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If there's one thing I like to do, it's find lookalikes of my favourite anime characters. I've done this most successfully with Allen (see ASP) but it occurred to me that it was about time I extended the favour to his good sergeant. So here are some chaps from anime, the real world, and elsewhere, who remind me a bit of Gaddes.
Aaah,
David Duchovny. I managed to find a picture of him
at his most Gaddesesque, with five o'clock shadow
and an open-necked shirt. Mr Duchovny is an actor
chiefly famous for playing Fox Mulder in The
X-Files. I think it's interesting, not to say
plagiaristic, that Allen Schezar has Mulder's
backstory (the missing little sister) and Gaddes
has his looks. (Meanwhile, Merle has Scully's
hair.) Mr
Duchovny is married to Téa Leoni and they
have two young daughters. He has been in some very
lame movies (although I kind of liked Return to
Me) and I have seen a photo of him sitting on a
kitchen counter wearing nothing but a big smile and
a large coffee cup in his lap. Good-looking,
then, but not much dignity. Now
that his showbiz career is dying down a bit, I
think he should return to university and finish the
PhD he left incomplete to follow his muse. Then he
would be Doctor David Duchovny and that would just
sound Too Cool. I
always think (or at least always have since I saw
him) that Murdoc from the, ah, virtual band
Gorillaz looks like Gaddes' evil twin, the scruffy
type of evil twin who never brushes his teeth,
stands around in peculiar positions and wears
excessively tight jeans. He is from Stoke-on-Trent
and his most prized possession is a Winnebago. The
snaggle-toothed Svengali behind the winning
Gorillaz formula, Murdoc is a Gemini, a devout
Satanist and an exceptionally bad
driver. I
am sometimes disturbed by mild feelings of
attraction towards him, but am able to reassure
myself with the thought that this is only because
of his resemblance to Gaddes. Get
the cool shoeshine at the Official
Gorillaz
Fansite
(where I pinched the picture). Lieutenant
Makoto Yamamoto is the first officer of the
starship Soyokaze in the SF comedy
anime Irresponsible Captain Tylor. He
is loyal, honourable, courageous and desperately
uptight. While
Gaddes has an admirable commander who presumably
made him the fine soldier he is today, Yamamoto is
stuck with a sleepy-eyed slacker captain who drives
him mad on a regular basis (sample Tylor quote:
'Let's surrender! Dying wouldn't be any fun.'). Although it may take you a
while to see it, he's quite soft-hearted and
worries a lot when his friends are unhappy. One of
the most delightful things about Tylor is
getting to see the evolution of Yamamoto's
character, from Anime Guy Most Often Likened to
Rimmer From Red Dwarf to... well, watch the
series yourself and enjoy it. Yamamoto's
chief hobby is trying to find ways to relieve his
stress. He has sought medical treatment but also
finds sitting in the captain's chair on the bridge
smoking cigars and shouting orders at imaginary
people late at night very therapeutic. He's a
cutie. Spuckler
is a supporting character in Mark Crilley's
beautiful children's comic Akiko. (I took
the graphic novel collections to summer camp with
me and they got passed round a cabin of nine/ten
year old girls so much the cover fell off one. I
was a counselor, I should say - the books aren't
that old.) Spucky
is a reformed space pirate with a wooden leg and a
defective sense of smell. He's one of the devoted
little gang that accompanies Akiko on her
adventures on the planet Smoo, and tends to be the
most practically helpful and emotionally supportive
one among them, which is very
Gaddes-like. Calls
Akiko 'kiko and offers excellent life advice like
'Never ask what something is before you eat it.'
Babyish about having Band-Aids removed. I
like him *^.^* Manu
(a.k.a. Jon) Bennett is an actor from New Zealand
who spent a chunk of his life in Australia. If you
think you've seen him before that's probably
because you watched Xena: Warrior Princess
and, like me, admired him very much as Mark Anthony
in an episode which really should have had a note
in the credits, like the first season of Black
Adder, saying 'Additional Dialogue by William
Shakespeare.' Or of course it might be because you
watch Shortland Street and saw him a while ago playing very nice but quite mad lawyer
Jack Hewitt, or worse still, back in the day you
watched the execrable and blessedly short-lived
Australian soap Paradise Beachand saw him
playing a jerk called Kirk. 'Manu'
is a Maori name meaning bird, and he has Maori
blood. (The Maori were one of the two groups of
Polynesian people who lived in New Zealand before
European colonisation - they overthrew the earlier
Moriori.) He
looks like Gaddes, he has an exquisitely sculpted
upper body (even my grandmother thinks so) and he
looks good togged up like a Roman general.
Yay! This
is not a very good picture of him, but it's pretty
difficult to find Manu Bennet pictures on the
Internet. If it weren't for this
one dedicated
person
I wouldn't've found any at all. Visit her page to
see Manu with a really terrible Afro-mullet hybrid
haircut! Ohh...
yummmmmm... I found another! This is Paul Opacic,
who played prison guard Mark Waddle in the ITV drama
series Bad Girls, about life in a women's
prison. It is not as exploitative as that sounds -
in fact it's bloody brilliant and generally very
hard-edged. Although Mark had a history of, um,
anger management difficulties, in later episodes he behaved himself well and
flirted like mad with that Karen Betts as used to
be Wing Governer before Jim Fenner did the dirty on
her, oo-er. By
a spooky coincidence, another character in Bad
Girls is played by an actor named James
Gaddas, surely a variant form of
Gaddes. I
found this picture at the excellent
Bad
Girls official
homepage. And
here's the not terribly reverend Nicholas Wolfwood
from Trigun, because yes, I am convinced, he
looks like Gaddes. Hurrah! Found the picture at
The
Hastily Assembled Nicholas D. Wolfwood
Shrine,
a name which makes me suspect its designer and I
share work habits. You can find out a bit about him
there. Obscure
fact: If I had been born a boy I would have been
Nicholas. I like to think I would have been a cool
Nicholas like Wolfwood. But I would probably have
been more like Nick Harrison off Shortland
Street. This is a sad thought. I will go
now. In sketchy design mode, here's Wakagi Tomoyo from Key the Metal Idol. I've been meaning to add him for months and months - I found him Gaddes-like, with a bad ass and a good heart, tremendously resourceful and all round someone I'd want to have on my side. Key is the story of a spaced-out android girl who believes she can become human if she can make (err... was it 30,000?) a given number of friends. Tomoyo, her grandfather/maker's assistant and her bodyguard, should in my opinion be counted as Friend Number One. Indeed, the name 'Tomoyo' means friend or friendship. He can be my friend any time. Assuming he makes it out of that final fight with Sergei alive. That was left kind of ambiguous. I can't produce the exact quote because I can't find the webpage again, but I once found an interview with the character designer for Key in which the dude said he was really proud of how Tomoyo turned out because 'I wasn't sure I could do a character that cool.' I liked that. Cool he is. This is Tim Jones from the online comics Bobbins and Scary-Go-Round. (SGR is the sequel/redevelopment of Bobbins, by the same author.) I've recently picked up reading these, and have developed a Tim Crush. Besides looking Gaddesy, he is an inventor, thus incorporating elements of Folkenish hotness, and was recently elected Mayor of Tackleford on the Scientific Democrat ticket. Here we see Tim, Alternate Future Tim, and one of his greatest inventions, the Time Teapot. This illustrates some of the spirit of the strip, and also why I would like to see Gaddes wearing a black-and-white raglan-sleeve teeshirt. That will be all.
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