[EVA] Ryoji Kaji and cats

[Gwern Branwen]

On 3/18/07, Peter Svensson <sun1jack at hotmail.com> wrote:
> >I still haven't figured out whether any character was meant to be a cat
> >originally,
> >what the source for such a claim is, and whether that character was
> >Kaji.
>
> In the original plans for the Evangelion series, the story that was revised
> into Episode 24 was about a young boy and his pet cat, where the cat was the
> angel. Kaworu was thus originally going to be a cat. You can find a
> translation of the original series proposal from the Newtype 100% in the ML
> archives somewhere.
>
> Peter Svensson

Thanks. That helps a lot - I never would have guessed it was Kaworu.
But I can't actually seem to find the original. There's a mention of
it here but that's from 2000 and even there seemed to be problems
actually getting to the original. Further, there are problems with the
old archived emails?
The more obvious Google searches (ex
or for Patrick himself don't seem to bring up the original.
Hand-searching through the old archive pulls up later, in the case of
Kaworu. However, what they originally meant and  what they became can
be very different. Kaworu was originally going to
be a  cat, with a little kid."
Similarly "In the notes of the DVD volume 7, it says that the cat was
supposed to be the real Angel, actually... Kinda cliché... ^_^;". Is
this right?

It's weird, but if you do a sitesearch through Google, I noticed that
the old archives seem to be in the eva.onegeek.org subdomain but the
more recent ones to be in the list.onegeek.org subdomain. Really threw
me for a loop until I looked more closely.
So, some indefatigable searching later (reading everything in
<http://www.google.com/search?q=100%25+Newtype+site:http://eva.onegeek.org/pipermail/oldeva/&hl=en&start=10&sa=N>,
one finds <http://eva.onegeek.org/pipermail/oldeva/1998-April/013133.html>
which says: "Where can I find these tranlsation' Would the translator
gently repost in
on the ML?"

Nooo! Even going as far back as 1998, the nigh mythical translation
seem to have been lost! Despair sets in, but the weary traveler for
the last time clicks on the next message link out of sheer reflex, and
is greeted with: "didn't write it. I just grabbed it out of the
archives, and am resending it here, with Patrick's preface intact."

(Odd note: turns out Patrick didn't translate it. That explains the
lack of Google hits for him and it.)

Anyway, an hour of searching later, I finally found the relevant tidbit:

,----
| Episode 22: The cat and the transfer student: The first humanoid Angel
| (child with a pet cat) Nerv's accidental allowing of the Angel's entry
| into the laboratory. Shinji's delima of fighting a humanoid Angel. The
| laboratory's greatest secret is shown.
`----

Cue happy dance.

--
Gwern