It was at Anime Weekend Atlanta 2003 that I first beheld the visage of Fred Ladd, staring owlishly from
the audience towards the front of the panel room where I was setting up for another “Dubs that Time
Forgot” program. An acquaintance had tipped me off, warning me to be careful if I was to showcase any
of Ladd’s dubbing work. “He’s liable to speak his mind if you make any cracks about his shows,” they
told me. But then, I never had a whole lot of complaints about Fred Ladd, the man who, in the 1960s,
beheld the rise of Japanese mass-market animation and concluded, quite correctly, that it was not just
suitable for export to the west, but ideal.
Ladd’s trajectory towards a fateful 1963 meeting with Osamu Tezuka and NBC Enterprises to decide the
fate of a brand new TV series called Tetsuwan Atom was crooked, but only a little. Ladd had studied
broadcasting in college,…
