stuff was added to this Page on August 24th, 1997 |
ORIGINAL VERSION (1994) |
| Corellian is a big Ranma fan, and had always wanted to do a Ranma 1/2 parody, but at the time, nothing from Ranma 1/2 was yet available on Laserdisc. Then, in January of 1993, at a meeting the CFO-LA Anime Club, Corellian and Phillip saw what Anime fans refer to as Ranma 1/2 Movie #2. When Phillip asked Corellian if he thought he could do something with it, he replied with a big grin on his face, "Oh, yes". Corellian wrote the entire script within 3 weeks, and we began the pre-production work. The Japanese title of the movie was Battle at Togenku, Bring Back the Brides; and when VIZ finally got around to it, they called it Nihao, My Concubine. However, we had the Sherbert version done, and were showing it almost a year before VIZ had completed their version. As far as our version goes, on a video editing level, it was nowhere near as complex as Iczer-C: The Untold Story. Corellian chopped off about 5 minutes, and rearranged the order of a few scenes. On a technical level, we were able to do the entire thing using our own equipment.
There was one funny thing that happened with regard to a particular sound effect we needed and didn't have at the time. There is a scene where Ranma is standing in a room with rats. After we found that none of the sound effect CDs available had something like that, Corellian figured that if we could find a National Geographic special on bats. Corellian felt that a group of bats shrieking would give us the desired effect. So, all during the production, the other members were calling Phillip and Corellian whenever they saw a special or movie having anything to do with bats. They finally got the effect after a particularly long voice over session. Phillip was relaxing and happened to turn on the movie Nightwing (which involved a community being terrorized by bats); and managed to tape about 30 seconds of these bats shrieking. He immediately called Corellian who had just gotten home, and was dead tired. Corellian was so curious to know if we had finally gotten a good effect for this scene, that he drove back over to Phillip's place that night just to hear it for himself. Corellian was indeed happy with it, (and with the fact that this meant people would stop calling him to tell him there was a show about bats on T.V.), and we used it in the final version of that scene The voice over portion of this project was another matter entirely. In terms of dialogue and cast size, this was the biggest project we had yet attempted. The script ended up being 114 pages long, with 75 scenes. By comparison, the Iczer-C script had been 84 pages, with 64 scenes; and the finished versions of both projects run about 60 minutes. The other problem we had was that the Female Ranma character was in about 50 of those scenes. Therefore, even if most of the other actors were available; but the voice actress we had for the female Ranma was unavailable, we couldn't do a Dub session. The cast for this one totaled 17 people, and generally, we needed at least 9 to be available to do an effective dub session. On average, we were able to complete about 10 voice over scenes per session. While all this scheduling stuff may seem trivial, or even irrelevant to some people, let me tell you that in any sort of large project, the thing that ends up delaying it's completion is schedule conflicts of the people involved. On most of our productions, the biggest hassles we had were technical in nature, because we often had to push our equipment beyond what the manuals said it could do to get the desired result. For Ranma 1/2: Summer Vacation, for the first time our biggest hassles were on the scheduling end of things. I still think it's our best work to date in terms of voice acting and general sound quality (the mixdown went very well). |
SPECIAL EDITION (1997) |
| After we completed Ninja Team Gatchaman (Part 2): Bring me the Head of Sandy Frank using our new editing system, Corellian Jones brought up the fact that although he was moderately happy with the way Ranma 1/2 Summer Vacation turned out in 1994; since we now had a truly professional system, he wanted to go back and redo the music and effects track, and use some of the voice over takes that we originally liked, but were unable to use for one reason or another. Phillip Sral replied, "What the hell, if it's good enough for George Lucas and Star Wars, it's good enough for us."
With that, Corellian went to recreating the original video master on Betacam SP, and began making notes on what he wanted to fix from our original version. In the end, he beefed up the effects track with more sound effects throughout, and added a three minute music video in the middle of the feature because he felt the audience needed a breather. We redid two voice over scenes with completely new dialogue because the jokes were dated, and hey, it wouldn't be a real Special Edition without some changed and added scenes. As far as the music track in concerned, Corellian replaced an instrumental portion taken from the Musical Flower Drum Song with Kate Capshaw's version of Anything Goes from the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom feature film soundtrack CD. Corellian had wanted to put Anything Goes in the original version of Summer Vacation, but was stopped by two factors. Fist off, Corellian wasn't sure he could pull off a good sounding cross-fade between Anything Goes and the song that followed it with the equipment he had available in 1994. Secondly, he had already spent about $200.00 on acquiring the various music CDs for Summer Vacation, and had REALLY HATED Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom when it was in theatres. As a result, he had a real problem with putting money into George Lucas' pockets for a film Corellian felt was absolute crap. However, four years later, he was able to find the Temple of Doom soundtrack in a used CD bin for a cheap enough price; and thus it was available for use in the Special Edition. There was one other music selection change concering the title song from the film Karate Kid. Back in 1994, Corellian lifted the song from his vinyl LP record of the movie soundtrack. The equipment he was using in 1994 was not as sensitive as our current setup, and as a result, it didn't really pick up the majority of pops and hisses that were on the LP. In 1997 with the new equipment, the pops and hiss came through in full stereo, and were very recognizable. Corellian spent a month looking for the original Karate Kid soundtrack on CD, with no luck. Because he couldn't find it, he replaced Karate Kid with the theme song from the 1973 Hanna-Barbera animated series Hong Kong Phooey. However, it (thankfully) was not the original version. The song was lifted from a CD of Saturday Morning Cartoon themes redone by famous Rock and Roll/Heavy Metal bands of the early 1990s. The only other change Corellian made was to the opening and closing credits. He redid them using our Amiga 4000 and Toaster 4.0. |
| At Anime Expo 1994, as we were showing Ranma 1/2: Summer Vacation to a crowd in our hotel room; Phillip was approached by a member of the fan sub-titling group Nexus Studios. This person asked if Sherbert had somehow used the Nexus Studios script of Battle at Togenku, Bring Back the Brides to dub our version. Phillip replied that they didn't even know that Nexus had sub-titled it, and that Corellian had written the Sherbert version from scratch. The person from Nexus was amazed, because although in many areas the Sherbert version went really off the wall, there were quite a number of areas where what Corellian had written was almost exactly a straight translation of what the characters had said in the original Japanese version. The person from Nexus said he liked our version overall, but was bored in spots because he felt like he had seen it before. |
| At Project A-Kon 8, at the premiere showing of the Special Edition, as the added three minute music video sequence ended, an audience member remarked, "Okay, I'm touched. Can we get on with the story now?" The room busted up with laughter. Corellian later remarked to Phillip, "That's exactly the type of reaction I was going for with that particular music video." |
| Female Ranma | Nikki Cameron |
| Male Ranma | Corellian Jones (a.k.a. Chew E. Bacca, Dr. McCoy) |
| Akane | Doc Weyr |
| Kasumi | Alexandria Kadar |
| Nibiki | B-KO (a.k.a. Steve, Celia, and Yuri) |
| Shampoo | Calandrean |
| Shana | Winderemere (a.k.a. Cassie) |
| Grammy | Alexandria Kadar |
| Kuno | Souffle' |
| Ryoga | Shea Owlsfeather |
| Donald | Shea Owlsfeather |
| Soun | Souffle' |
| Genma | 3D Man |
| Old Man | Laserman |
| Indiana Solo | Phillip Sral |
| Taylor | (T-1000)-(ED-209) |
| Jason | Daed d' Wolf |
| Rover | 3D Man |
| Executive Producers | Corellian Jones (a.k.a. Chew E. Bacca, Dr. McCoy) and Phillip Sral |
| Production Coordinator | Phillip Sral |
| Original Screenplay | Corellian Jones (a.k.a. Chew E. Bacca, Dr. McCoy) |
| Director | Shea Owlsfeather |
| Script Supervisor | Shea Owlsfeather |
| Script Correlation | Cassie (a.k.a. Winderemere) |
| Music Selection | Chew E. Bacca (a.k.a. Corellian Jones, Dr. McCoy) |
| Foley | Phillip Sral, B-KO (a.k.a. Steve, Celia, and Yuri) and Corellian Jones (a.k.a. Chew E. Bacca, Dr. McCoy) |
| Computer Graphics | 3D Man, Mr. Chyron, and Backseat Video |
| Editor | Corellian Jones (a.k.a. Chew E. Bacca, Dr. McCoy) |
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