“Why do the good die so young?” is the appropriate lamentation to wail to the heavens while holding on to a deceased friend who died in a furious war, or cuddling a puppy that never got a chance to take a dozen breaths, or crying over a cheap computer monitor you couldn’t even squeeze two years’ service out of. And now that anime and manga has practically become mainstream in America, every fan has fallen on their knees at least once and cried for a cancelled series that was just too good for this cruel world.
Life in the fandom can suck especially hard for residents of Canada or Europe, where certain series often land to stretch their wings before moving on to their big chance in America. “When will we see more of this show?” ask the fans who fall in love with the preview episodes. The answer is almost always, “It depends how well the show does in America.”
It’s hard for a small production to survive without the Big American Money, and it’s not uncommon for cult favourites to fail on American airwaves and fizzle out forever. This ongoing circle of events has helped, at least in some small way, to fuel some instances of anti-American sentiment, but truthfully a studio’s handling of an anime or foreign cartoon has a lot more to do with its success than the intelligence of the US public in general.
Such was the case with the 1999 cartoon Cybersix, a unique joint production between Japan, Canada and Argentina. Although it ran only 13 episodes, Cybersix features a fairly well-told story and stunning animation drenched with fluid animation, gorgeous cityscapes and enough black shine to ignite a leather fetish. The heroine, known best by the tattoo on her arm (“CYBER 6”—the sixth creation in a line of experimental humans), flits from rooftop to rooftop in the fictitious city of Meridiana, setting right the wrongs of society.
Cybersix’s creative beginnings are as strange as her biological origins. The series began as a comic book by Carlos Meglia and Carlos Trillo and chronicled the story of Doctor Von Richter, a Nazi geneticist who experimented on concentration camp inmates during World War II. After the Allied forces stopped Hitler, Von Richter fled to South America where he continued his experiments. In his seclusion, he managed to engineer artificial superhumans with specific designations, including 5000 “Cybers”, which Von Richter considered the height of his creations until they exhibited free will. He culled the entire series, and only two escaped: Cyber 6 (“Cybersix”) and Data 7, a panther who possessed the brain of a fatally injured Cyber. Both fight to stop the long-lived Von Richter’s current batch of mutants however they can.
The Cybersix comic is filled with graphic violence, sex, Nazis, dead prostitutes and even the existence of an illegitimate child conceived by Cybersix and her male friend, Lucas Amato. It is, in a word, adult, which makes the animated series an interesting venture. The cartoon didn’t contain a fraction of the comic’s controversial material, but neither was its toning-down obvious. There was simply less emphasis on story and character development than there was on the animation and fight scenes. Von Richter obviously was a Nazi scientist, but nobody actually outright said so; his engineered son, Jose, did all the goose-stepping required for both of them. As a means of censorship, it worked without making the viewer think they were watching something sanitized.
Unfortunately, Cybersix’s adventures didn’t take her far outside of Canada and Japan. TMS (the Japanese studio responsible for animating the series, as well as Monster Rancher and Little Nemo) has no plans to continue the series, especially not seven years after its initial run. Money is the main reason; TMS once cited each episode cost almost a million dollars to produce, thanks in part to the frequent go-between with the writers in Canada and the animators in Japan. A good run of the show in America might have yielded a future for the series, but Cybersix’s American debut proved sadly impotent.
Fox acquired rights to the show after a long, drawn-out struggle to get it on American airwaves (one of the major deterrents, according to TMS, was Cybersix’s male alter-ego, Adrian Seidleman. Apparently, American studios were hesitant to air a cartoon with a “gender-swapping” hero). Fox was still in the heat of a battle for supremacy with Kid’s WB. Instead of picking up Cybersix for its unique animation or strong female protagonist, the station seemed more interested in grabbing whatever it could to trump its rival. WB had Pokemon, so Fox aired Digimon. Gundam went up against Escaflowne. And Cybersix existed only to do battle with Batman Beyond.
Cybersix was not marketed well in America, nor did it maintain a consistent time slot. The show was also badly censored, with entire episodes cut, which is a significant loss for a series with only 13 episodes. The fight scenes were marred with the addition of “impact flashes” and dialogue was added to fill silences lasting more than five seconds. Regardless, the tangled mess did manage to net a few loyal viewers and attention from critics but they were ultimately disappointed when the series was taken off Fox before the episode roster even cycled once.
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