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