Back in 1994 I was involved in the production of K.O. Century Beast Warriors, the one and only release on the Anime UK video label and my first shot at being a voice actor; this is a look back at those few days in May and my part as Badd Mint, lecherous bird-warrior and all-American hero.

It seemed like a great idea at the time; a bunch of us were working for Anime UK Magazine, Britain's first and foremost anime and manga publication, writing, translating and just generally grooving on the whole Nippon vibe, when someone suggested that it was time to stop reporting on anime and start producing it. More accurately, dubbing it and distributing it to a content-hungry audience. AUK's editor Helen McCarthy got the ball rolling with translator Jonathan Clements, and the first I knew of it was when he called me at my day job.

"Can you do an American accent?" he asked. "Sure." I drawled, and with that short audition I was hired; partly on the strength of my faux-Californian, but mostly because I wasn't an Equity member, so I would work for less (much less) than scale. The following week, I was in a cupboard-like studio in Soho with a gaggle of other amateurs, a couple of real thespians and a highly professional technical crew. I was playing Badd Mint, a mutant teenager from the Bird Tribe with an eye for the ladies and a selfish streak a mile wide; they told me I was a natural choice for the part. Someone handed me a copy of the script and prodded me toward the mike; I had twenty seconds to rehearse, and then I was on.

K.O. Century Beast Warriors was made in 1992 by the KSS anime studio, a straight-to-video science fiction action-comedy series about a group of heroic teens discovering their destiny and saving the world. On an Earth split (literally) between the nasty Humans and the mutant Beast tribes, the evil Tourmaster seeks the secret of Gaia, a power that can unite the world; opposing him is dissident scientist Professor Password and granddaughter Yuni, who help a trio of young Beast warriors to awaken the Totems, a trio of powerful machines. Leading the fight is Wan, a plucky lad who can transform into a tiger-man, the mermaid princess Meima and Badd, a bird warrior with chicken-fried courage. Brightly coloured with a shallow plot and lots of broad gags, the show featured talent like Hiroshi Negishi (Ladius, Knights of Ramune) as director and costume designs by Oh My Goddess! creator Kosuke Fujishima.

At first, my character had been concived through Jonathan's translation as a Pepe Le Pew-style ladykiller, but the script later bore out his 'Yankee' origins; even in the original version he's heard to utter hip-speak like "Hey, Bruddah!" and other snatches of Japlish, plus the fact that Badd's grandfather looked like a cross between Yoda and Uncle Sam sealed the deal. Badd was from the US of A, as I later proved by making him mimic Homer Simpson, David Lee Roth and Han Solo at important plot junctures.

Writing for AUK and Manga Mania, I'd frequently griped about poor voice actors, but after walking a mile in their shoes I changed my mind. I saw just how hard it was to muster up an emotive outburst for the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth take. I felt a little more sympathetic; but I also got less forgiving when I realised that it's not so hard to do the job right, that poor direction and slapdash production are part and parcel of companies who viewed dubbing as the least important thing in releasing an anime. I worked the entire first day of the dub without ever having seen the show I was voicing or previously having read the script; production company Paradox hadn't sent out material to the actors because they thought there would be no point. That night I went home, pored over my dialogue and watched the raw Japanese footage a half-dozen times; I stayed up so late I missed the call the next day and arrived in time for lunch, grovelling, apologising and weathering comments that I'd become a prima donna...

We suffered for our art as we yelled and snarled our way through Clements's script, running through a rain of flame-retardants when the studio fire alarms went off, punching one another to get the right kind of "ooof!" noises, screeching, barking and debating the use of the word 'bastard'. Some of our cast were proper actors and not the bunch of AUK staff members and friends-of-friends the rest of us were; they said things like "Oh, for a Muse of Fire!" when asked for a sound check and read The Stage when they weren't looking at the clock and thinking of their next audition. Still, those of us who'd never done anything better than AmDram were heartened when the 'pros' gave performances worthy of 2 x 4's and wandered their ethnic accents around the countryside like wayward puppies.

In a masterpiece of casting, we had an eight year-old girl to play an eight year-old girl, along with a Cockney barrowboy hero and an Essex princess. Then there was me, taking work out of the hands of some struggling American actor somewhere. Despite a few flubs and rookie mistakes, I stand by the majority of my performance, noting that it was authentic enough to fool some genuine Americans when previewed at a US convention; in his smooth-talking lothario mode, Badd's breathless hearts-and-flowers monologues were enough to make my female castmates swoon, and what more can a guy ask for? But for all the effort, Beast Warriors would forever be a flash in the pan, doomed with poor sales into VHS limbo; plans for the sequel series K.O.Century Beast Warriors II and a subtitled version never materialised. Alas, Badd Mint, we hardly knew ye.

Jonathan did directorial duties and writerly cat-herding throughout the sessions, as well as lending his dulcet tones to the floppy-haired villain V-Daan. He recalls "Helen thought the script would be about eight pages long, and when it arrived it was 150 pages of handwritten Japanese. Beast Warriors was a dreadful flop for all sorts of reasons, and it’s best regarded as a £40,000 grant for me to find out how not to run a production." Like Jonathan, Helen also pseudonymously appeared in the show as Akumako, a tiny devil woman who constantly maddened our heroes; Harry Payne (as turtle-boy Mekka) and John Spencer (as Shaba, Wan's dad) filled out the rest of the Anime UK reprobates on the bill.

In the boom-and-bust phase of UK anime production, Beast Warriors was ill-starred from the start, and it fell by the wayside like a handful of other British one-off anime labels like East2West and Crusader. Copies of the tape are - perhaps luckily - as rare as an ice cube on Venus, but the show lives on in plans for a new dub, done with proper actors by a major US anime distributor.

And as for me? My voice is available for rent.

Right to left: Jim Swallow discusses the Beast Warriors script with Jonathan Clements; Harry Payne and Helen McCarthy prepare for their arduous roles.

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© J.Swallow, 2002. All images © their original copyright holders.

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