Dr. Elara Lee, noted expert on the Sleeping Android, writes:
During the Middleton Manifestation, I had the opportunity to interview Police Chief Harry Thompson, who recounted a most curious experience he’d had, decades earlier, at an American military base in Japan. The ensuing investigation led me down a rabbit hole of lost media, alternate dimensions, and a possible encounter with a ghost.
But first, I’ll need you to pardon a brief digression to introduce an obscure anime series from a long-defunct studio.
Power Ewes: Gigamon Action Go! was an action-comedy series produced by Yakonoko Animation, with two seasons released from 1993 through 1995. The show followed a team of five superpowered high school girls—Ayame, Reika, Natsumi, Sakura, and Emiko—who banded together to battle a different giant mechanoid each week, saving their city from destruction while managing friendships, family dynamics, romantic relationships, academics, and extracurricular activities.
Power Ewes was set in the fictional metropolis of Tetsudō City, where the five previously ordinary high school students lived and attended classes at the same school. When trouble struck, the team accessed their powers through a Sailor Moon-style power-up sequence that transformed each girl’s school uniform into a color-coded sailor suit and bestowed sheeplike horns and floppy ears.
With their newfound powers, the girls teamed up and called themselves the United Heroines, protectors of Tetsudō City. However, due to the ovine appearance of their powered identities, the girls were dubbed “Power Ewes” by the media and, to their eternal embarrassment, that was the name that stuck.
Each episode of Power Ewes introduced a new giant mechanoid, dispatched to Tetsudō City by the devious Lord Orongo. With a wide variety of robotic designs, the behemoths-of-the-week tested the limits of the Ewes’ powers and surfaced weaknesses in their team dynamics. To keep the mechanoids from wreaking havoc on Tetsudō City, the girls would have to acquire new skills, resolve struggles in their personal lives, learn to work better as a team, and combine their powers in new ways to become more formidable than before.
Despite lukewarm reviews, Power Ewes acquired a small but loyal following. However, the production was cut short when showrunner and lead animator Ichika Miura stepped off a Tokyo curb into the path of an oncoming truck in May of 1994.
Miura had been regarded as something of a prodigy, only nineteen years old at the time of her tragic death. Power Ewes had been based on Miura’s original manga, which she’d self-published in a high school zine that one of her classmates had circulated while working an after-school job in the Yakonoko Animation mailroom.
Yakonoko Animation was, at the time, reeling from a string of commercial failures, including The Time-Travel Toaster, Mecha Moe Mates, and The Great Cheesecake War. Most recently, the studio had released the much-hated Virtual Vixens: Cyberpunk Edition, which attempted to revive the beloved Valley Vixens franchise with cringeworthy dialogue, a convoluted plot, and a virtual world made entirely of product placement.
Power Ewes was exactly the dice-roll that Yakonoko had been seeking for a project that would either to save the studio or drive the last nail into its coffin. That the board of directors would put all their remaining financial eggs into the Power Ewes basket and place that basket into the hands of a teenager was a testament to the company’s desperate straits.
The modest success of Power Ewes did in fact allow the studio to limp along for another couple of years. But with the sudden loss of its flagship project’s creative lead, Yakonoko found itself unable to meet its production schedule, payroll, and contractual obligations. Only eight of thirteen second-season episodes of Power Ewes were broadcast, with the remainder rushed out as quality-compromised direct-to-video exclusives.
Fan-dubbed bootlegs of Power Ewes circulated abroad, acquiring enough of a cult status in the United States to draw the attention of a conservative media watchdog group, who cited the horns of the Ewes as evidence of demonic influence.
This led to what is, perhaps, the most enduring legacy of Power Ewes: the “Manga-chan does not approve” meme, adapted from a news photo from the congressional hearing at which an oversized poster of Ayame Matsumoto in her Power Ewe form looms over a pair of lawyers and a beleaguered committee staffer.
This image still pops up in my feed and has fascinated me, taunted me, and frustrated me as an artifact existing at the intersection of culture, technology, and sheep. For years, I pondered over possible connections between this meme and the Sleeping Android—was it possible that the Cyberlams had left a hoofprint in Internet culture?
The origins of the meme were obscure, and my research was stymied by the belief that this character’s name was Manga-chan. Even my experts and consultants within the anime community were unable to identify the source of this image at first, so completely had the Power Ewes faded from the collective consciousness.
Yakonoko Animation declared bankruptcy in 1995, and the company was dissolved entirely by 1996. The fanbase, such as it was, moved on to a multitude of similar shows and, even if there had been calls for a Power Ewes revival, the rights were tied up in a legal morass of corporate IP and the estate of Ichika Miura.
But there were no calls for a revival. Decades passed, storage media degraded, memories faded, and database entries mysteriously dropped out of their tables. I believe some force, as yet beyond our understanding, may have been acting to push the Power Ewes back into the realm of dreams from which they had originated, although that aspect of my investigation is ongoing, controversial, and beyond the scope of this report.
Ichika Miura lived a short life in Tokyo. She dreamed up the Power Ewes, brought them into existence, and shared them with the world. Her planned three-season series arc never progressed into its final season. On these facts, all of my conventional sources agreed—until I encountered Middleton Police Chief Harry Thompson, who presented an alternate version of that story while being, himself, caught up in the events of a separate Sleeping Android manifestation.
I can only conclude that Chief Thompson’s involvement was no mere coincidence, and that these manifestations are linked in ways that we may never understand.
To be continued in Part 2…
