Yoshiyuki Sadamoto & Olympia

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cyharding
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Yoshiyuki Sadamoto & Olympia

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Postby cyharding » Sat Mar 19, 2011 10:46 pm

I own a copy of Sadamoto's Alpha artbook, and the book conatins illustrations of something (I think it's a video game) entitled Olympia. I can't read Japanese, so does anyone know what this is? I tried to find out by myself, but google failed me on this one. Thanks in advance for any information.

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Postby Ornette » Fri Mar 25, 2011 5:55 pm

I think I randomly found one of the pages for this book, if anyone who can read this, take a look at what it says.

https://cdn.tesuji.org/images/Olympia-Alpha005.jpg

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Postby 1731298478 » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:14 pm

View Original PostOrnette wrote:I think I randomly found one of the pages for this book, if anyone who can read this, take a look at what it says.

https://cdn.tesuji.org/images/Olympia-Alpha005.jpg


It (Sadamoto) says that Olympia was an idea proposed as Anno's next project after Nadia, but it never came together. It was about a girl named Olympia who traveled to various planets to gather powerful weapons that had been hidden away in order to avenge her father against the emperor of the galactic federation. All the weapons combined to form a giant robot. It was conceived as being between Nadia and Gunbuster in terms of atmosphere.

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Postby Reichu » Wed Mar 30, 2011 6:58 pm

Anno ought to resurrect it for Khara's next big project. And fuck with people's heads by including all sorts of false intimations that it's connected to Gunbuster, Nadia, and Evangelion's universes.
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Postby cyharding » Wed Mar 30, 2011 11:05 pm

That's very interesting. Again, thank you for the information. It was the only one of the titles in the book that I couldn't figure out.

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Postby Noriko is my wife » Sun Apr 03, 2011 6:02 am

The Notenki Memoirs describes the planning of this project
In his characteristic lucid style Yasuhiro Takeda wrote:Olympia - the phantom project

It was around this time that Okada suggested we pull out of anime altogether.

None of our animated titles were turning a profit - weren't even accepting any new projects. Our in-house animators were kept on, but found themselves with nothing to do.

Okada was the one who had wanted to mimic the practices of other production companies, but our attempts to treat production in that manner consistently lost money... and now he was saying that we should quit.

You've gotta be kidding me! I thought to myself. You frickin' idiot!

I decided to give Okada a good talking to. I was joined by Akai, who pointed out that GAINAX's involvement in anime was the very thing that gave it its foothold in the gaming industry. Dropping anime in favor of games was precisely the wrong way to go about things. What's more, we were determined to let Anno have another crack at making an anime.

We all headed to Matsumoto to hammer out the details of our next project. The reason we chose that locale was that our brainstorming session would double as a weekend retreat, and we always did those in Matsumoto. Once there, we all began tossing out ideas, and the first major snag we hit was Olympia.

The storyboards for the project were included in the very first collection of drawings we received from Sadamoto, which meant that the details of this thing had already been thought out to some degree. We came up with some good ideas of our own, but thinking back on it, the way that we came up with them was a little odd. We had just started to get a good grasp of the story when somebody piped up, "Okada, you're not helping. Why don't you sit this one out for a while?" Things started getting back on track, but almost immediately, it was "Anno, now you're not helping. Just hang back for a bit, ok?" Finally, it ended up being just Yamaga, Akai and myself banging out the framework for the project. It might have been wrong, but it was the most expedient way to go about things.

But then we hit a snag, and everything came to a screeching halt.

I think if the same thing happened now I'd be able to do more, but back then I felt almost helpless, as if I'd been backed into a corner. Finally, we all agreed that the project was unsalvageable, and the whole idea was scrapped. I feel like it was my fault, that I was inexperienced as a producer.

Following this incident, Okada announced that he would be leaving GAINAX.

"The storyboards" could be a mistranslation of "image boards" and refer to the concept drawings found in Sadamoto's book.

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Postby gwern » Thu Jun 23, 2011 11:36 am

Thanks for the information, guys. I'd always wondered what Olympia was actually about; added links & summary to the footnote in my TNM page. Interesting how the same scrapped ideas keep coming up - if you squint, Olympia looks a bit like what Okada was talking about:

OKADA: After EVANGELION, his next plan is to make a STAR TREK. Not *that* STAR TREK--a sort of anime like STAR TREK, a crew in a spaceship, who go to every planet, and each planet has its own culture. For example, one planet will have a very democratic culture, and everyone will approve, so they'll board, or they say, "no," and they talk with the crew about everything. And the spaceship crew will sometimes fall in love in some way on the planet, or something will happen--*maybe* some robots fight [LAUGHS]. He wants to make that film, because Mr. Anno thinks it will be a very good experience for the Japanese animation world. But the sponsor says, "It's not so good,"

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Re: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto & Olympia

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Postby imprimatur13 » Sun Aug 27, 2017 3:42 pm

Here's the scan, btw. The original link is broken.
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Re: Yoshiyuki Sadamoto & Olympia

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Postby Ornette » Wed Aug 30, 2017 9:04 am

Thanks, I fixed link


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