The other Jonathan Clements, who died on Sunday of complications from lung cancer, served for twenty years as a finance journalist for the Wall Street Journal. In semi-retirement he embarked upon a new career as an internet guru, dispensing monetary advice through his website Humble Dollar.
People often used to get us mixed up. We were both authors, both born in Britain, although he had lived in America for so long that his speech had drifted into a sort-of midlantic twang. But whereas I wrote about Japanese cartoons and Chinese history, he wrote about finances, investments and pensions.
Invariably, we would get each other’s mail. I would get occasional requests to address learned audiences about handy hacks for the American tax system, something about which I knew absolutely nothing. He would get asked to show up at a convention where people dressed as anime elves. Only last year, I found him angrily haranguing my US publicists for Rebel Island, after they had hash-tagged him in on the release of a history of Taiwan, to which he reacted like an old man exhorting them to get off his lawn. The publishers of my Empress Wu audio book also refused to admit that he hadn’t written it in their publicity tweets, leading him to spend much of his final months on Twitter shouting at them: “For the umpteenth time, you’ve got the wrong Jonathan Clements.”
In the strangest cross-Clements incident, I was left flustered and speechless when an elegant Japanese lady tried to pick me up in a Swiss cinema, assuming that I was him. “That never happens to the real me,” he fumed.
At one point in our correspondence, we embarked on a wacky quest to find the other other Jonathan Clements, a now-deceased author of 1960s erotica, whose Keep it Kinky and Dearest Mummy, I’ve Been Ravaged have repeatedly skewed our online search results, and continue to do so. Finance Jonathan would eventually publish the results on his own website as a page called Imposters, listing people like me who claimed to be him. Back when I had a website of my own, I had a reciprocal imposters page, decrying him for impersonating me.
In May 2024, he was eating his breakfast when he suddenly felt off-balance. A trip to the doctors for what was presumed to be a routine issue, turned out to be serious. He had lung cancer, which had already metastasised to his brain.
“What would you do if you were told you might have just 12 months to live?” he wrote. “For me, this isn’t a theoretical question.” He immediately began retooling his website, shutting down its donations function, and setting up as a slower, but more targeted series of updates about estate management and legacy planning.
“Cancer is obviously not what I want,” he told me. “But I have the privilege of knowing roughly how much time I have left, and that time offers the chance to get a few last things done that are important to me.”
His final months saw some of his best ever work – a detailed account of estate planning and “sadmin”, by a man making the very best of the knowledge that his days were numbered. He got married to his long-term partner, and wrote a thoughtful piece about how long he would have to stay alive for his bride to benefit from his pension. He left behind deeply useful columns about how to make life easier for the people we leave behind. This included obituarists, for whom he wrote a detailed farewell elegy on his website, leaving an account of his life as he would like it to be remembered.
““I want to take the time that I have left,” he said, “and squeeze as much happiness out of those days as possible.”
Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. Other Jonathan Clementses are available.
“Though in me you behold / the injury of many a blasting hour / Let it not tell your judgement I am old / Not age, but sorrow over me hath power.”
Penelope Clements (1947-2025)
All right, strap in.
We had some arguments about the order of service. The cover image was pretty easy to decide upon. That’s my mother, not yet 22 years old, on her wedding day. She always wanted to be remembered as being young and beautiful, and it’s such a striking image.
The back cover was tougher. I found a nice one of her in Austria, but her partner, Ian, wanted something else.
“I want,” he said, “a picture that shows her doing what she loved best.”
“What?” I said. “Moaning?”
“No,” he said, “I want a picture of her on the Orient Express, when she was at her happiest.”
I remembered that she told me that when they took their last trip on the Orient Express, it was the last time she remembered walking into a room and everybody turning around and staring, ‘coz she was all dolled up, like someone who was just about to get murdered in an Agatha Christie novel. That was very important to her, and it was something that diminished as she got older, and she felt that she was becoming invisible. I said she should suck it up, because that’s how the rest of us have to live all the time.
Of all of you here today, only her sister Wendy has known her for every iteration, every period in her life. For the rest of you, I am sure that something I say will be news. And let’s start at the beginning. We don’t know why she was called Penelope, but we do know that her mother knew the story of the Odyssey, and who the original Penelope was. We think that she was named in honour of a wife who waited for years for her husband to come home from the war, which is indeed what my grandmother had just done.
There was a line of shops along Victory Parade, near the street where she grew up, and the butchers and the bakers, but presumably not candlestick makers, all called her Miss Impossible. I asked Wendy why, and she said it was probably something to do with her being such a prodigy, and so witty and talkative, but was it? Was it, really? Wasn’t it more likely that they were all sick of her imaginary friends, Yibbits and Yubbets, for whom doors had to be opened otherwise they would remain trapped in the shops?
Cousin John is here, with whom she and Wendy formed a club that met daily on an imaginary pirate ship at the bottom of the garden. For some reason, it was called Donna, and to get there, they had to navigate the garden on rollerskates, while carrying beanpoles. I don’t know why this is important, but I was supposed to tell you.
I want to mention something more relevant, I think, which is the influence of the Bulgin family, for whom my grandmother worked. They were something big in avionics, and had a mansion in Westcliff, and for some reason, they took her family under their wing, and showered them with kindnesses. It was visits to the Bulgins’ that instilled my mother with a love of art, of music, of plays and the finer things. They would get a hamper every Christmas from Fortnum & Mason, inspiring her ever after to what her own mother called her airs and graces.
She represented Essex in athletics, and led bizarre school singalongs in the chemistry lab, standing on a desk and conducted her classmates in rowdy renditions of wartime hits, waving a ruler in the air. She already displayed signs of her later commanding form. On being confronted by a flasher outside the school, she simply shouted at him: “Oh for God’s sake put it away!” and ran off laughing.
With her friend Pam, she’d go to see Elvis movies at the cinema, clutching a loaf of Hovis to eat in their seats. No, I know it’s weird. What can I say, times were different. They went to see Roy Orbison play the Odeon, and his support act was the Beatles. She thought they had nice jackets, but filthy shoes.
She converted to Catholicism, because life isn’t difficult enough. Her friend Rosi’s mum Val said to her: “Oh, you’ll love it, Pen, it’s very theatrical.” Which I find interesting because I always assumed her dramatic streak manifested in her twenties, but clearly it was earlier.
Perhaps you, like me, are fascinated with the work of Holland-Dozier-Holland, the songwriting team who made so many of Motown’s classics. No? Okay, just me, then. So I’d better point out that they tried to tailor their songs to be as general sounding as possible, and tried to avoid mentioning specific girls’ names. They made an exception for their 1967 hit “Bernadette.” Which, quite by coincidence I’m sure, my mother chose as her confirmation name.
On what must have been one of history’s most boring dates, she came here to this church, St Mary’s in Stoke by Nayland, to make brass rubbings with my father. Somewhere in this church, there is an image of a long-dead lady… oh, it’s there is it? Yep, okay, over there. And that image has hung in her houses ever since. It represented for her a vague, but ever solidifying yearning, to one day return to this place and live here. It would be thirty years before she did, but that was when it all started.
She went to work in Austria with my father, at a hotel in Mondsee. She still has an Austrian accent when she speaks German. They used the money to tour Europe, which was a real eye-opener for her, and she fell in love with its history and culture, so far removed from her Essex upbringing. When she eventually had children, her two sons, she would dress them up in lederhosen every Sunday, an experience from which neither of them has quite recovered.
She became active in the Southend Shakespeare Company, eventually rising to become its secretary. She played Ariel in The Tempest, and Perdita in A Winter’s Tale, which is why there is a picture of her in the gallery trying not to laugh at an unconvincing bear. And from there she graduated to the Royal Shakespeare Company, not as an actor, but as a dresser. For those that don’t know, when your leading man comes off stage covered in blood and you have to get him out of his armour and into his nightshirt for the next scene, the dressers are the wardrobe minions who have it all ready in the wings.
It meant that she literally had a backstage pass to Theatreland. When I was a child, we’d be in the street in Covent Garden, and she would suddenly say: “Oh, they’re kicking out for the interval at the Twelfth Night matinee. Let’s go to the green room.” And we’d walk up to this door in a back street, where Gareth Thomas and John Matshikiza were chuffing on cigarettes and trying not to get ash on their doublets.
She went back into secretarial work in the 1980s. Simon Wakefield is here, who was the man who hired her at Canewdon Consultants. And as that’s where she met Ian, basically everything that follows this moment is his fault. Ian had high hopes of retiring to the Costa del Sol and learning to play the guitar, but none of that happened after he met my mother. Instead, he found himself buying a house in Provence, where they spent many happy summers before it was fashionable.
She ended up at Cazenove Capital, which was the highlight of her career. There are some of you from Cazenove’s here today, and I we had a lovely letter from her former boss, saying that she used to administrate a charity on his behalf that I had never even heard of. They handed us a cheque for £500, so although it hasn’t showed up on the memorial webpage, it’s enough money to double the donations made in her name to Shelter. As of yesterday, when Tony and Christine pressed Send on their donation, the official total for donations on and off-line has gone over a thousand pounds, so well done, everybody. [Time Travel Footnote: Cazenove sent another cheque, the total is now at over £2,200].
She was my current age, 53, when she was made redundant, ironically just at the time when she and Ian had scraped together the money to buy their dream house in Suffolk. She wrote in her diary of a desire to reinvent herself, although God knows what as. Instead, there was a degree of bitterness that crept in, and she became a Woman of Letters. Money was a struggle until their pensions kicked in, and she wrote of the brutal awareness that she was too anxious to enjoy what she did have. In particular, she grew steadily annoyed at encounters with people who still had jobs, but were no good at them.
And we have a ream, an actual ream of paper in her files, of her draft letters of complaint to various bodies: the Alliance and Leicester, Prudential Insurance, Oak Farm, Dedham council, Southend United… I did intend to give a reading of some her most cutting remarks, but the Reverend Stéphane says that’s not what a eulogy is supposed to be. Although one of the things that has been really comforting to us since she died is the number of people with a funny story.
We have people here today who have come from Switzerland, and California, condolences from New Zealand and France and Hong Kong. And so many of them involve stories about her colourful language and creative invective. They begin with: “We’ll always remember…” and then it will be something crazy. Like my Australian friends, who said, “We’ll always remember that time when she got into a fight with Thorntons the Confectioners, over whether she could have a four-letter word as a cake decoration.”
“We’ll always remember that time she punched a horse….” No, I made that one up.
These ripples that we make in life, how people remember us, the effects that we have on each other’s lives, are fascinating to me. So many of you have mentioned moments, or interests, or decorations in their life that they owe to her, and they can be the most ridiculous things. I have a writer friend, who was the only person in her circle who didn’t get chapped hands during COVID, “…because I always used L’Occitane soap, and I first encountered it with your mother.” Or my friend Kimbers, in Texas, who said: “I’ll always think of your mother when I have spaghetti carbonara.”
Apparently, I was told, she’d never had spaghetti carbonara before, but the first time she ate it, she was sitting across from my mother in an Italian restaurant, and my mother was in full-on Apocalypse mode, ranting in a four-letter frenzy about the Bishop of Brentwood.
Just ahead of Brexit, my mother sent a Fortnum & Mason hamper across the border to me in my Finnish home. The natives crowded around it like jackals, peering in incomprehension at jars of Piccalilli and bespoke marmalade. It was a distant echo of the Bulgins’ kindnesses, half a century after they were dead. And I see some wag has actually put some of the flowers today in a Fortnum & Mason hamper… bravo.
You’ve told me about the effects she has had on the pictures on your walls, the books on your shelves, the music you listen to and the food you eat. And that’s been very comforting for us, to see fragments of her in other people’s lives.
Some of you have been surprised at the fact that she is being buried here, in the church she first visited as a twenty-year-old woman. You all listened to her witter for decades about how she wanted to have her ashes scattered all over Cornwall or something. But no, in 2022, she changed her will. She decided not just to live here, but to die here as well, which is why I invite all of you to walk with me down the Crown, where there will be Scotch Eggs for me and some sort of buffet nonsense for the rest of you, and to share more stories of her colourful, influential and often sweary life. Because when we are gone, the ripples we leave in the eyes of others are all that remains.
I didn’t know for sure what I was going to say when I stepped up to the lectern, but this was it as best I can remember it.Photos by Michael Clements, Kati Clements, Peter Finlay, and some others lost to time.
It was not until July of this year that Jan Scott-Frazier tardily returned to her first love of illustration. Confessing that she had not really attempted a picture for fifteen long years, she set about with modern tools, an XPPen Magic Drawing Pad and Clip Studio Paint, to create “Moonlit Beach,” the first of several of what would become her latest and last works of art.
“Of the artistic ‘manual’ jobs,” she confessed in her younger days, “I guess I liked background painting the most. It allows you to be very creative and is difficult but very mellow.”
Jan, who died on Tuesday, was a surprise hiring in the anime business. She was 22 in 1987, the year that she quit working at Radio Shack and headed off for Japan, where she became rarer than hen’s teeth – a gaijin in the anime business. She studied at the International Animation Institute, somehow being put in charge of teaching classes before she graduated, and was soon working for Noboru Ishiguro’s Artland studio on such shows as Locke the Superman, Bubblegum Crash and Shurato.
“I have worked,” she told Charles McCarter at EX magazine, “as an inbetweener, key animator (briefly), animation checker, cel painter, cell checker, Ink & Paint department chief, cameraman, background artist, production assistant, production manager, production coordinator, computer/digital systems consultant, ANIMO operator, teacher for most of those subjects, director’s assistant, producer and most recently director.” In particular she seemed to find herself working below the line on the so-called “flight films” – the piece-work assembled on behalf of anime companies by subcontractors overseas.
That was how she found herself in Hangzhou, China, as news started to break of tanks rolling into Tiananmen Square. She seemed doomed to live in interesting times.
“The company I was working with decided that it would turn into a revolution and wanted to get me out of the country. I was supposed to be on a chartered flight out of Nanjing to Taiwan and we raced to get to the airport on time. When we got into the city, we had to clear some junk off the road so we could drive our pickup truck through and some soldiers way down the street opened fire on us. It sounded like hornets flying past and I got showered with debris from the wall near me and got nicked by something hot. (Cinderblock? Wood? Bullets? Still don’t know.) I thought that it was all over for a minute. It was really scary!”
In search of somewhere safer to work on the likes of Moldiver, Genocyber and SWAT Kats, Jan was packed off to Bangkok to found her own studio, TAO Corporation. TAO made use of cheaper Thai labour to assemble colouring and inbetweening for foreign clients, but adventure still seemed to find her.
Trapped in the city in the midst of democracy riots, Jan sandbagged the doors shut and spent the next three days huddled in her office, with one eye on the internet and the other on the barricades, clutching a loaded Heckler & Koch MP5K and waiting for trouble. She personally reported that she did not find it as scary as her exit from Hangzhou “except for seeing some guys that had been shot in the head when we went out for groceries one morning.”
Jan was only in the anime-anime business for a decade or so, and I suspect may have outstayed her welcome with some companies through her naturally American bluntness. She was unforgiving about tin-eared writing in anime shows, and unafraid to point it out to her bosses when she thought they were going to look stupid. She hated the lazy diversions of fan service, fumed about characters with unlikely body language, fulminated about the cavalier attitude of anime heroes to collateral damage, and reserved particular ire for writers who just recycled stereotypes.
“Getting a cold from being wet is a traditional belief about health,” she explained to Jagi Lamplighter-Wright at Manga Max, “and although such cultural shorthand is inevitable it shows a lack of conscious thought on the part of the writer. I hate stories where the best of modern science cannot cure something but the old medicine woman comes and jiggles her charms and wipes the sickness out immediately. Well, except The Exorcist….”
Famously, she once quit one production on the spot when she saw a fax from the producer that used a racist slur. She would also mount unwelcome arguments about the effects of movie violence, which many of her producers were reluctant to consder.
“If you think about it,” she argued in Manga Max, “if TV did not influence the viewers, especially the kids, why would there be advertising, and why would advertisers spend so much and fight so hard to get good spots? We’re talking about only 30 seconds that influences a kid to push his parents into buying a product. So a 30-minute show has less influence? A game where the kid is totally immersed has less effect? That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
By the middle of the 1990s, Jan had sensed the way the wind was blowing and was moving into digital work, repping Cambridge Animation System’s Animo software and teaching animators how to use it. She loved the teaching but hated the schmoozing, saying that the only thing she despised more than the grind of inbetweening was false bonhomie of pitch meetings and sales conference. In collaboration with the artist Izumi Matsumoto she worked on Comic ON, a manga publication released on CD-ROM and one of 1994’s non-game computer best-sellers in Japan.
By 1995, she had moved on again, becoming the president of the American wing of Production I.G, working on a number of games such as Grandstream Saga and Kyoushin Senki, as well as the Panzer Dragoon video. As she had with Artland, Jan helped smooth the Japanese creatives communications in the English language, working as the uncredited translator of innumerable interviews and press notes. She was, however, aghast to discover that I.G had taken her very rough first draft of the script for Blood: The Last Vampire and gone into production with it.
By the turn of the century, she was working for Celsys USA on the next generation of its RETAS production system, working as a freelance director. I had my own magazine by then, and later an editorial job at All the Anime, and in both positions, I begged her to bring over her “Beyond TV Safety” column, a biting series of articles about her life and career, showcasing the anime business warts and all. I never quite understood why she wouldn’t take the gig – I wanted to fund her to write a book, one article at a time, which would set down all her crazy stories for posterity but for some reason she never agreed.
She was always a hit at conventions, and had an ease of dealing with voice actors that often made her a bridge between the chalk-and-cheese animation/acting communities in a convention green room. She was instrumental in the founding of the Voices For charity, and as her health worsened, plunging her into a spiralling series of crises amounting to a decade of complications from kidney failure, it was the voice-acting community that most conspicuously rallied around her with crowd-funding calls and charity drives to keep her alive.
Jan always thought the world needed more heroes, railing against the surfeit of “brats and anti-heroes” in entertainment, which she regarded as the creations of cynical film-makers foisted on credulous children.
“I think that’s fine for adult shows,” she said, “but I think that it’s important to have at least some shows with heroism for children to see. Adults often forget that children are experiencing all of this for the first time and that they haven’t become jaded and bored with such stories. I see kids who were raised on a TV diet of brats and anti-heroes and they’re just not as strong as the kids of 10 years ago. They’re lazy and soft.”
Atsuko Tanaka, who died in August, was already thirty years old when she got her big break, providing the Japanese voice for Madeleine Stowe in Unlawful Entry. She had spent the previous decade moonlighting as an occasional dancer and movie extra, while holding down a humdrum job as an office lady. It was only in her late twenties that she resolved to turn her childhood passion for drama into more than a hobby, retraining at the Tokyo Announcement Academy. Her parents heartily disapproved of her throwing away six years of office work, but she was adamant. They would eventually relent when she landed a role in Lupin III, which even they had heard of.
Throughout the 1990s, she lucked into a series of Hollywood voicing roles with up-and-coming young actresses whose stardom would keep her active – Kate Beckinsale, Jennifer Lopez, Gwyneth Paltrow, and her own personal favourite, Nicole Kidman.
In the anime voice community, her nickname was “The Major”, deriving from her most famous role in 1995, for which she initially considered herself ill-suited, and whose philosophical dialogue she often didn’t understand. As Major Motoko Kusanagi in Ghost in the Shell and its various spin-offs, she became a memorable audio icon for tough, steely femininity, repeating the type in numerous anime and games, most memorably as the eponymous Bayonetta.
That’s not to say she couldn’t bring the ditz when she had to, also providing the Japanese voice of Phoebe from Friends, and the more sinister Dolly in the Toy Story franchise. She also added a note of invisible continuity to the Japanese version of The Mummy – whereas Rachel Weisz was replaced in the third movie by Maria Bello, Tanaka provided the voices for both, making the transition somewhat more seamless for Japanese audiences.
In the English-speaking world, the original English voice of Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor, found herself controversially edged out, partly because she was apparently “too old” now that she was in her fifties. Tanaka was already pushing 60, and still merrily barrelling along in the role of the demon-hunting witch.
Outside the voice-acting booth, she lived a relatively private life, known only for a couple of things – her fandom for the Nippon Ham Fighters baseball team, and her role as one of the “godmothers” of pandas donated to Japan by the People’s Republic of China. Her death was announced on social media by the actor Hikaru Tanaka, only then revealing that he was, in fact, her son.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #244, 2024.
Articles about the late Michael Bakewell struggled to contain his career high-points. He had, after all, been the BBC’s first Head of Plays, appointed in 1963 to add a touch of class to broadcasting. He arrived at the television wing after almost a decade directing radio for the “Third Programme”, and continued to oversee radio adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and the acclaimed radio version of The Lord of the Rings.
Bakewell was a hands-on director, often taking a partial credit for the scripts. Surviving footage of him at work shows him pushing his actors to wring every nuance from their words, vitally aware that in radio, words are often all they have. In the mid-1970s, shortly before his radio triumphs with Holmes and Frodo, Bakewell was roped into an unusual job, replacing the audio of a Japanese television programme with believable English dialogue.
“We thought at first the thing was undubbable,” he told Nationwide. “The only way to get it at was to do it in what I can only describe as, kind of, English Oriental tradition, somewhere in between Fu Manchu and The Goon Show.”
The programme was The Water Margin, based on the manga by Mitsuteru Yokoyama, itself inspired by a classical Chinese novel. An entire generation of British children grew up listening to Burt Kwouk’s cod-philosophical voice-overs, and puzzling at some of the weirder churns of dialogue made to match the lip-sync. NTV’s Monkey soon followed, making Bakewell the go-to guy for difficult Asian dub-jobs.
A few years later, he was hired by Manga Entertainment to oversee their early cartoons for grown-ups, often punched up with questionably racy dialogue. His output was sometimes dismissive, giving trash like Dark Myth and Mad Bull 34 little better than they deserved, but also with some real gems among the classier releases. Roujin-Z, with an ADR script from George Roubicek, was a superb job, as were Bakewell’s English audios for the Patlabor movies. Even his throwaway projects have often gained a certain cachet – Cyber City Oedo 808 has come to be something of a classic because of its sweary dub, scripted by John Wolskel.
Budget cuts at Manga coincided with Bakewell’s brush with bowel cancer, leaving much of the later-period 1990s Manga Video dubs either bought in from America or flung together at a lower-rent outfit. In semi-retirement, he turned to writing, leaving a clear mark on Manga Entertainment’s style and library in its heyday. Anime News Network lists literally dozens of anime dubs to his credit, entirely unmentioned in his mainstream obituaries.
Jonathan Clements is the author of Anime: A History. This article first appeared in NEO #235, 2023.
“I remember cryptic asides at the occasional Manga Entertainment pub lunch, about ‘that guy with the money in the brown paper envelopes,’ an unnamed figure who somehow diddled Terasawa and several investors out of a fortune. Terasawa himself was crushed and dejected by the experience, having spent six months labouring over storyboards, and now with nothing to show for it.”
Over at All the Anime, I write an obituary for the manga artist Buichi Terasawa.
“If a background is really good, it’s taken for granted —viewers can ignore it and just immerse themselves in the world of the movie,” he said. “If it’s bad, they can’t help noticing it, and lose their concentration. When we remember the good times in our lives, we always remember the background as beautiful, even if we didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. That is the kind of realistic beauty that I want to depict.”
Over at All the Anime, my obituary for the scenic artist Nizo Yamamoto.
I’ve got a couple of things in the archive for any would-be obituarists covering Leiji Matsumoto :: this wide-ranging interview with him from Salon Futura, and my own entry on him from the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
When I met Jason David Frank for the first and only time, I was a 24-year-old newshound for a children’s magazine, and he’d drawn the short straw, dispatched on a press tour of Europe to promote Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers: The Movie.
It was driving him slowly crazy. He was holed up in a west London hotel suite, with only an old school buddy of his to keep him company. The publicity people, usually hands-on and clock-watching, were nowhere to be seen.
I introduced myself and showed him our magazine, and he laughed heartily at our electric rotating lollipop cover-mount, which everybody agreed looked like a sex toy.
“The thing is,” I said to him as we sat down to talk, “when I watched the film–”
“You watched it!?” he said. “Dude, nobody who’s come through here today has seen anything more than the trailer.”
“Well, I thought it would be smart to watch it.”
“D’ya think?” he laughed around the rotating electric lollipop in his mouth. “Go on, man.”
“I saw that some of the actors were under-cranked so they looked like they moved faster. But you– ”
“Yeah! Right!” Suddenly he sat bolt upright, flinging the electric lollipop onto a coffee table, looking at me with intense focus. “They don’t have to speed me up. Sometimes I think they want to slow me down. It’s because we’ve all got our skill sets, you know, like one’s a dancer and one’s a gymnast and so on, but I’m a martial artist. This is what I do.”
We talked about the martial arts, about how he’d taken the job as the Green Ranger and been so overwhelmed by the love of his fans – an entire generation of children who thrilled to have him back in successive iterations of the franchise, as the White Ranger. In later years, he would be a Red Ranger, a Black Ranger and a Green Ranger again. He boasted that he was throwing all the money he could spare from his starring role into real estate, because this might be the only chance he got to make proper money. I don’t think it ever registered with me that he was still only 22 – he had a presence about him that made him seem much older.
The next journalist in line had been kept waiting for almost half an hour as we ran over. But Frank didn’t want me to go. “A lot of these guys,” he confided. “They don’t care. It’s just great that someone appreciates the work, you know.”
The Official Schoolgirl Milky Crisis Blog 