The people behind Third Earth
The Crew
Ten people in a New York office. A studio in Tokyo built from the wreckage of Topcraft. 130 episodes.
The voice cast gave SilverHawks its voice. This is everyone else. The writers who invented Third Earth, the artists who drew every new villain on deadline, the producer who ran the recording sessions, the composer who made a syndicated cartoon sound like a film, and the Japanese animators who turned rough pencil sketches into the show people actually remember. Most of them are barely credited. Some are not credited at all.
Two rooms, one show
SilverHawks was made the way every Rankin/Bass production had been made since the 1960s, split across the Pacific. Scripts, casting, recording and design happened in New York. The recorded tapes, the storyboards and the design sheets were flown to Tokyo, where Pacific Animation Corporation animated the episodes. Finished reels came back to New York for editing and broadcast.
The New York end was tiny. Ten people, of whom often only one was an artist. The Tokyo end was a studio formed out of Topcraft, the company that had just lost two thirds of its staff to Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata when they founded Studio Ghibli. Between them they shipped 130 half hours in four years.
Wing one
The New York room
Rankin/Bass Productions, a small office in midtown Manhattan with a hand-operated elevator. Profiles marked Profile coming are on the build list; if you knew these people or worked with them, we would like to hear from you.
Wing two
The Tokyo studio
Pacific Animation Corporation drew SilverHawks. Twelve of its animators have full portfolio pages here, tracing careers that run from Topcraft and Mushi Productions through Studio Ghibli, Gainax, Disney and Evangelion.
Long-form feature The Tokyo studio that drew SilverHawks The studio history, the lineage from Topcraft, the addresses, the Disney acquisition, and what happened to everyone afterwards. Read the feature- Katsuhito Akiyama Director, Season 1
- Masaki Iizuka In Charge of Production
- Tsuguyuki Kubo Character Designer, Supervising Animator
- Masayuki Opening Sequence Key Animator
- Minoru Nishida Background Artist
- Kazufumi Nomura Animation Staff
- Toshihiko Sato Animation Staff
- Shigeo Koshi Animation Staff
- Yuji Yatabe Animation Staff, all four seasons
- Tameo Kohanawa Animation Staff
- Ryo Yasumura Animation Staff
- Akihiko Takahashi Animation Staff
Elsewhere on the site
Help us finish this
Crew histories are the hardest thing on a fan site to get right. Credits were thin, records were thrown away, and the people who know are not always the people with websites. If you worked on SilverHawks, are related to someone who did, or hold production art, scripts or photographs, we would like to talk.
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