that could be easily described as happy.)

This is what I was able to pick up in conversations and scuttlebutt around the office at the time. Anno had been trying against reality during the first part of production to bring things around to his original intended vision. By the midpoint of the series, he finally gave up; note the changes in the avowed purpose of the Human Instrumentality Project, for example. He up-ended the whole thing in the last two episodes of the TV series.

Death & Rebirth was going to be his attempt to do some ending to the series that would have some connection to the story prior to the last two episodes of the TV series. Here too, Anno ran out of time to complete it prior to its scheduled theatrical release again running behind schedule, and thus, he had to come back the following year with The End of Evangelion, which was originally supposed to be “Rebirth”.

Is there anything to the rumors¹⁰ about Anno & Yuko Miyamura being romantically linked?

I recall hearing some talk around Gainax at the time, but I can’t say of my own firsthand knowledge.

I had assumed you had handed all miscellaneous English questions and research, but Carl Horn recently mentioned that towards the end a Gainax staffer called him to ask where in Revelations the line ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’ could be found, so apparently not.

As I recall, Anno wanted to use that line in of the English episode titles in Eva (he had different Japanese and “English” titles in the series because he’d grown up watching dubbed foreign series with Japanese episode titles that were often drastically different from the original English titles, as another aside). I’m no biblical scholar, and in those days, the World Wide Web was stone knives and bear skins compared to today, not to mention the fact that 56K dial-up modems were the cutting edge of connectivity. So I contacted Carl to see if he might know the line, or know where I might find it. Talking to people who may know things you don’t is part of research too.

In another instance around that time, Anno wanted Asuka to write something in German, which I managed to piece together with my rusty high-school German and a Japanese-German dictionary at the local library.

Were you involved in the naming of the English episode titles/soundtrack titles? If not, how were they chosen?

See above. On the TV series, Anno would communicate what he wanted, and then I would struggle to think of something that might not be entirely awful in English. I had nothing to do with the soundtrack albums.

While we’re on translation issues, what the heck was up with the ‘Children’ thing anyway?

As with many other such things, Anno took it into his head that he wanted to describe a given thing with a given term, because it struck his fancy, and which was aimed at other Japanese, not foreign, audiences. Again, I can’t pick on Gainax specifically, because my anecdotal observation to-date suggests that much of what Japanese do is intended for the benefit of impressing other Japanese, with little or no regard for how such things may appear to non-Japanese.

Were you in charge of dealing with prospective R1 licensors and/or ADV? Were Anno’s requests for the English translation of the series (Angels, Instrumentality, etc) and policing of ADV’s dub/sub scripts issued through you?

No and no. My only involvement was to explain to Gainax that Movic apparently initially tried to cut a deal with AD Vision for Evangelion, without knowledge of either Gainax or King Records¹¹. That and translating some preliminary contract proposals.

Are there any translations that went out in the official versions that you regret? (With the tight deadlines and ambiguous, subtle language in some Gainax scripts, I’m sure it must have happened.)

I haven’t seen any of what AD Vision did, at any stage or in any form.

The Platinum commentary for episode 18 mentions that “The people who performed the English operator dialogue at the beginning were Michael House, George A. Arriola, and Hiromi Arriola. Michael House was a GAINAX employee at the time, who did in-house translation work. George A Arriola and Hiromi Arriola were friends of his and are apparently husband and wife.” How did you and they get involved in doing any dubbing?

For much the same reason as anything else: because I was there. About 3 weeks before that episode went to the recording studio, Anno walked up to me and asked if there was anyone among my obviously extensive gaijin acquaintances whom I could get for recording some dialogue in an upcoming episode. I thought, sounds like fun. Again, no great mystery. George and I met during the latter part of AnimEigo, and we’ve been friends since. He and Hiromi were married at the time, but have since divorced. We also did another block of dialogue before the commercial break, which Anno mixed or overlaid with the Japanese dialogue that was recorded before we went into the recording room. I recall the result was incomprehensible.

Were you involved in End of Evangelion or Death and Rebirth, and if so, was there any differences between working on the movie compared to the series?

Despite my name being listed in the credits in The End Of Evangelion, no.