Hello, this is WumpaGem, writer and editor of the original video, coming from the future! I'm writing this top comment to be pinned because some interesting development came about regarding Coco's creation and the involvement of Sony Japan on that, basically to offer extra details and corrections. Responding to a fan on Twitter (oops, I mean X), Roppyaku Tsurumi, the producer of the Japanese localization of Crash's PS1 titles, confirmed that they gathered artists within Shuhei Yoshida's group at SCEI Product Departement, to come up with illustrations under the theme of "what if Crash had a little sister and how would she look like?", to be sent to Naughty Dog. The idea was that Japanese artists would draw the concepts first, so to keep elements that are incorporated to be sensible to a Japanese audience, which would then be adapted by the Western artists. Tsurumi asked Takamitsu Iijima and Taichi Ogawa from the Ape Escape team to work on the initial character design. The specific concept art we've shown in the video was actually Ogawa's work and not Iijima's. Charles Zembillas would then take these concepts and refine them, with oversight from Tsurumi. The idea behind Coco's final design, specifically her overalls with the straps off the dominant arm, was to make her look active, and her thick-soled sneakers and laptop were a fad in Japan in the 1990s. Tsurumi explained to Zembillas that "Japanese characters wear meaningful symbols like these". I asked Tsurumi-san on that same thread if the people at SCEI resented the character Tawna in any way and mandated her removal from the series, offering a new character like Coco as a mean to fill the void. Tsurumi responded that SCE Japan did not request her removal and that Jason Rubin's claims were absolutely correct, that being the feud with Universal Interactive's marketing director at the time, Kelly Flaherty. Although there is some truth about Tawna's "nice-body" nature motivating the creation of Coco in the first place. As Shuhei Yoshida commented in a GDC conference back in 2002, when they were playtesting the first game in Japan, one kid commented she looked like a middle-aged woman, thus deeming her too old to be considered a heroine for a young Japanese audience. So it's fair to assume that when Naughty Dog and SCEA took their own initiative to remove Tawna after the feud with Universal, Sony Japan followed in with their own solution of a new character that's more appropriate for Japan. Link to the thread and other sources: twitter.com/tsurumy/status/1692328597145669638 twitter.com/tsurumy/status/1692560355422343353 twitter.com/sarugearchive/status/1692531502364369323 www.gdcvault.com/play/1022565/Next-Generation-Console-Development-and (Timestamp: 40:09)
The bandicoot can talk, he just likes fucking with cortex. Him speaking in full sentences would emotionally destroy the doctor. And you said the naughty dog word, "trope", hold this nitro crate.
I wish Activision cared about japanese Crash players like Naughty Dog used to do back in those days; the two remakes we had are almost perfect for western Crash fans, but they are just made identical in their Japan releases except for the game cover
7:07 Wasn't it confirmed that Charles Zembellas assumed Japan also had an issue with Tawna but I think Andy Gavin said the removal of Tawna was strictly from Universal? They didn't like the forced redesign which is the Tawna we saw so they scrapped her?
Zembillas did confirm ND scrapped Tawna and went to create a sister figure to appease Sony Japan. zembillas.blogspot.com/2013/01/crash-bandicoot-origin-of-coco-part-1.html But Jason and Andy do insist that the bickering with the marketing lady at Universal led to Tawna's scrapping and not Japan. There's two sides of the story around Crash's development in its early era that conflicts with each other, and we wrote this part according to both sides.
@@CrashyNews Ah I get ya. Based on how Jason and Andy tell the story I think the confusion might have been that Japan help design Coco and not properly explaining to Charles what happened. That's how I see it anyways
2:13 small correction, two more mangas were made, one for Crash 1, and another that features *Baby Crash and Baby Coco* , there's a vintage CTR comic that got remade by many people including me, and CTR NF got a free comic as a neat little gift.
Note that we said STANDALONE comic book, as in the manga was made into his own physical book. Crash's other mangas can only be read through the CoroCoro magazine which periodically compiles multiple stories. The vintage CTR comic was in the Disney Adventures magazine and the Nitro-Fueled comic was digital-only.
In the end we still had no way to recycle butter. By the way, the manga of Crash 2, when Crash is dreaming about being a popular hero, we can see some bandicoot girls being all like: "Kyaaa! Crash-kun!", and they look suspiciously similar to the Trophy Girls as they were in CTR (before CTR Nitro-Fueled changed their designs and turned them into actual, infinitely better characters). Even though those in the manga were just some random female characters, I have some reasons to think Naughty Dog might have seen them as well and decided to put them in CTR as some minor character, then naming them after some real women (most notably, Megumi, as already mentioned in this video). That could be possible because those minor characters were never meant to have any personality or name, since they were drawn for the sake of a joke about Crash wanting to be irresistible and missing Tawna. In Crash Team Racing, those girls have big eyes, a feature that is (or used to be) stereotypically associated to most anime/manga characters. Therefore, even though I can't confirm this 100%, it is possible that the first appearance of Nitro Squad (formerly "Trophy Girls" for nostalgics, or "Race Queens" in Japan) *might* actually have been in that manga, so we might as well thank Japan for making them (even though I'd rather thank Beenox for bringing them back as playable characters).
@@rayvenkman2087 I don't know, but I am sure some people at Naughty Dog must have come across some of Crash's mangas. I could say there were pictures of developers reading those comic books