|
Anime Expo - Saturday - Legend of Galactic Heroes
|
| |
|
 |
If anything shows the power of anime in North America,
it's this image. In the lower right-hand corner are Noburo Ishiguro and
Yukio Kikukawa, director and executive producer of the Legend of Galactic
Heroes series. They're surrounded by fans of the spacefaring shows about
a war between an imperial empire and rebellious planets, loving the show
even though it's never gotten a wide release in the U.S. Even though the
event was listed only as a "LOGH" panel on the Anime Expo web site schedule,
these fans -and many more who didn't fit in the picture - traveled to Anaheim
to meet the artists who created their favorite series. |
 |
"Legend of Galactic Heroes started with a great novel,"
Ishiguro said. The producer has been slaving away his whole life to make
it and he's still making it," he said, referring to the production of new
Heroes episodes. "He still wants to make Legend of Galactic Heroes something
suitable for the foreign market. That's the driving force behind keeping
the series going." |
 |
"We could have decided to quit at any time but we
didn't," Kikukawa added. "Now that the second season of the side stories
is over, we're deciding whether we want to continue it or not. We've been
doing it for 13 years and we have stories for another two years. That decision
will be made in the next month." |
 |
Fans wanted to know about Heroes products. There
are computer games in Japan, but the producers are timing their release
so they don't get ahead of the anime stories. A board game was started
in Japan, then stopped, they said. Action figures never were made, but
there are kits of Heroes spacecraft and mecha. And the group joked that,
if a Heroes DVD set ever was released, it might cost as much as one of
the series' space cruisers. |
