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Information

• Member: Ashyukun
• Studio: Electric Leech Productions
• Title: The Greatest Anime Hero
• Premiered: 2003-09-26
• Categories:
  • Parody
  • Fun
• Song:
  • Joey Scarbury Believe it or Not (Theme from "The Greatest American Hero")
• Anime:
  • Black Heaven
  • Moldiver
• Participation:
  • Anime Weekend Atlanta 9 (Professional), Anime Weekend Atlanta 9 (Professional) (2003-09-26)
• Comments: This is an idea that has been kicking around for quite some time- for about five years IIRC. On a whim I had picked up a CD that had a whole mess of TV themes from the 70's and 80's on it, and we (myself and the others that had once been No-Brand Videos) were kicking around ideas of videos to make to some of the themes. All of us being Children of the 80's (tm), we had all at one point of another seen "The Gretest American Hero", quite possibly one of the cheesiest of the 80's comedy/adventure shows.
  
  For those of you who are too young to have seen it or missed it in syndication, the premise of the show is this: concerned with the state of the world, aliens come down and give a school teacher and a FBI agent a suit (it looks like bright red long underwear... with a weird logo on the front) capable of a whole host of super powers that only the teacher can wear. And an instruction book on how to use the suit. Which they promptly lose, meaning they only know how to do a very few things with the suit, including flying (badly.... and the word isn't 'land', it's 'crash'), invulnerability, and some others later on that they figure out. The opening theme was very appropriate for the show, and typical of the time. And cheesy as all get out.
  
  Almost right off the bat we thought of using Moldiver to it. Unfortunately, though we had the LDs to the show at the time, we needed clean copies of the OPs to do it right, and they weren't there.
  
  Flash-forward about 5 years to my scrambling to put together a Pro video. Having decided I just couldn't pull together my Masters video in time, I false-started two other videos before this idea came back and hit me over the head. I had picked up the Moldiver DVD a while back since I loved the show, and therefore had all the source I needed. Unfortunately, the source footage was, shall we say, less than perfect. The encode sucks, there was frame blending all over the place- especially for some of the scenes from the first OP that I needed. And Pioneer, in their briliance, had put all 6 eps on one disc along with a few extras, so the quality blew overall. To top it off, they put one of the two OPs on the disc in clean version. *sigh* This video took far more cleanup work than it should have to just make look passable.
  
  The source lists Black Heaven as being included- and it is in there. There just wasn't an appropriate scene of an alien ship to use in Moldiver, so I borrowed a scene from Black Heaven.
  
  Just in case anyone is thinking, "Damn, those titles look lousy." to that I say, "Thank you, I worked hard to make them look that way." When I first started adding the titles in After Effects (they were created initially in Illustrator) they just didn't look right, and my wife pointed out why- they looked too good. In the early 80's when the show was running, title equipment was far from as nice as now and the titles had a very distinct look to them. I played with filters and dirtied them up and intentionally left their layers in AE in low-res mode to make them look closer to what they would have looked like if they had been created on the old equipment.
  
  I tried to cast people who had ties to the 80's, but had a hard time. For the little brother, it was just impossible- nobody the right age would have really have been doing anything in the 80's. :P
  
  Hopefully those of you who remember the original show will get a kick out of this. :)