Saturday Anime Promo 1995

Apollo Smile

"Apollo Smile"

Apollo Smile, billed as the "Live Action Anime Girl," frequented sci-fi conventions throughout the 1990s. During these conventions she would often sing upbeat songs from her own original albums and give martial arts demonstrations. In the summer of 1998, Apollo hosted Anime Week on the Sci-Fi Channel's, Syfy, "Summer Movie Blast" which featured movies that regularly appeared on Saturday Anime like "Galaxy Express 999" and "Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer". All that aside, Apollo Smile was also a successful singer/songwriter whose song "Thunderbox" is featured on the soundtrack of the 1990 film "Days of Thunder" starring Tom Cruise!

"Anime Week Summer 1998"

If you thought that Apollo Smile didn't have enough talents, she is also a voice actress whose primary roles include strong female characters in English anime dubs. Here's a list of her roles:

• "Coco Hearts" in Wild Cardz (OVA)

• "Karin Son" in Voltage Fighters: Gowcaizer the Movie (OVA)

• "Tracy" in Battle Arena Toshinden (OVA)

• "Nova" in Megas XLR

• "Ulala" in Space Channel 5

At the present date, Apollo Smile, real name Paula Apollo Anne Scharf, is no longer in the anime scene and is now among the staff of a prominent dancing school. Throughout her career, Apollo Smile has left an indelible impression on the fans of anime and the industry itself. Saturday Anime 2 salutes you and wishes you well!

As a special gift to Apollo Smile fans, I am offering a free wallpaper for your desktop computer featuring her best moments! Click on the photo to see the full size image and right click. Choose "Save Image As" on the menu to download this wallpaper to your computer.

 

The Beginning

Saturday Anime was the Sci-Fi Channel's, now renamed Syfy, two-hour long programing block which aired popular and obscure Japanese animated feature length films dubbed into English by prominent but now defunct North American anime distributors. Next to Cartoon Network's "Toonami," Saturday Anime was by far one of basic cable's longest running anime programming blocks, running for most of the 1990s. As I remember, Saturday Anime began at 9:00 am every Saturday morning before "Mystery Science Theater 3000" and was primarily aimed at young people just entering their teen years. The tagline was, "This ain't no swim in the kiddy pool!" 

"Cloud"

As we're talking about basic cable after all, the movies were often censored for language, violence and sexual content. If the movie aired didn't fill the two hour block, then Sci-Fi Channel would air a segment from the classic film "Robot Carnival" ,usually the segment known as "Cloud," to fill in the rest of the time. Some movies like Dominion Tank Police and IRIA: Zeiram the Animation, which exceeded Sci-Fi Channel's two hour time frame, would be broken up into segments with one segment airing one Saturday morning and the other airing the next. Even an epic series like Record of Lodoss War was only allowed three episodes, with the others never airing at all! During one week in the summer, around July or August, Sci-Fi Channel would air two of their anime movies every night beginning at 8:00pm with an encore beginning at 11:00pm. One of these events was hosted by the "Live Action Anime Girl", Apollo Smile who would often reveal facts about the movie being aired that night. 

Apollo Smile

Saturday Anime ran until the early 2000s, being relegated to the exceptionally early morning time slot of 2:00am, when it finally came to an end. Years later, in 2007, Sci-Fi Channel brought anime back into its programming schedule with "Ani-Monday," making it the successor of Saturday Anime. 

"Ani-Monday"