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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

> He was blown away, as well. Obviously it influenced us when it came time to create TaleSpin.

Kinda interesting given how many similarities there are in the setting of talespin and Porco Rosso. But talespin predates porco rosso by 2 years.

When I first watched porco rosso I thought “man talespin really copied this one!” And only later learned of the time line. Now I can’t help imagining Miyazaki watching talespin and get inspired - although realistically they probably both draw from the same, third source of inspiration.

Also transformers and Gundam. There has got to be a connection there.

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Miyazaki's family owned an airplane parts manufacturing company during WWII. In the 80s he contributed manga and illustrations of airplanes and tanks to a hobby magazine Model Graphix. One of these short manga, published 1989, he adapted into Porco Rosso. I don't know if the creators of Talespin would have had access to it but it is possible

TaleSpin was inspired by old adventure movies. The whole tiki-bar culture, scruffy cargo pilot thing was a vibe back then.

Transformers has a much weirder cycle. They were a collection of different transforming toy lines from Japan that U.S. companies wanted to sell to children here. They divvied them up based on criteria: road vehicles largely became good guys, weapons and planes largely became bad guys. They wrote some comics around a concept of a giant war, made some animated films as a sort of pilot, and went to town.

Jetfire (IIRC) is actually a Macross figure.

Gundam is Gundam. I think that's just a Japanese series that is also popular in the U.S.

To me some of the main characters from transformers really looks like gundam. That’s what I meant with “there must be a connection”, as I thought transformers was an American invention and assumed heavy inspiration from gundam.

As much as any mecha is inspired by any other mecha.

Go Lion, Albegas, Dairugger, Super Sentai, Macross, Gundam, they're all the same and they're all different. I think it all comes down to "Giant robots are fucking cool"

Transformers were Japanese toys ported to America. I don't think there's a direct connection other than Japan's fascination with mecha, which predates both Gundam and Transformers.

I had no idea. That makes it seem like an even bigger omission.

Transformers was really big and the Michael Bay reboot movies made the franchise huge again and it’s all basically Anime.

While it's true the Transformers toys were made in Japan the old Transformers cartoon which ran in the U. S. was American made and an American company owns the western rights to the toys.

From the Wikipedia article about the show

>The series was produced by Marvel Productions and Sunbow Productions in association with Japanese studio Toei Animation

Toei Animation, the studio that made Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon, seemed responsible for the animation in the first two seasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transformers_(TV_series)

That's interesting: it seems the writers were American and the animators were a Japanese studio.

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