With anime's new found popularity, it is perhaps easy to forget that Japanese animation had gained a measure of success in the United States some 30 years ago. Central to this success was producer Fred Ladd, who helped pioneer the American distribution of anime, a field in which he continues to be involved.

Fred Ladd. Photo by Harvey Deneroff.

Ladd, a native of Toledo, Ohio, who studied Radio & TV at Ohio State University, was based in New York for the first 30 years of his career, which did not initially start out in animation. His involvement in this arena was, in fact, somewhat serendipitous.

"I had gone to work at an advertising agency," he recalls, "where I wound up doing a lot of nature documentaries. The very first one, Jungle, was about animals and their natural habitats. It was sold to some countries which could not export dollars to pay for the shows, but they could send us films in exchange.

"So, the question became, 'What kind of film are we going to take?' We didn't want to have foreign art films--we weren't in that business--but there were a lot of cartoons that we could take," which they did. These films, many in what seemed to be in "bastard lengths of 30 to 50 minutes, which are standard programming lengths in Europe, for which there was no market for on American TV, especially as single films." Ladd thus took on the task to adapt these films for the American market.

Kimba, The White Lion. Courtesy of Fred Patten.

His solution was to dub them into English and package them into 5 to 5-1/2 minute episodes, which were released under the name of Cartoon Classics. His success with this and two other programs, The Space Explorers and The New Adventurers of the Space Explorer, led to his involvement in the production of the animated feature, Pinocchio in Outer Space, which was released theatrically by Universal Pictures. (He would later help produce a second feature, Journey Back to Oz, which like the first involved the artistic collaboration of Preston Blair.)

Astro Boy
"Sometime in 1963," Ladd recalls, " NBC's representative in Tokyo saw a very, very limited action, adventure show on television about a little boy called Tetsuan Atom, which means Iron Fisted Atom Boy. NBC Enterprises, a division of the broadcast network, picked it up very cheap, not even knowing what they were buying. No one spoke Japanese. No one really understood it.