[LoGH] Live update from Philcon
Walter Amos (amos@sedl.org)
Sat, 1 Sep 2001 21:39:57 -0500 (CDT)
Hi, this is Walter Amos, your friendly correspondent at the Millenium
Philcon, the 59th World Science Fiction Convention where we have had
the fortune to have Yukio Kikukawa, producer of LoGH, as a special
attendee. We are presenting discussions, video, and the first LoGH
movie "The Stars, My Conquest" at the con to try and attract more
interest from the literary SF fan community, a group which would likely
find LOGH very appealing if it knew about it.
We had a few snafus yesterday at the 2 hour long discussion/intro panel
with Mr. Kikukawa. He arrived OK, but unfortunately his translator,
Anime Expo staple Takayuki Karahashi (who also did all the translation
work for the film and videos to be shown here) didn't arrive on time so
we were without translation or Intro video to show. Nevertheless the
panel was reasonably well attended with about 30-40 people. I
blathered on to fill time, and Philcon anime coordinator Collette
Fozard ran off and shanghaied some members of the Nippon 2007 Worldcon
bid committee to act as interim translators. Despite the setbacks,
things went reasonably well.
This morning things went much better with the video presentations of
the subtitled "Hero of El Facil" side story from the "Spiral Labyrinth"
series, the 2 English dubbed "Battle of Vermilion" episodes from the
end of the 2nd season, and the subtitled "making of LoGH" video. Taka
had arrived by this point and brought the videos, and translated for
Mr. Kikukawa who fielded questions between several of the videos. The
screening room in which this was presented was fairly packed,
especially for the El Facil video. Much laughter at some of Yang's
stereotypical exploits. When Mr. Kikukawa asked how many in the
audience had never seen LoGH before, over a dozen people raised their
hands.
The only small personal down side came much later this evening when,
while posting another notice in front of the anime screening rooms, a
mother attending the con asked if I knew why another show playing then
("Shinesman") had been labeled PG13 by the con. I replied I didn't
know, sinc I felt that series was pure goofy comedy. She replied she
wanted to be sure there wasn't any unsuitable material for kids in it
because while other things labeled PG13 at con were entirely innocent
and she felt were rated unnecessarily strongly, she said she and her
young child had a disturbance earlier in the day when they had seen
some fairly bloody gore in an anime that was labeled PG. It turns out
she was referring to the Battle of Vermilion episodes, where there are
indeed some very very gory scenes briefly showing the effects on the
crew when these ships explode from the cool looking laser blasts. When
I said that that scene was exceptional in the series and that if she
felt up to it she should still try to check out the film tomorrow since
there is nothing comparable, she seemed hesitant.
I felt a bit bad about this and partially blame myself. Back when
Collette asked me for brief synopses of all the stuff to be shown for
the program and an appropriate parental rating, she said she'd probably
label everything PG unless otherwise stated. I said for LoGH I thought
that was reasonable. It had been so long since I last saw these
episodes I totally forgot about these scenes. Had I remembered them, I
would certainly have cautioned a higher rating for these episodes than
the others. :(
Well, many of the attendees at the video seemed enthusiastic about
seeing the film, which is at 11am tomorrow morning. Let us hope that
goes well. Also at the video I made sure to several times mention the
LoGH Info Center (www.logh.net) and urged them to check it out, sign
the petition for English language LoGH, and check out the mailing list!
So maybe soon we'll see some new members here from Philcon!
--
==============================================================================
"Zu jeder Zeit, an jeder (sic) Ort, bleibt das Tun | Walter Amos
der Menschen das gleiche..." - Galactic Heroes II | amos(at)sedl.org
