Postby Jay_Rath » 20 years ago
Nuts! And here I was hoping the DVD producers would fly me to Australia! You'll all have to come here, then.
I'll pull all my stuff out of storage and await all your expert questions. One funny story that immediately comes to mind was how we had to change the scripts. The translations from Japanese were rather literal -- hippo became "water horse," for example. We ran into that sort of thing often, and had to change them as we were recording the lines.
One thing I really regret is that our director and producer didn't seem to understand the idea of continuity. I was instructed to try several different approaches to Skunk in several different early episodes. I finally was allowed to do it the way I wanted to.
We did the pilot in the fall of 1980, actually, and did all the rest over the course of the summer of 1981. Conditions were horrible by the end -- we'd arrive at 10 a.m. and depart sometimes at midnight. Coughs, sore throats and colds were common in the last week.
Besides working on "Astro," I later was an assistant storyboard artist on the animated "Doug" series. I was also a longtime staffer on The Onion, a satirical weekly and website that you might be familiar with. I still do voice work on its radio show; in fact, I continue to do a fair amount of radio drama when I can. That's why I was tapped for "Astro" in the first place.
