Link: 60 Years of Kimba (Jungle Emperor)
: He has been five years gone, but I only just
: learned of Craig Andersen's untimely death
: in 2012, and wanted to remark on what an
: essential guy he was. I am the fan who
: provided Craig with the tape which allowed
: him to reconstruct the famous lost Kimba
: pilot episode. I stumbled across his
: kimbawlion.com site some years ago; at the
: time he knew about the pilot version, with a
: different English language soundtrack, but
: only had a poor quality snippet of the
: famous sequence where Kimba has a vision of
: him late mother.
:
: I happily provided him with the full
: soundtrack. I'd been taping the audio from
: WLVI in Boston, the local home of the Kimba
: series, my goal being to collect the sound
: from all the episodes (no home video in
: those days), and I was lucky to capture the
: one instance when the station
: (accidentally?) aired the demonstration
: version. Craig was very excited to get this,
: and when he finally put my tape together
: with the picture and sent me a DVD of the
: result, I was amazed at what a good job he'd
: done. My tape had some glitches - the sound
: would sometimes go in and out because my TV
: reception wasn't perfect that day - but
: you'd never guess it since he had seamlessly
: cobbled together the best parts of my
: recording with the sound from standard
: version to produce a hybrid that played
: perfectly.
:
: He was very excited about this project, and
: I believe much of the interest in Kimba
: today is a result of his dedication. Later I
: sent him my whole collection of tapes of
: sound from Kimba and other Japanese animated
: shows as broadcast in the late 60s. I can
: think of no greater steward of this material
: than Craig, and I hope all of his collection
: of items germane to the show found its way
: into the hands of someone who appreciates
: it.
:
: Craig was the best that fandom has to offer.
: Sad to hear that he left so early.
: -Peter Mork
Dear Peter,
Thank you for posting! It's an honor to hear from you, and to have you on board!
Yes, Craig was a special guy indeed, and I can only second everything that I wrote on my tribute page! I also still can't believe that already 5 years have passed since he left this world (but his spirit and works didn't)!
I'm very familiar with both your and Craig's effort in capturing and thus recreating the rare Kimba pilot episode as I have a copy of the DVD. As a guy who grew up in 1980s I must say that I'm amazed how you were able to make a "hi-fi" connection (in the 60s) from TV to a reel-to-reel tape recorder! I don't know how many of the Kimba fans have managed to buy the "Little Kimba" DVD from his site, but those who did should be proud to have it in their collection, as it contains your humble efforts of preserving the more loved version of the episode!
Craig's website is the best thing that is freely available to Kimba fans and to the Kimba fandom, something that he was working on for years and decades and in which he put himself deeply, and something that is left for both the current and the future Kimba fans.
His work on it unfortunately had to be stopped but the site is still there, thanks to Craig's wife Robin who extended it's existence after his passing away, and I hope she will continue to do so for the future generations. In other cases I'll gladly help with the preservation of his website.
Best regards,
CroKimba (AKA Arslan)
webmaster of 60 Years of Kimba (Jungle Emperor)
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