Lawrence Guinness, Senior Vice President of what used to be known as Manga Entertainment, has shared never-before-seen development cells from a canceled Spice Girls anime project – and I'm kinda bummed out that it was never made.
"We were in very advanced talks with their management," Guiness revealed in an interview with AnimEigo. "These development cells were produced with Studio I.G., and we did a lot of work in creating Girl Power: The Anime which is interesting because when we spoke about the likes of Studio Ghibli and that audience; this really would have addressed that. You could see the direction we were moving in. Interviewer."
The development cells, created by the same studio that produced Ghost in the Shell, feature everything from Baby Spice running from a T-Rex to Victoria Beckham looking rather posh on a motorcycle and Ginger Spice looking rather bewildered with a gun in her hand. You can see the clip below at around 34 minutes in.
Continued Guinness: "If you're a 12-year-old girl in 1987, I think you might've gone to the cinema to see this. In fact, I think you would've stood in a line for a long time to get in to see this. This was the vision. You've got to have a vision. Look, if that's not girl power in action, I don't know what is."
Manga Entertainment, established in 1991, was a producer and distributor of anime in the US and UK and has since been folded into Lionsgate in the US and Crunchyroll in the UK. Guinness does not reveal why the anime was ultimately cancelled, especially when it seems that both the Spice Girls and their team were on board. It's also likely that Guinness misspoke when saying 1987 and meant 1997, as the Spice Girls made their debut in 1994. That said, 1997 would've been a prime time for the release of Girl Power: The Anime – and I would've forced my parents to rent it from Blockbuster every week for the forseeable future.
For more, check out our list of all the new anime you should know about.
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