World Book character sheets ARE ALL ONLINE. (plus other goodies.)

It’s only taken me…what, 10 years now? But–it’s true–after major fan demand, ALL THE WORLD BOOK CHARACTER SHEETS HAVE BEEN SCANNED AND ARE ONLINE.

They’re up as individual images for the moment. I need to transcribe the last ~45 and will start to…okay, eventually…put the images and text into a document/PDF. (I was going to say that I had done this with the World Book, but the PDF version actually does not have any images in it. Something else to add to the to-do list!)

For those who have been asking me (for YEARS now), I am truly sorry for the delay. Just…you know…life and stuff. I hope that these have been worth the wait!

Well, in other news…hello! Stuff is definitely in the works. It’ll be quite a while yet but a redesign/update of the site is in progress, to finally dust it off, clean it up, and bring it into this decade of web design.

A few things of note, sent in by some awesome people over the months:

Alexandre has captured the Sega Genesis PoDW soundtrack and converted it to mp3s for our listening pleasure. ** will host these files on this site once I update **

Neike has edited and uploaded an incredible collection of screenshots of locations and creatures, the Treasures of Rule, and more.
** will host these files on this site once I update **

Brittany contacted me about a doll she spotted on eBay a while ago. It’s a doll of Ren that I’ve never seen before, and even the original listing has no real information on it beyond “Made in Korea.” Do any of you know know anything about this? See below…

ren-doll-ebay-unknown

Jakub, and possibly some others, have been working on building out a wikia.com wiki for PoDW.

Sony/”Konway” has uploaded a few choice videos: the end credits of Dark Water, the Dishonor cut scene* with Roddy McDowall vs. Frank Welker

Want a hi-res scan of the background image behind episodes 1-13? Doug pointed out that the original painting was up for auction at Heritage Auctions a while back but the image is still there.

And deviantART user DanFelix has been maintaining Dark-Water-Pirates, a collection of fanart from across the website. People have created some really interesting, clever, and fun pieces lately.

*I refer to this as “cut,” though some people were fortunate enough to see the show on TV with this clip included. Different stations made subtly different cuts to the show.

That’s it for all, but hopefully not for long. Cheers! Thank you so much for your support and kind words–I never say it enough, but I deeply appreciate your encouragement and enthusiasm over all these years.

The quarterly (not-an-)update

Hey, everyone–how are you doing?

So as I mentioned in the last post, I will be starting grad school this fall. I’m attempting to set a goal for myself, which is to make a substantial update to the site (and not just the blog) before school starts at the end of August. We’ll see if I can do it–I really hope I can because there’s a lot I would like to clean up and consolidate. Not to mention, I really don’t know if I will have time to make any big updates to this site during my two years in school (something tells me Carnegie Mellon isn’t the easiest of schools…), and I don’t want to let this site become more stagnant than it already has (the date in the header and footer still says 2007!). The biggest constraints that come to mind are time and my aching right wrist…we’ll see how it goes, though.

To those of you who have continued to stop by and who’ve taken a moment to send me a note recently–thank you so much. Life has been really busy (between preparing to start school, move, and leave my current job and my life here in Atlanta) and your kind words have really lifted my spirits. 🙂

Some PoDW-related stuff
– There are several very cool items on eBay right now: several gorgeous cels from The Quest (ep. 1) and a storyboard sketch sheet (!!!) from Dishonor. (ep. 2) The cels are $70 each and the storyboard sketch sheet is $80. These are the best cels I’ve seen available for purchase in years, so if you can afford them, go for it.
– It’s been pointed out to me (hi, Mugetsu!) that the five seals you see tiling down the page, the ones from the end credits of episodes 1-13, are not available for download anywhere on the site. CRAP. Sorry about that! Here they are: the seals from The Quest, Dishonor, Break-Up, Betrayal, and Victory.

Some animation-related news…80s Fever is in the air again. I heard a rumor (hi, Ryan!) that the same people who released Mysterious Cities of Gold on DVD are thinking about releasing Spartacus and the Sun Beneath the Sea. (I have not seen either of these, but from all the e-mails that have come in, a bunch of you have and were very fond of both these shows, so…heads-up!)

On top of that, according to Johane Matte (a.k.a. Rufftoon), an animation artist who did storyboard work on Avatar, there are plans for a sequel to Mysterious Cities of Gold–apparently there have been rumors about this for a while now, and other failed attempts, but she seems to believe this stands a chance of happening.

I couldn’t help but read that and feel a little discouraged. It’s great that so many other beloved shows are being rediscovered, but why not this one? There are so many thousands of fans out there who have such fond and strong memories of this show. I know I haven’t really done anything to organize or mobilize the fans, besides attempts at messageboards and the like (though I’ve thought about it more recently)–my emphasis has been more on digging up information about the show around the time of its production and posting as much as I can find. There’s a petition on petitiononline.com with thousands of signatures, but who’s doing anything with it?

When looking through old e-mails, I came across a mention of a posting on a messageboard a couple of years back where somebody claimed that the PoDW master reels in the Warner Bros. vault had been badly damaged, and that’s why they haven’t been released on DVD or otherwise revisited yet. As far as I know, that’s only a rumor…but it’s kind of sad that wholly unsubstantiated rumors are all we have to depend on. If that news were true, that would be terrible, but at least it would be a concrete reason. It’s hard for me to fathom that people could just blithely overlook this show, considering the loyal fan base and how many people do remember it.

Heritage Auctions and PoDW production art

I first found out about Heritage Auctions through cels they’d put up for auction on eBay (strange that an auction site would put their items on another auction site, but maybe it was for the extra advertisement; it worked, in this case!). Through a random search, I came back to their site and saw that they have several dozen pieces of animation artwork currently for auction at the moment, in batches of two or three (usually the actual cel plus its accompanying clean-up animation drawing, but sometimes with an extra cel as well). If you’re interested in collecting animation art from PoDW, this seems to be the place to be. They seem to have consistently been selling PoDW animation art for a while now.

(If the direct link to the PoDW listings doesn’t work, go to ha.com and search under Comics and then Animation Art.)

 
 

Oh, yeah! As an update to the previous post, I got in touch with Alex, the Super Toy Archive webmaster (and a pretty big PoDW fan himself). He has a Hasbro catalog with images of the discontinued second line, which dispels several rumors that have been floating around: the biggest one is that there was never a Tula action figure. Even in this second line, they didn’t make one, which I think is surprising and also incredibly stupid. (Hello? Main character? So what if she’s a girl?) He’s offered to scan the pages in the next few weeks–I’m definitely eager to check those out and I’ll be sure to post them here.

Maelstrom master background 14″x36″ on eBay

Only $2395. Oh, to be 10 years older, with enough expendable income saved up that I could afford this easily…

There’s also another really beautiful one of the Pandawa port from episode 3 that has been up for auction at around the same price. Search for “pirates of darkwater” (one word, not two) on eBay.

This auction has ended.

Old blog archive: 24 October 2005

Hey! I’m alive…wow, it’s been a while. I would assume that anyone who does read this on a semi-regular basis has come here via one of my other websites, but if not, I haven’t updated in (almost exactly) 4 months because I quit my web design job and moved to Japan to teach English for a year. I also turned 24 during that time, so I have to update this info (and probably revamp this journal–geez, this layout’s drab) I’ve been in Japan for…wow. Exactly 3 months, almost to the hour. (It’s 3 more days till my 3-month anniversary of moving to this town, if you want to be technical.)

Well, let’s see…I just set up internet access last week. And I wasted no time–I checked eBay a little while after first signing on, and I stumbled across an incredible find: a Ren PoDW Halloween costume. And I won it! It should hopefully be making its way to my parents’ house back home…maybe I should warn them to keep an eye out for it. It was a hilarious costume, though…instead of Ren’s actual costume, the torso is yellow with a picture of Ren holding his sword and the PoDW logo in the background, and the pants are bright blue. Priceless!

Speaking of eBay, there was something I didn’t win but that I’m getting anyway…I’d tried to bid on this book of Pirates of Dark Water style guides at least a year ago, and e-mailed the winner to see if I could somehow still get a copy. Well, time went by and I completely forgot, but he didn’t: he’s scanned them all and is in the process of mailing me his PSD (Photoshop) files of the scans! And they’re gorgeous. I’ll be editing and uploading them with the next update.

To be honest, now that I’m on a laptop and not a desktop (and now that I live in freaking rural Japan instead of the slightly more mundane metropolis Atlanta), it’s harder to motivate myself to work on my site. Part of it’s the fact that there are many other things I’d rather be doing than spending full weekends on my computer (er, this past one didn’t count because I was making up for lost time), and part of it’s probably a posture thing…editing my site was much easier when I could sit in a chair at a desk, but my apartment’s small enough that a real desk isn’t feasible, and I sit on the floor when using my laptop. It’s going to be interesting to see how I do any future web or graphic design or digital illustration work over the next 9 months.

But seeing how this is a journal devoted to PoDW as well as animation in general, I’m sure I can come up with something to write about, considering how much anime is on TV here. I should probably revamp this journal to reflect that slightly new focus, but we’ll see.

Old blog archive: 08 April 2004

I think I need to work on my eBay strategies. That, and graduate and get a job and move away so I can manage my own expenses and not feel so guilty about buying this stuff and getting my parents pissed off at me for “wasting money on this crap.” But it’s hard to work on eBay strategies when the only reason I’m on eBay is to acquire rare PoDW merchandise. And it being rare, it doesn’t come up too often, and I’m almost always outbid because of reserves. (Stupid reserves.)

Last time this happened, though, the winner messaged me immediately after and he’s going to send me scans of his materials. This time, though…it’s a 200-page book (the PoDW style guide), so…I don’t know. Damn.

Old blog archive: 15 December 2003

Wow, been a while since I posted here. But something happened Friday that made me think of this journal again. ;o) I was hanging out with a couple of guys (one I met on Friendster–he messaged me because one of the photos I have up there is the one of me in my PoDW shirt–and it turned out we actually had met years and years ago; the other was a friend of his who knows somebody I know) at Starbucks, when (the gist of) this conversation happened:

W: You have a lot of websites–how many do you have?
Me: Well, a lot of them are just part of my domain–I have a bunch of fanlistings, a Pirates of Dark Water site…
W: *grin* Oh yeah. *turns to P* She has, like, THE biggest and most extensive Pirates of Dark Water website.
Me: *kind of shyly* Yeah, it’s #1 on Google.
P: *blank look* Pirates of Dark Water? Is that the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean?

*facepalm* (which was pretty much our reaction ;o))

The “holy shit” auction from 2 posts back–I lost it, but I’m in touch with the guy who won it (he was gracious enough to e-mail me and to offer to donate a copy of the files to the site–I think he’s going to scan them in bit by bit, which is freaking AWESOME), and it’s full of very, very, very cool stuff. Over 200 pages of storyboards (that was what really got me) and a lot of other concept material–and he won another auction for original Hanna-Barbera style guides and stuff from 10 series, one of which is PoDW, so he’s really gotten lucky. :o)

Oh, and I made a few animated .gif’s last week, because I got bored. ;o) I discovered that some software that came with my system allows me to screencap from certain file types, so…oh, and I’d recommend that you (right-click and) save, instead of just (left-clicking and) viewing, because they load faster off your system than in your browser.

ioz-opera.gif – longtime gag with several of my friends, a.k.a. Smitha is a freaking huge dork. 😀
jenna-ren1.gif – the scene where Jenna gives Ren the sword. I’ve always adored this moment; it’s incredibly symbolic in terms of many of the mythological and epic tales, because Ren’s receiving more than just his father’s sword–Jenna’s passing the whole legacy of Primus and Octopon, and the throne (in a sense), and the Quest and just all of it. A very pivotal and moving and well-executed moment.
ren-destiny.gif – from “Victory,” when Ren’s raising his fist at the very end. I’ve always loved this moment–I had to shrink it because I screencapped DarkWaterFan’s version, which was really blurry and unclear.
podw-opening.gif – I LOVE the opening. Those first 5 scenes are breathtakingly gorgeous…and then they go and show the inside of the Maelstrom and ruin it. 😛 I made this almost like a promo, except not really.
podw-logo.gif – oooh, shiny. ;o)

And the RPG’s kicked off at the forum (FINALLY). It’s definitely not too late to join if you’re still interested!

But anyway, back to work. Stupid, stupid Mondays!

Old blog archive: 18 November 2003

HOLY SHIT.

It’s MINE. I’m TOTALLY winning this (and subsequently putting it online *grin*).

In other eBay news, there’s also a kite for sale. I’ve never seen it before, and kind of went, “Oooh…” when I initially saw it. :o) I’m not bidding, though–I’m saving up for the first auction. *evil grin*