The color registration is off enough to be easily noticeable; look at Wakko's nose or Dot's feet to see it most clearly. This appears to be a printing error rather than one in coloring.Drawn by: Walter Carzon and Khato
Colored by: Tommy Berg
The Warners in Japan. Yakko and Dot are dressed as samurai warriors, with swords and armor; Wakko is dressed (or, depending on your perspective, undressed) as a sumo wrestler - but he is wearing his usual hat. Dot is holding a fan. A pagoda and a snow-capped mountain are in the background, with a bit of bamboo and a bird in the foreground. The art is done in the style of a Japanese painting. Instead of the normal logo, there is a combination Japanese/English logo at the top of the page. Down the left side is a purple strip, with flowers drawn along it. The DC and WB logos, and the UPC, are in that strip.
The Japanese characters (called "katakana", used for foreign words) in the title translate to "Animaniakusu", which would be pronounced pretty much as it's spelled in English, with all of the As sounding like "ah", as in "father". The hiragana (the standard Japanese alphabet, used for native words) on Dot's fan read "kawaii", which is Japanese for "cute". (RO)
The color registration is off enough to be easily noticeable; look at Wakko's nose or Dot's feet to see it most clearly. This appears to be a printing error rather than one in coloring.
The coloring itself is done in a traditional Japanese (and Chinese) style called "inkwash". This is one of the most realistic renderings of the Warners I've seen. (BC)
Newsreel of the Stars, Japanese style. This is the story of how the Warners were created, at the animation studios in Tokyo instead of Burbank. The animators in the 30s came up with the Warners, but they were totally out of control. Eventually, they were captured, and locked away in the studio pagoda. They remained there until today, when they escaped.
The storyline follows the cartoon as much as possible given the amount of space they had available. The introduction to the Newsreel of the Stars is a mix of the original pictures (Clark Gable, lower left, and Harold Lloyd in Safety Last, upper right) and new, Japanese ones (Godzilla, upper left, and Astro Boy, lower right). As in the original, the Warners' noses are red even in the black and white segments. Dot and Yakko's tails are missing as they're being thrown into the pagoda at the bottom of page 2.Sixteenth century Japan was a lawless place, where bandits roamed freely, terrorizing all in their path. In the midst of this, three samurai without masters, the Warners, are on a vacation trip. They are traveling through Totomi province, on their way to visit the famous giant bonsai tree. They hear a loud runbling, just before they're trampled by a bandit horde. Dot tells the leader to watch who he's trampling, but he says that they can trample anyone they want.
The Warners finally arrive in the village with the giant bonsai tree, only to find it deserted. All of the villagers are hiding in their houses, thinking the Warners are bandits too. They eventually come out and explain their plight: the bandits keep robbing them of what little they have. They would like to hire samurai to protect them, but they have nothing to pay them with. They ask the Warners to help, but it's not in their contract to do so, and so they say no.
This doesn't last long, however. The bandits ride into town, and the Warners are forced to confront them. When they make fun of the bandit leader's helmet, he asks if they know who he is, then introduces himself as Daigoro Kojima, the most feared bandit in the five provinces. This doesn't impress the Warners, and Kojima takes offense; he tries to cut down Yakko where he stands, but Yakko pops out of the way and lands on Kojima's back. Yakko demonstrates how it's done, with some flashy karate moves, but then tires himself out. Dot takes over, and talks Kojima into kissing her instead of cutting her down - but when he gives in, she pulls his nose instead. Kojima leads his band out of town, vowing to return to have his revenge.
The grateful villagers provide the Warners with a humble meal (rice balls with rice, with rice juice) to show their gratitude. The repast is interrupted, though, by screaming hordes of bandits, who have returned, true to their word. The Warners are forced to fight, and, one flurry of swordsmanship later, accomplish what nobody else has: they humiliate the bandits into retreating. Kojima and his henchmen, infuriated by the demise of their plans, charge Yakko and Wakko, but Dot foils them by dropping the bonsai tree on their heads. The villagers aren't too pleased by this, of course, as they've just lost their livelihood. We fade out on the Warners being chased out of town by the angry mob of villagers.
The title refers to a classic Japanese film, The Seven Samurai, directed by Akiro Kurosawa. It was the basis of the Western The Magnificent Seven. (BC) There's no credit for a colorist for a very good reason: the story is done completely in black and white. Manga are almost always black and white, and this story does a nice job of capturing the feel of authentic Japanese manga. Normally, I'd include a nit about how the Warners' noses are always red, but in this case, that would interfere with the desired atmosphere. "The art style reminds me alot of the Ryoichi Ikegami school of Japanese manga, i.e. a hyperrealistic styling. Ikegami is most famous for drawing such works as 'Crying Freeman', 'Mai the Psychic Girl', 'Sanctuary' and 'Lone Wolf and Cub'. This last piece about a ronin and a child he cares for, seems to be the inspiration for this piece." (BC) The bit about Pat Morita and waxing the floor refers to the movie Karate Kid, which had that scene. The name Toshiro refers to veteran Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. There's a NARF in the middle of the swordfight. Depends is the name of a line of adult incontinence control undergarments...in other words, diapers. Dot's flower only has 4 petals in a couple of places. (pages 7, 9) "Itchinosi" isn't a possible Japanese word, since "si" isn't a Japanese phoneme. A better choice might have been "Itchinozu". (page 8) (RO) "Bandits" is misspelled "banits" in the first panel on page 9. (RO)The Warners are free of the pagoda on the Tokyo WB lot. They're running through downtown Tokyo when Dot spots a karaoke bar and has to go in. (It's a family karaoke bar, thankfully.) She's on stage for the next two and a half hours, and is just winding up her performance with the traditional My Way when the bar is closed due to a giant monster attack. Dot takes offense at that and decides to give the monster a piece of her mind.
Dot makes herself larger by using the old toon blow-up trick, and confronts the monster. The monster toasts her, and she retaliates by eating a garlic store and blowing her breath back at him. Round Two of the battle starts, with Wakko and Yakko in the war room monitoring its progress, and Dot tells the monster to turn tail. It does, hitting Dot with it and knocking her senseless for a moment, but Dot returns while the monster is gloating and lures it to run headfirst into an anvil factory. The monster gets up just in time to be attacked by a plastic air force on strings, with live ammunition.
Dot and the monster square off again. Dot gets it to duck by saying its foot is untied, and clobbers it with a building. She checks her list, and discovers only one thing she's missed doing: she introduces it to her pet. The introduction isn't needed, though. The monster and her pet have known each other for years, and are happy to renew their acquaintance. Since they don't want to fight any more, Dot decides there's only one thing to do: more karaoke!
The title refers to a long string of Gojira (Godzilla) vs. [monster] movies. (BC) "A room full of tone-deaf businessmen trying to sing My Way" is a very accurate description of the average karaoke bar in Japan. Etiquette demands that everyone who goes to such a bar sing at least once, but the accepted cop-out for those who can't carry a tune in a dump truck and don't wish to inflict their lack of singing ability on others is to lip-synch My Way. (This, at least, is what Americans who travel to Japan tell me. Those who have lived there for an extended period say this is one time the Japanese behave differently for their American guests than for themselves; then, they do Japanese pop songs, and the loudest, worst singer usually is the one who wants to hog the mike...JM) Rick Springfield is a soap opera actor from the 80s who had a brief career as a rock singer before disappearing completely from sight about 1989. (BC) The blatant gratuitous giant woman cameo: R. Crumb is a cartoonist who enjoyed most of his success in the 60s and 70s, and is probably best known for the drawing titled "Keep on Truckin'". His comics included many giant women for no good reason at all beyond the fact that Crumb had a fetish for them. (SC) Daryl Hannah is an actress who tends to be cast as unusual women in movies. This mention is a direct reference to her role in the remake of The Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, and she also played the mermaid in Splash and a female robot in Blade Runner. (BC) In the box of bombs: Wawa World (refers to Waterworld, which really didn't do all that badly), Ishtar, Heaven's Gate, and Howard the Duck. The MTV video is Joan Osborne, whose videos all seem to have lots of tight closeups of her face and who has a gold nose ring; the "someone annoying" is most likely Beavis and Butthead, given the logo in the bottom right corner of the picture. (SC) The monster plowing into the anvil factory refers to a classic Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs gets a bull to run into an anvil...a classic gag with a Japanese twist. Bambi Meets Godzilla is a very short film that shows about a minute of Bambi frolicking in a meadow while credits roll, then about two seconds of Godzilla's foot squashing him. There's a scene in the cartoon Broadcast Nuisance, in Animaniacs episode 41, that shows a character being squashed in a similar fashion. Two references in one cameo: The balloon Pinky and the Brain fly through in at the bottom of page 30 is a Rickee Rodent head, referring to the story Rewriting History, in Animaniacs #4 (July 1995), while Pinky's comment about "Remember when we became big and--" refers to the cartoon Tokyo Grows, in Pinky and the Brain episode 3. The monsters and Dot, in the final panel on page 32, are doing the same dance as the Village People did when performing their song YMCA. The building to the right of the frame is an A shape, completing the row. The patrons of the karaoke bar look very Western for a bar in Tokyo. This could be because many characters in anime are drawn with American features just because the artists like to draw them that way. (AM) The drawings of the contests referred to in fact #1 are the ancestors of modern manga. (BC)
That book didn't start out as The Book of Facts. The manga titles include Hello Nursie (drawn in the style of Hello Kittie, a popular manga title) and Plucky. There's a can of Gogo Cola (refers to a Tiny Toon Adventures character, Gogo Dodo) and a newspaper with the headline "Rock Star Really Giant Chicken".
You can get anything from a vending machine in Japan. (Vending machine ramen, anyone?) (BC)