josephlovesit wrote:
I asked a question at the beginning of this thread, but maybe no one saw it. Anyway, now that there are more insiders aboard, I'll give it another go.
When there are over 2000 episodes of Shin Chan, how do the episodes that you guys use get picked? Do you only have licenses for a certain amount episodes or do you have free reign to go through the Shin Chan archives?
Hey josephlovesit. I'm kind of wondering what you love.
I have the job of choosing which vignettes will be used-- with some help from the translators. I had about 100 episodes to choose from, starting around episode 360 in the Japanese. That means 300-350 vignettes. (Most of the episodes have three 6-8 minute vignettes, but sometimes there are 3 minute shorties.) I grabbed vignettes from all over this batch and mixed them together into new episodes.
The goal was to choose vignettes that would be the most entertaining. There are a ton of different considerations, and it's hard to list them all without making this post a huge wall of text that will make your eyes bleed. So I'll try to be brief(er).
Vignettes that are faster paced, have crazy storylines, or feature our favorite characters get first pick. When Shin does his a*s dance or gives a Mr. Elephant performance, or runs around naked... those make the cut, too. Since this is aired on AS, we go for things that wouldn't be allowed in other time slots.
When going through all these episodes, I don't have a translation-- just a translated title to give me a hint what's going on. But since we make so many dialogue changes, what matters is what we can do with them. A couple times I've chosen a vignette where the original plot didn't grab me, but I had an idea for a tweak in the story that sort of had me foaming at the mouth. The best example comes from an episode that won't be seen for a while, so I won't spoil it.
The "crazy" episodes... i.e. Ench-man, Shin's fever dream, Happiness Rabbit coming to life... are much more rare in the original series. I'd guess about 1 in 10 vignettes. The original is quite a bit slower paced as a whole, with lots of stories about Shin's day-to-day home life. Somewhat comparable to the Simpsons and their Treehouse of Horrors episodes. We wanted a faster paced show that fit better on AS, so all the crazy episodes were taken and crammed together in a yummy orgy of randomness.
I chose the episodes in three chunks. 1-8, then 9-15, then 16-26 several months later, after the show was already in production (Note: this AS season is only 1-20). By that time I'd worked on the series and had a better idea of the show Shin Chan was going to be. I'd also heard the main characters' voices and knew the direction we writers and the director and actors had taken with them. So characters I didn't gravitate toward in the first round, like Principal Ench and Penny's Mom, were now on my Most Wanted list.
While I was mixing and matching from all over, we still wanted our new timeline to make sense. This was quite a problem when Shin's house exploded in the middle of our 100 episode batch. I didn't want the family to be hanging out in their house at the start of an episode, then have them in their apartment 6 minutes later, then have Shin crawling on the ceiling of their old house 6 minutes after that. And then there was Yonro's hole in the wall. Couldn't have the hole keep appearing and disappearing, so that limited which vignettes I could choose, too. That's why episodes 8-10 are slower paced than the rest of our 20 episode season. There were so many key plot points to cover that I had to use, let's say, 9 of 15 vignettes from that part of the original Japanese episodes, where normally I might have only taken the 4 or 5 strongest or fastest paced ones.
In the third round of choosing, I had a larger pool of episodes (either I didn't have all the 100 episodes to review the first time, or I did and I somehow lost a bunch of the DVDs in my sock drawer), so I went back and spread the 8 episodes from the apartment into 11 episodes, inserting more random vignettes that take place away from the apartment (meaning I could use them even if they originally took place much earlier or later in the series), to give it more of the oddball style we wanted.
And that's my story. See? A very long post. And I could still ramble for hours about this... but we have all great hopes and dreams we should go aspire to instead of reading this. Or least some video games to play or basketball games to lose money on.
Message Edited by shoutingatthedark on 04-29-200703:46 PM
But...
On that day, you leveled up. 
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