Now, here’s a sentence no one expected to read in the year 2025: Once upon a time, we might have gotten to see the Spice Girls and the Wu-Tang Clan in anime form.
In a recent interview with AnimEigo, Lawrence Guinness, a senior VP at Manga Entertainment, distributor of anime such as Perfect Blue and Street Fighter Alpha (and subsidiary of Island Records), revealed the company considered co-producing its own works. Two projects he mentioned would have starred the aforementioned bands, and the Spice Girls idea got far enough along that he had some production stills to show. Had it happened, it’d have been a film called Girl Power: The Anime, courtesy of Production I.G, the studio behind Ghost in the Shell.
According to Guinness, Manga had “very advanced talks” with the British pop group’s management at the time this was pitched and would’ve hopefully appealed to fans of then-popular anime like Studio Ghibli. Even now, Guinness is confident teenage girls “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. Look, if that’s not girl power in action, I don’t know what is.”
As for the never-realized Wu-Tang project, a series that would have been called The Imperial Warrior, he claimed near everything was in place for the project, except some of the hip-hop group’s members didn’t sign off on it. His pitch to Island Records founder Chris Blackwell saw Wu-Tang “challenging the forces of evil through their music and martial arts skills.” The soundtrack and designs for the characters (he mentioned RZA and Ghostface Killah specifically) were “great,” said Guinness, and it would’ve been “revolutionary. That was the project I was proudest of that never happened.”
Over the decades, Japanese creators have been open about their love of western music, and artists like the late Prince and Aaliyah have inspired characters in Michiko & Hatchin and My Hero Academia. Making musicians or other celebrities into fictionalized versions of themselves for film and TV is another tale as old as time, and Guinness wanted these two projects to take off to both put Manga on the map and successfully “synthesize anime with the best of western culture.” When it comes to Wu-Tang Clan, he’s sort of gotten his wish, thanks to RZA’s involvement in Afro Samurai and developer Brass Lion Entertainment’s upcoming action game Wu-Tang: Rise of the Deceiver.
As for the Spice Girls, it’s a shame they never got their animated due—there are worse ways for a band to be memorialized than an anime movie with some original songs and cheesy action that still holds up years after the fact.
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