Question from the audience: "What was the Most Disastrous Project You've Ever Had to Work On?"

That would have to be BUCHIGIRI PART 4. Most of the people reading this will not have seen BUCHIGIRI, or even know what it is, and I feel profoundly sorry for the rest who have.

A brief explanation of the show:

Some stupid high school motorcycle gang punks beat each other up and wreck things while proving that misogyny is alive and well.

BUCHIGIRI 4 came my way when I was working in the production department at Artland in 1990. For some reason they wanted to do it as fast as and with as little of a budget as possible. The chief producer would come in every so often and ask how things were coming. "It still sucks." was usually the answer. "Well, as long as it gets done on time that's OK." (This was not my first experience with Doing It For The Money production but it is still my strongest memory.)
We used about half the amount of drawings and cels that we normally would on a show this length and we were short of staff so I ended up painting and checking cels too. Cel check on BUCHIGIRI consisted mostly of shaking our heads at the really awful cels we got back from the Korean subcontractor we sent them to. (The production manager went out of his way to go to the absolute cheapest place possible.) About 1/3 of the cels had mistakes on them and we fixed what we could by painting on top of the cels, coloring in shadows and mistakes with black markers (a skill that would prove very useful when doing BUBBLEGUM CRASH #3) and other interesting modifications. I got to thinking that we might be better off working with gorillas than most of the subcontractors (both foreign and domestic) we were working with. ("Ape has killed ape!" ZAP! "Ape will paint cel or ape will get cattle prod again!") (This also brings up images of trainers waving cels of the main characters with the wrong paint colors or with scratches in front of groups of gorillas while they fire flame-throwers near them and shout "NO!" through bullhorns.)
The camerawork was pretty bad (jittery pans, choppy movement and about everything else that could go wrong) and due to the severe lack of time we just let it go rather than calling retakes. As it was the last scenes went to the camera 12 minutes before they were supposed to be finished. (There were 4 scenes shot with the wrong backgrounds and they stayed that way "None of the viewers will know.")
On top of all this, the backgrounds were pretty bad and the drawing quality was just average. The music was as uninteresting as anime music can be.
The production people hated working on the show and we started trying to shove it off on each other. If somebody came in late or we were mad at them for some reason they would have to work on BUCHIGIRI that day. After a while we just tried to ignore it and let it get done by itself, checking on its progress periodically but that just made it worse. Nobody in the studio wanted to touch it. When it was all over, we took the storyboards out and burned them in the parking lot of Red Lobster at 3 am.
I figured out that this show was going to be pretty bad early on so I asked that my name not be in the credits. When I saw the completed version at the staff showing, and how it had become almost a textbook case of what not to do when producing animation, I was very glad of that decision. I never saw it after it came out on tape. Sales were quite unimpressive. This is a good thing. Such things should not be supported!
As for the controversy over whether Richard Crenna invented tartar sauce or not I have no real opinion. You may want to check other sites on the Web dealing with this. (Type in "Richard Crenna + tartar sauce" in Alta Vista for more.)