re-listening to "Samurai Rabbit with Stan Sakai & The Usagi Chronicles Creative Team"
This week I have been re-listening to one of the longer interviews with Stan Sakai, Khang Le and Candie and Doug Langdale and I found a youtube version of it with official subtitles!! I can finally understand what some of the parts actually were about compared to before x3
Should I post a link to this? or links to others? reblog or comment! you can probably find it yourself if you're curious.
Or would anyone be interested in like, a summary of those interviews?
I've posted links to that and other interviews before, but this is one of the most extensive ones imo, so I thought it would be nice to post the link that here separately.
One thing I see the collective fandom voice out is how they don't like that it's about a young rabbit and not a direct adaptation (it wasn't up to the crew, they were brought on after the decision) and this interview actually gives answer to that and many other questions I've seen fans talk about publicly both on here and on twitter. (Like why there aren't phones or screens for example.) There's a nice intro about this aspect as well, how two fans of the og comic feel about this show when about to interview the author himself and how the main creative leads are also big nerds about the Usagi Yojimbo comicbook series.
Stan Sakai and Khang Le mainly talk about the art and adaptation, as well as story of the show, while Candie and Doug talk about the creative writing parts of the show. They even talk about the music a bit! Reccomended listening if you like the show! This was also recorded before the final 10 episodes aired so it's fun hearing them tease the 2nd season again.
What's nice is that the interviewers themselves (the Comicbook Couples Counseling podcast), are fans of Usagi Yojimbo as well so they are very well-versed in the comic series, so the questions they ask are also very relevant... but also respectful to both the creators and the comic and cartoon! So it's a nice interview to listen to, from a very creative and mature perspective imo.
Seeing fans from different sides of both the TMNT and Usagi fandoms voice different opinions based on assumptions of the show has been a bit frustrating to see (maybe much less so if I only look at fanart, but it's been both "older" and younger fans), so this has been refreshing to re-listen to because it really only looks at the show from creative and collaborative viewpoints vs what people seem to assume that Netflix shows are all about - money and profit and keeping up only some sort of live-wire.
I personally really think the show probably could have had a bigger "impact" with the story if it took some bigger risks, but at the same time, they did their best with what they were given in terms of budget, which I'm remembering again after listening to the creative ways they had to avoid some shots or how some storylines got cut. It's a very creative and easy-going show to me, even if it's not "the best" in terms of what people have come to expect from cartoon shows for kids now.
It's also really interesting to listen to the interview again with subtitles and getting some of the context better (like how the makkine and spaceships, there was a certain inspiration they we're looking at outside of comics - "Robot Carnival" - an animated film I was only vaguely aware of before).
I also found the artist who did the layouts and special poses for the 2D sequences, which was so cool to find! I'm so glad that the Samurai Rabbit crew and artists have been proud to post their work on the series so far as I found a few artists' portfolios/galleries and blogs last month as well. Not gonna repost those (that's obviously just rude without permission and no one wants to get in trouble for that) but it would be cool to share links to those too if people were interested x3
anyway, it's amazing this show exists at all, whatever anyone else thinks.
