That time a Japanese animator hid a secret message in an episode of DuckTales

I noticed this a few years ago, but to my knowledge it hasn't been discussed here before (or possibly anywhere).

30 years ago, an episode of DuckTales titled "The Sweet Duck of Youth" first aired. It's about Scrooge looking for the the legendary fountain of youth Ponce de Leon wrote about, and the inciting incident for his quest is a passage from an old book about mythical treasure. Here are some screengrabs from that scene:
imgur.com/a/ZcPcw

In the first page is more or less a paraphrase of what Scrooge reads aloud to the boys, but the towards the end the artist starts doodling seemingly random English and Japanese words.

The next page is where the secret message starts, and below is my attempt at deciphering it line-for-line. If any has a better idea of what some of these words are supposed to be, or better yet, can read Japanese, PLEASE help! This has been bugging me ever since I found it.

>animation product
>animate (animateya?) best one sure,
>I have a pen. I have a pencil --
>[I] can't write English story of Walt Disney's Ducktales
>My name is Osame Okabo
>I can't speak English and
>[wr]ite it. So anyone us
>an it very nice spe
>[aking] English.

After the word 'English' is where the Japanese starts. Here's what little I can make out:

>Nihon no
>[anim]ation wa totemo
>shu desuyoga
>Disney no mo
>a kakemo
>a rutuoa

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japaneseism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left_in_Japan
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Another shot from that sequence.

Very interesting. But I suspect you may need to head to Sup Forums if you wish to succeed.

Pfft. They'd just tell me head here.

That's interesting. I'm sorry I can't help, I know just very shoddy basics like that "Nihon" means "Japan".
Also, this is the second time I'm hearing about strange writings in Ducktales.

Here's to you, Osame Okabo, wherever you are.

That... can't be real, can it? Brb, making a quick trip to KimCartoon to confirm.

I'm 99.9% certain that's true. You'd be better off trying Sup Forums rather than Sup Forums or /jp/. The users of those boards pride themselves on being clannish, unhelpful and snooty. Bunch of miserable little pissant bitches. Over the years, whenever I've had cause to hang around Sup Forums I've always gone out of my way to help whoever I could, often just to spite them.

I don't know what Sup Forums sees as their board culture but it can't be any worse than those two. If you can't find anyone willing to parse it here, maybe try there instead.

Haha, that's awesome. By then the show was being drawn in Australia, so they definitely knew what they were writing. :)

Thanks for the tip, user, I just might do that.

I'm pretty sure it's real. I took the screenshot just now from my copy of the episode instead of using the screenshots that Google search provides.

The text is somewhat different in this other shot, though.

>I don't know what Sup Forums sees as their board culture
Basically rate how white I am, or do I pass as a native in your country shit

They do that to keep people like you out, glad to see its working

I know better now, I just posted a screenshot from KimCartoon two posts up.

But if you don't me asking, where'd you get your copy? It looks cleaner than the shots I was able to take from my season 1 DVD.

...

A little later in the scene, there's some japanese/english/engrish written on other books from Scrooge's bookshelf:

>NANDAKANA
>BAW WAW DOR II
>NATIONAL

I can't remember for certain. I think we had a share thread here and someone posted a Mega link.

Forgot to say but "totemo" means "very".

>I have a pen. I have a pencil --
M...MASAKA! Are they the pioneers of this?

>NEVER GIVE UP!
>DR. 1
>WAHAHA STORY

>Forgot to say but "totemo" means "very".
That's actually helpful, thanks. I know "wa" means something like "is", so the line goes something like "animation is very ____".

>Nihon no [anim]ation wa totemo
The [anim]ation of Japan is very...

>desuga Disney no mo
But disney's (animation) is also

And then the last few words are too broken up and unclear

Don't know Nihongo but watching thread.

Wow, thanks! So maybe he's saying something about how Japanese animation is very hard, but Disney's style of animation is difficult, too. Or maybe the second line is noting that Disney's animation is done in Japan as well?

I believe he wrote that anyone(meaning everyone) at Disney is nice with him in spite of not speaking English very well. Then he writes that he will now write in Japanese and we get this:

Since Its written in wannabe Italics, It bothers me that is trying to looks more to be "desyuga" or "deshou ga", specially since I cant see the Disney word on it in the romanji there

In both cases it's a reference to common phrases in English classes in Japan.

I know, Im not trying to talk about their abysmally archaic and bad english they still force there today, just trying joke about it, damn it

That makes sense. Thanks!

I didn't know that was a phrase they used in Japanese English classes. Cool.

yeah no shit that's what he said. i don't know why would be glad of that though.

Weird text might result from Japanese and English having very different grammar structures. If the guy was bad at English, maybe he didn't know how to write it coherently enough. Also, it looks like there may have been a little more text but it's outside the frame.

Asian people aren't always very familiar with the Latin alphabet. They can accidentally draw them the wrong way or even use nonexistent letters, much like how Western people can easily mangle Asian characters. If you're not familiar with the alphabet system of a foreign language, it's easy to fuck up their letters. I know that at least Batman: The Animated Series had a bunch of parts where Japanese artists made mistakes while drawing letters. Pic related, it's supposed to say "Win the original Jokermobile".

The stuff posted ITT seems legible enough. The letters are drawn right, but they don't make much sense. I'm particularly curious about the book names here
The background artist could've left these books blank like most of the books on the shelf, but they chose to write stuff on them. "Never give up!" sounds so inspirational and makes it seem like the artist was trying to say something to the audience, but I don't understand the other ones.

Nandakana seems like a word play in japanese
Nanda means "what"
Kana means "syallbary"

Never give up!
World War II
National, perhaps don't forget national pride after WWII?

Japanese uses Hiragana and Katakana for wording
In this sense, it can be translated as "whatever-gana"

>a kakemo
man the low resolution and its wannabe italics make that shit hard to properly read.
Since I doubt is Takeru, It looks more like Kakeru but then again te the damn thing has a "y" looking letter there or rather it seems to have a "-ruy" end so it couldnt be the animator trying to write "kakeyō"

When It come to Japanese the damn problem is that there is not even 1 version of Romanization of their alphabet, that is Why some people may have see sometimes they write words like "Syojo", wikipedia and others write it as: "Shōjo" and most people write or refer it as "Shoujo"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese

>The Animated Series had a bunch of parts where Japanese artists made mistakes while drawing letters. Pic related, it's supposed to say "Win the original Jokermobile".

One correction: Joker's Wild was animated by AKOM productions, a Korean based studio. It's the studio most infamous among TAS because Bruce Timm grew so fed up with their slipshod work that he fired them.

Thanks for the correction.
Either way, point is that people write stuff like this when they're not familiar enough with the language/letters. But I guess it's more of a side-note; the guy OP was asking about at least knew the alphabet system well enough.

These should be Sup Forums's rules

Assuming the animator at that time grow up in the 60s when the Japanese students movements were at its peak, they were quite the opposite of your "bushido nationalist" but yeah what lead to and happened in WW2 is one of their core elements ideals at the time

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Japaneseism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left_in_Japan

You guys seem quite knowledgeable about Japanese (you know far more than I do, at least!). I'm so glad you found this thread.

Is not secret alot of users here either browse also Sup Forums or used to do so but got tired of it, Im more of the later, the autism here is rather livable most of the time and I love pretty much most animated media and a good story, is just that Japs shits more diverse stuff of it that western thus why I used to browse more Sup Forums stuff time ago

scrooge looks like he just got a bad blowjob the way he is sitting there and that face.

reminds me of Akira

>Illuminati

You mean "ask about illuminati". And underneath that, "twg boys" or something.