Fred Ladd

            On Monday morning I posted my translation of “Baby Boum” by Serge Gainsbourg and memorized the first verse of his “L’hymne à l’amour - Moi l’ nœud” (The Hymn to Love – I’m the Node), of which the verses are lists of ethnic and sexual slurs and the chorus is the title.

            I weighed 87 kilos before breakfast. 

            My Global Modernisms Instructor got back to me to confirm that I’d done a good job in how I constructed my annotated bibliography. The deadline is midnight and so sometime today I’ll read through the essay proposal to see if I want to make any changes before uploading it. 

            I wrote a couple of stream-of-consciousness pages in longhand towards my essay on Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable. 

            Before lunch, I read through my essay proposal and made a few changes but kept it down to one page with double-spaced text. 

            I weighed 87.3 kilos before lunch. 

            I took a bike ride in the afternoon to Yonge and Bloor. It was five degrees outside and so I didn’t have to bundle up as much as usual. 

            I weighed 87.2 kilos at 17:30. 

            I proofread my essay proposal and annotated bibliography and made few changes. At about 18:45 I handed it in online, five hours and fifteen minutes before the deadline. 

            I created a document for my essay and transcribed some of my hand-written notes into it. 

            I had two bowls of the potato, lima bean, and broccoli soup that I made yesterday and finished it off. It was quite filling so I didn’t have dessert but only a cup of coffee. I had dinner while watching an episode of Astro Boy. 

            In this story a gigantic flying sphere with tentacles and the ability to generate sun-like heat appears in the sky and begins to terrorize the world. Countries and states begin receiving blackmail letters that threaten disaster if millions of dollars are not paid. The great detective Shylock Holmes is called in to investigate and Astro Boy is selected to be his assistant. But we learn before Shylock does that Elia Belial the former science fiction film director and now mad scientist is the one who controls the artificial sun. He does it from inside of a giant idol that the natives worship on tropical Fire Pot Island. As Shylock and Astro Boy are heading to visit Dr. Elefun they are abducted by Jekyll and Hyde, two thugs who work for Belial and who always talk in rhyme. They take them to a house where they already have Elefun tied up. Elefun confesses that he is the one who invented the artificial sun. He’d used it for mining in the arctic but then sold it to a film producer. Knowing that Elefun will be taken to the big boss, Shylock disguises himself as the doctor. He is taken by helicopter to Fire Pot Island and Astro Boy follows. Belial serves Elefun dinner with too much pepper and he sneezes his big fake nose off revealing that he is Holmes. Jekyll and Hyde are about to shoot Shylock when Astro Boy saves him. Astro Boy destroys the artificial sun and the idol and then defeats Belial. 

            The person who introduced Astro Boy and Japanese animation in general to the western world was Fred Ladd. He was working for NBC radio when the company purchased the rights to Osamu Tezuka’s “Tetsuwan Atomu” (Mighty Atom). NBC hired Ladd to write and produce an English version of the series. According to one source he also wrote the lyrics to the Astro Boy theme song but according to the show credits those were written by Don Rockwell. He hired Ray Owens, Billie Lou Watts, and Gilbert Mack to dub all of the voices.