Part 9!

LOL! You're probably right, Deco. Of course, the naked Zangief running gag, which is also quite prevalent in so much of the Street Fighter fiction available out there, will be dealt with quite artfully for television but we'll make sure it's always funny when we do it. It's really all about editing, camera placement, lighting and body positioning to pull that off (so to speak), the most brilliantly clever and hilarious example of which comes to mind in the form of "Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery".

Now if CHTV was smart, they'd already be doing this with, say, the raw footage of Chun Li's sex scene with Blanka to include a boob shot or, perhaps, even better. I'm fully aware that there's plenty of full frontal Zangief that was shot on that rooftop where we helped Ryu defeat E. Honda, including lots of still photographs which were taken on the set during the rather lengthy periods of time that the Red Cyclone spent naked up there. "The footage exists", as producer Jordan Hall once told me when it was being decided just what to do about Zangief's swinging, um, stuff.

Sam Reich had requested of Ghostlight Digital, the company that did our amazing special effects, to digitally remove Zangief's genitalia but Dave and James Codiglia, the twin brother team behind Ghostlight, thought better of it, bless them, and chose instead to simply pixel blur the goodies. James and I laughed about it, agreeing that Zangief just wouldn't be Zangief without the source of his famous bulge. Even more laughable is that only the base of Zangief's penis actually appears in but one frame of the shot wherein Ryu forms his Honda busting Hadouken, accounting for the smallest fraction of a second but they still decided to blacken it into the rest of his pubic hair. Seems silly but it turns out that a number of fans have made a game out of freezing and isolating that one frame just to laugh at the fact that Zangief appears to have nothing but fur there, LOL!

All of this TMI might seem tasteless or even vulgar to some but, hey, where else are you gonna get this kind of trivia but right here at this forum?