hello! this is something i've been meaning to do ever since my bud Jon has been writing similar post-mortems for his series Ratbasterdz. it seems like a fun way of detailing every step of the production of the episodes and effectively getting everything off my chest, putting it to bed. and also a hopefully fun read for people that are interested in this side of things. I let it slip me by for episode 1 and 2, but I decided to sit down and write one up for episode 3, and if people are interested I can go back and write similar ones up for episode 1 and 2 maybe!
This is a pretty stream of consciousness writeup, I didn't do any major planning so hopefully it's structured well enough to follow it coherently.
PUNCH PUNCH FOREVER EPISODE 3
If it hasn't been clear yet, PPF is essentially just a big love letter to the things I love. PPF episode 1 (and the series at large) primarily showcases my love of retro anime, the aesthetic of old worn VHS tapes, the smug early internet in-fighting between fansubbers, the music and vibes of the beginning of Japan's Heisei period right at the tail end of the 80s and very beginning of the 90s.
PPF 2 was a love letter to horror and slasher movies, and PPF 3 of course is a love letter to wrestling.
speedo likes wrestling :-)
I think a lot of people around my age can recall the WWF Attitude era wrestling in the late 90s to early 2000s being a total staple of the zeitgeist. It occupies the same space in my brain as early South Park, Jackass, MTV, blink-182, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, the internet dial-up sound. It felt like everybody was into wrestling at that time, and I was no different, pretty regularly watching shows with my older brother and cousin throughout the tail end of 99 into the early 2000s, painfully recreating moves out in his front yard, playing the PS1/PS2 Smackdown games, amassing a decent little collection of wrestling figures (my favorite being the sweating Stone Cold Steve Austin i for some reason really wanted - note his bottle of "Official Federation Sweat" (water) that you would put in a hole in his back and then it seeps out his crevices)
The irony of calling the new episode "Toothless Aggression" - a play on the "Ruthless Aggression" era that followed the Attitude era - was that it was during this era that I kind of fell off, somewhere around the mid-late 2000s.I'd tangentially keep in touch with wrestling by osmosis on the internet over the years - I fondly remember the Super Best Friends "Rustlemania" videos - it wasn't until around 2019 that I would say I proper started getting back into it. All culminated with the Dark Side of the Ring documentary series starting, a friend of mine just getting into wrestling at the time and I opted to watch any new major WWE shows like Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania, etc with him, and also myself wanting to check out joshi wrestling like TJPW.
So after starting PPF, doing a wrestling themed episode was always on the cards!
beginning production
I had a loose outline for what the concept of the first 8 or so episodes of PPF would be. I'd originally planned the "Mama wrestling" episode to come much later down the line (like an episode 7 or something), but the amount of fanart and such for the brief snippet of Mama in her wrestling leotard in the intro, led me to push it up to being the 3rd episode.
I went into this episode with the idea that it would be sort of "filler/standard". In the sense of, episode 4 and 5 I had already planned to be a bit of a shakeup to the formula, and episode 2 already in and of itself felt like a bit of a deviation from the main setting (in hindsight, making episode 2 of my show about a fighting tournament - and having the characters already going on a camping trip to take a break from the tournament - feels a bit silly lol it feels like it should have been more of an "episode 6" type of plot), so I wanted episode 3 to be pretty standard, with a simple fight back in a stadium setting while an audience watches, more closer to episode 1, but keeping it relatively fresh by having Mama being more of a focus in the fight. I felt like it was a little *too* early to have a solo fight without Gogo, so I decided a tag-team fight was the way to go.
character design
With a vague idea in mind for what I was gonna do for the episode, it was onto designing the main antagonists. for this episode, I did something I thought I'd never do.. get someone else involved with character design! I like to think I'm decent enough at designing characters myself, handling all the character design by myself for episode 1 and 2. Somewhere during episode 2's production though, is where I stumbled upon SpankyDraws, whose clear influence from old school Capcom and anime, pretty much entirely aligned with the kind of designs that I wanted in PPF. Some of his art that I saw that specifically made me want to work with him: (1) (2) (3) (4)
me and SpankyDraw's back and forth drafts for the characters
So I hit him up, and thought we'd go through a process of ping-ponging ideas back and forth, me sending him a first draft, letting him rework it some more and sending it back to me, then I rework his drafts some more, and so on.
Originally, the tag team idea was just gonna' be one singular Nabe, with a taller female wrestler partner.
A very early idea I had wanted to do, was to get a couple of actual Japanese wrestlers provide their voices for the characters - the ones I really wanted were Maki Itoh for the girl - a joshi wrestler who has over the years made more of a name for herself in the west, appearing on AEW, and being especially known for her excessive swearing in English, frequently sharing what "words she learned today" on twitter, which would then be followed by her saying things like "cleveland steamer" and "donkey punch". Who is teaching her these foul terms... I thought that was so funny, I even drew fanart of her a few years ago!
I then wanted the guy to be voiced by Tomoaki Honma, who, although I knew his voice wouldn't be as immediately obvious to the typical viewer compared to Maki's then-growing western internet presence, his very infamous crushed vocal cords give him this incredibly gravely strange voice that is so unique and funny sounding that I didn't think that aspect would matter:
I'll let you figure out which one is Tomoaki Honma based on his voice!
Eventually I scrapped the idea because the idea of getting not one but two different non-voice acting entertainers onboard for my internet cartoon seemed like an incredible undertaking. Zach & Michael's story about getting Gilbert Gottfried for Smiling Friends came to mind, so I just imagined that scenario but 10 times more difficult given the language barrier.
But as you could see above, after my initial draft, Spanky finessed the Nabe design as well as designing the basic idea for the DWF belt. By draft 3, I'd rewritten the female wrestler to be more of a ringside "arm candy", like some wrestlers that rock up to the ring with their wife by their side. Her design continued to shift, eventually landing on the near finished design you see in draft 3. To maintain the tag team dynamic, I then decided to split up the Nabe into a pair of identical twins. In the last draft by Spanky, he had the idea of having the twins resemble that old Japanese folklore tale of the red and blue oni. Lastly, he added the finishing touch to Mika, which was adding the wolf pelt to her coat. I'm not sure if he intended the wolf pelt to be literally still be alive like I wound up doing though! But this process came out great, and led to them being designs I love wholesale, especially Mika being one of my favorite character designs of the whole show! Spanky is a character design machine so he roughed out tons of other random character designs, some of whom I threw into some of the crowd shots in this episode, and a few that are so fucking good that I wanted to keep them for future episodes to play more significant parts. Don't think he has a newgrounds, but give him a follow on twitter for sure!
storyboard/animatic
storyboards for the episode
Finishing episode 2 led to some of the most extreme burnout I'd ever experienced, and in combination with a lot of other small negative things happening in my life around that same time such as mounting health issues, early production on episode 3 was definitely the roughest of any of the episodes. Overall, the process of writing, storyboarding and doing the animatic, a process that at most took up to about 1.5 - 2 months TOPS for previous episodes, this time had taken over 5 months. 5!!!! some animators could make an entire cartoon from start to finish in that length of time.
When I'm really in the throes of working on a project, I happily spend 5,6,7.. right up to 11 or so hours in a day animating/drawing. But during this period I was struggling to spend more than 2 or 3 hours a day, just aimlessly picking away at this storyboard while my mind worried about other things, and not being overly satisfied with any of it.
Given what I mentioned earlier about kind of viewing episode 3 as a bit "filler", I think that also led to me being very lax with it, but eventually I slogged it over the line and got the animatic done by around mid-late December.
animatic
Steadily over each episode, I've been getting more and more animators involved, but I still like to do the lions share, to keep it feeling still wholly my own. With episode 1, I essentially did all of the animation (both animatic and cleanup) entirely myself, with the exception being a couple of effects/explosion animations. Episode 2, I got a few other people to do a couple of rough animatic shots of the more intense fight scene moments, and a handful of people did some extra cleanup to speed up the process on the tail end of its production. For this episode though, I decided to leave a lot more shots in the animatic open for others to do, and intended to have a lot more hands on deck for the cleanup.
I would still say I did about 85-90% of the animatic myself still. I definitely know my limits, things like effect animations are a weakpoint, and certain movements and moments that convey character weight in a more grounded way are a bit out of my field. But also I'm stubborn, so I don't want to just give away all the "cool" shots that might be a challenge! Some shots I'm particularly proud of were Yubisaku picking up the chair and throwing it at Jushin Aniki (9:23), Mama powerbombing Shirisaku down into the ring and through the earth (10:04), and the entire Mika rant near the end (11:44).
My disinterest in offsetting the work to too many other people is exactly the reason why i like keeping PPF indie and haven't much interest in network shit, but getting other talented animators onboard to rough some shots out leads to character movements and moments I never would have thought of or been capable of doing myself, such as Jin's expressive walk up to and lean on the ropes (4:24, roughed by Crib and cleaned up by me), or Gogo skidding across the ring and bouncing into the ropes (5:45, roughed & cleaned up by waterzenno) .
It's been a learning process to essentially "let go of the wheel" and be comfortable with letting other people do their thing, and it basically always comes out better for it.
It did leave to me having to do a lot of grunt work that I would never really be doing for cartoons I would usually do entirely by myself, such as detailed turnarounds, and animation guidelines.
cleanup guideline, and Nono turnaround.
as a final note, I continue to use dusty old Flash 8 to do both the storyboard and animatic. I will always find Flash to be the easiest, most straight forward animation program to use, so it remains my go-to for the early production. I still use it for cleanup on plenty of other animations I do, but for PPF, I do cleanup in Clip Studio Paint EX.
cleanup
cleanup in Clip Studio Paint EX! each animation layer, i put into a folder, within which i have 3 sublayers - the top being the lineart, the middle layer being the shadows/highlight colors and the bottom layer being the flat colors
Despite the very sluggish early production process, the cleanup process was a relative breeze. From January, up to basically the end of May, the whole 11-ish minutes of animation was all cleaned up and colored. I think getting all of that done in just over 5 months is really impressive. Given how much of the production was held up by myself early on, it leaves me a little more optimistic of future episode productions, as obviously I don't intend to take that long on the early stages anymore.
Learning to animate in Clip Studio Paint EX and my process is perhaps something I go into further if I go back and do similar writeup for episode 1, but to be honest, it's a bit of a clunky process. Not bad enough to make me not use it of course, but certainly not as straightforward and intuitive as Flash. that being said, the end result (especially being able to use any kind of brush instead of Flash's googoo gaga basic vector brush) is worth it. I feel like the lineart brush I use for PPF isn't even the most "authentic" looking it could be to replicate the cel animation look, but it's one I'm quite happy with. Again, maybe the whole process of what I do to achieve PPF's retro look is something best saved for an episode 1 retrospective writeup.
The cleanup though is where I let other artists take the wheel more, myself doing about 75%~ of the cleanup. Everyone did great at style matching to maintain a cohesive visual. Particular shoutout to Rechi, who style-matched pretty seamlessly and wound up doing over a minute (!) of the entire cleanup himself!
Another cool little thing in this episode was the pixel art/animation videogame segment done by Nakamanga! I rough animated the segment in the animatic, and gave them that, plus the character designs roughs below and they turned it into the cool authentically Capcom-looking "Fart Biter II"!
my roughs for Fart Biter II, "Slambeef" being designed by myself (though i may not have done much, given the thinly-veiled parody), "Gigahead" designed by SpankyDraws
Fart Biter II final version in the episode
I'm a big multi-media hoe, so always love to have some sort of awkwardly green-screened live action included, or 3d animation, or in this case pixel animation. So I look forward to playing around with that some more in future episodes!
guest appearances
the great SephirothSword57 returns in the role of Jushin Aniki
Having guest artists I dig on to do the eyecatch artwork is one of my favorite qualities of PPF! I think the artists I gravitate towards for these are ones who I think also convey a bit of a "retro" vibe that fits in with PPF. For instance, the very first artist that came to mind provided the first eyecatch in ep 1, BlueTheBone (+18), whose obviously 80s/early 90s inspired anime artwork was a natural choice. Likewise, ep 2's animated eyecatch by PicassoTrigger has a completely manic hand-drawn feel to it that also fit right in.
Ep 3's eyecatch 1 was done by OKADA, an artist whose colorful poppy drawings of cute women evoke a bit of a retro feel, not entirely dissimilar to Hisashi Eguchi's work. Some artwork by them that particularly caught my eye (1) (2).
Eyecatch 2 was done by Pontoffelnp, someone whose very traditional hand-drawn feeling "art vomit" pieces, filling a canvas with a bunch of characters from different anime, games, movies, etc. with a great handle on caricature, are always a treat for the eyes! Like Spanky, his taste in art and movies lines up with my own, so naturally his aesthetic fit the vibe perfectly. I was surprised to see he drew all 7000 PPF characters for his eyecatch piece! Some other artwork by them (x)
As for other guests, the return of SephirothSword57 is always a welcome one! I think his acting skills and character action came such a long way from the first episode, that I bet you didn't even notice that the Emperor of Japan and Jushin Aniki were even played by the same guy! It was really fun having him involved in an action scene, and animating smears and shit over his footage.
I also got a little voice cameo from Kenny Lauderdale, one of my favorite youtubers that discusses various retro anime and old school Japanese tv shows. Naturally, he was a perfect fit for a "TV shopping channel" style segment at the start of the episode.
oh wait there's Maki Itoh after all!
I'd say somewhere nearing the end of the animatic process in December, I had this scene of Mika freaking out at the end, cursing Yubisaku out in English. The rest of the voice acting was recorded, but I still left this scene blank. I think the thought of "ah but what if I DO get Maki" lingered throughout, down to the point where I decided in my mind that that scene probably wouldn't have been as effective had it been anyone else voicing her. I'd made the decision that fuck it, I'll try and reach out and see if I can get her to do it, and if not, I'd just scrap the scene. A couple of my friends who I'd shown the storyboards to were a bit lukewarm on the scene and it was among the first suggested to scrap when I was wanting to cut the episode down shorter (very early drafts were like 13-15 minutes, and thats without the intro, end credits, etc).
I'd made peace with not getting Tomoaki Honma, as the thought of trying to wrangle a 50 year old Japanese wrestler to record on anything other than his iphone, was a bit too much. Maki I thought being around my age and more "with it" on the western side of the internet, I felt was a bit more attainable. So I try to DM and great immediately, her DM's are closed off. cool! So I went to the next best thing which was going to the website of the agency she wrestles for, and seeing if there's any way I can contact anyone from there. There was a "contact email" page on the DDT Wrestling page, that I assume people use primarily to email and say "hey, my account isn't working, can you help me?" or "this one wrestling match VOD isn't on your website". They are probably not used to "hello, i am a youtuber from Ireland, can one of your wrestlers voice act in my internet cartoon?". But I sent it off anyways, and decided if I didn't hear anything back after about 2 weeks, I would just move on and scrap the scene.
After about 10 days though, I get a response from a guy called Mic Inoue, who it turns out is like one of the showrunners and commentators at TJPW, and he says he is willing to make the Maki voice acting gig happen. With a little help from my usual Japanese voice acting team (RASH A1M), we were able to get a reference take of her lines along with the animatic and character design doodles sent off to them. They even helpfully booked a recording gig in a proper recording space so that it wouldn't sound like complete doodoo. A week or so later, I got back a whole bunch of takes, so much so that I couldn't help but put a couple of the extra "fack you bitch. you piece of shit!" takes at the end. She did so great!
One of my favorite things about having Japanese voice acting is not knowing how lines will wind up being delivered, leading me to animating certain things differently, and this was one of those times. Especially the line "what good are these sorry-ass fingers to me now?", which the take I used was delivered so frenetically and fast, that I really enjoyed animating her really spastically tugging on Yubisaku's fingers, like she was having a temper tantrum.
I'm glad that this scene wound up being one of the "winners" among most of the people that have seen it or I've seen react to, even for people that didn't recognize/ know who Maki Itoh was.
the funny thing is, back in those very early drafts of the antagonists when i had first wanted Tomoaki Honma voicing the Nabe man, and Maki voicing the female wrestler, some drafts of the female wrestler were specifically made to look like Maki. in the end though, I loved the final design me and Spanky had squeaked out, so I kept it unchanged, and put a little Maki demon vaguely based off this design in the background after her scene.
final thoughts
it looks like i've hit the image limit for a news post - i didn't know there was one! - so I guess now is a good a time as any to wrap up this big old post. There was more things I wanted to touch on like compositing stuff, but again I think that could be a topic for another writeup on ep 1 or 2.
in the end, i'm glad people really dig it! I was absolutely convinced at the peak of my slump during the animatic stage, that this would be "the least favorite episode". Not being in a great headspace at the time obviously contributed to that, but if not for the subject matter/references to wrestling potentially not being interesting to some viewers, or Mama being more of the main focus not being as interesting to viewers compared to Gogo or Nono, i felt it just might have not been the funniest one. But from reading what people have been saying, a lot of people consider it their new favorite, or very least 2nd favorite behind episode 2, and i'm absolutely thrilled with that reception!
it means a lot that people are still digging the show even after the very long wait since episode 2's drop.
i'm very excited to continue working on future episodes, and hopefully they should come along a bit quicker. as i said,
episode 4 will be a little bit of a format shakeup, but it should still be a lot of fun! and probably what will come along a little sooner, will be a short Christmas special! i love comfy Christmas specials, and have done a couple of PPF christmas artworks for the past 2 years now, so i've been meaning to do a little animated special!
Please look forward to them! Thanks for reading all this if you did. xoxo
OviManic
Dang, now that’s a passion project!
Wish you the best on Episode 4!