Endless Credits #1 - Flight to the Death

'Endless Credits' investigates a dozen pieces of music that were written for films but never publicly released. These are the painstakingly researched and surprising stories behind some of the best movie soundtracks you never heard. This first episode is about a gone-too-soon comic book artist from Japan, a female director determined to honor his vision, and an all-female band from one of the dullest towns in the UK who used power tools to enhance their music. Warning: Contains adult content.

1.

Lazy Buzzsaw

“Flight to the Death”

?Flying Girls, 2001

In the mid-1990s, a phenomenon landed on after-school TV screens. Seemingly out of nowhere, homes were hit with an explosion of color and joy in the form of the ‘Flying Girls’—a squad of four perky characters who, aided by their ability to fly, helped solve the problems of other kids in their high school.

Derided by many as the “Flower Power Puff Girls,” episodes featured a hippyish peace and love message and endless optimism from the quartet of protagonists—Twinsy, Lotus, Kay-Sue, and May. It was over-the-top optimism that should have been anathema in the age of nu-metal angst and the burgeoning era of internet rage. However, the show struck a chord and, within a year, the faces of its animated stars were on lunchboxes, pencil cases, and t-shirts.

Then, in 1999, when the channel that developed the US version of the show, Kidddz, commissioned a feature film to be made, those same faces would soon be on the big screen.

“It’s a huge piece of news for fans of the show,” wrote Executive Producer Marty Eddinston, who was overseeing the global expansion of the Kidddz Network at the time. “These four girls have saved the day for their friends and neighbors time and again. And they’ve never asked for anything in return. So, we decided to give them a movie of their very own as our way of saying thanks to our favorite flying friends.”

Time was of the essence if Kidddz wanted to cash in on the popularity of ‘Flying Girls,’ as they knew that youth culture moves on fast and that there was no guarantee that a year later there would still be the same interest in (or profit from) a spin-off film. Eddinston was doing the rounds of some of Hollywood’s hottest talent, looking for the person to direct the movie, when a message landed in his inbox. It was from up-and-coming star Wanda Yamada, who had recently been nominated for a host of awards for a stop-motion animation short called ‘Not Every Elephant’ which told the story of a pachyderm struggling with weight issues over the course of twenty engaging minutes. Wanda Yamada went by the professional moniker WaYa and was a young Japanese-American woman of few words. Her mail to Eddinston read simply:

“I will direct your film, and I will tell the true story of the Flying Girls as they deserve.

I am waiting for your confirmation.

WaYa.”

Intrigued, Eddinston asked his assistant to send him WaYa’s work to date and was much impressed by ‘Not Every Elephant’ and by the confidence of this young woman, who had not even been in the frame for the director’s position but had boldly announced herself as the only candidate worth considering.

With the clock ticking and a strong feeling that he was making the right call, Eddinston informed WaYa that she had the job without even setting up a meeting. He was impressed by her resume and inspired by her promise to tell the story the right way. He didn’t feel there was anything more he needed to know…

Meanwhile, in Leighton Buzzard, a quiet market town in the sleepy heart of England, nineteen-year-old Kate Wawrzyk had recently been listening to The Kinks.

“I started a band with three friends when we were sixteen. That was 1997. We were kind of simultaneously inspired by and horrified by the Spice Girls. We liked the idea of 'girl power’ but we wanted the version that sounded like L7, Bikini Kill, Lush, or The Breeders.

“The first incarnation of the band was called Period Pants, which my parents actually thought was pretty funny. However, we wanted to play at our school sixth-form party, and the PTA was having none of it. At first, we got all angry and wanted to tell them to piss off, but then we decided it wasn’t that good of a name anyway.

“We originally thought we would call ourselves The Lady Buzzards, as a play on the name of the town we were from, and an answer to the short-lived rock band The Leyton Buzzards, who everyone assumed were from round our way but were actually from London. We thought we were reclaiming the name or something. So, we called ourselves The Lady Buzzards for our first proper show, but it didn’t last. We saw it on a poster, and it just looked lame.”

It would take a while for the band to get to Lazy Buzzsaw, and it wasn’t in a straight line.

“I’d been looking for a signature sound for the band, and for my guitar. I had read how the Kinks had used knitting needles and razor blades to rough up their little green amp and make the sound in ‘You Really Got Me.’ I found that story so exciting, that I went out to my dad’s workshop and started messing around with different tools.

“He had this circular saw that was set into a workbench. I flicked the switch; it gave this brief loud whine and then this piercing shredding noise as the blade went around. I just thought it was amazing. I ran into the house, got my cheap equipment, and recorded the noise of the saw at different speeds and at different moments in its operation. Like when I switched it off and it slowed down for a few seconds and then gave a judder and a clank, and then silence.

“That was my signature sound. From that moment on, whenever I played guitar on a record, at a quarter volume, right there in the mix, is the constant whir of that buzzsaw. It sounds like I am doing something absolutely insane with a guitar, but it is just normal chords played with mild distortion over the sound of an industrial machine.”

And so, weeks after their first show as the Lady Buzzards, the band put up posters around school announcing that they would be appearing again, but this time as Lady Buzzsaw, in deference to their new sound.

Unexpectedly, this was met with immediate protests from the PTA. The chairwoman suggested that lady buzzsaw must be some youth slang for a female sex toy, and threatened to have the concert stopped on the grounds of indecency. Rather than cancel the show or go to the trouble of printing more posters, the band walked around with black marker pens and put a ‘z’ where a ‘d’ had been—thus giving the band its fourth name before it had even played its second show.

Unlike the previous names, Lazy Buzzsaw stuck and the band used it for the rest of their short but high-octane career. “Lazy Buzzsaw felt right,” reflected Wawrzyk. “We wanted to be girls in a band—and we wanted to be feminists—but we didn’t want to make music that just talked about us being girls. Having the word 'lady' in the name put all this focus on our gender. I rather like the shift to focusing on the fact that we were teenagers and all a bit lazy. And I think that Lazy Buzzsaw summed up the sound perfectly. The buzzsaw is there in the mix, but it is only at a quarter of the volume of the guitar. It’s screaming along in the background but is being somewhat lazy.”

With a catchy name, a grinding new sound, and some decent songwriting underpinning it all, Lazy Buzzsaw soon found themselves playing to bigger crowds and getting a deal to cut a single with a local indie label. The song ‘Cut You Up Again’ performed well enough to get them a review in the NME and a single-record deal with a small label known for big risks and anarchic tracks—Bowl Movement Records.

The subsequent debut album, ‘Saw You Coming,’ dropped in late 1999 and garnered positive reviews from the magazines that really mattered, earning the band no chart success but regular early-afternoon slots on festival bills throughout 2000.

“It was the worst time to be a group of females playing loud music. Imagine being a teenage girl on the same festival bill as Blink 182, Korn, Limp Bizkit, The Offspring, and Papa Roach… It was a rough ride. Then, one day, we got a call from our record company saying we should call this woman in America who wanted us to write a song for a film.

“The first time I spoke to WaYa, I introduced myself, and she said, ‘You will write a song for me for the Flying Girls movie.’ I laughed and asked her if it was maybe not a mistake because our music was a long way from the vibe of that animated show. She said, ‘No, you are mistaken. That show is not Flying Girls.’ I was intrigued.”

A week later, Lazy Buzzsaw received a package in the post from America. It contained a DVD featuring a two-minute sequence from the in-progress Flying Girls film. After watching it on a loop time and again for over an hour, the band picked up their instruments and worked in the studio for two straight days without sleep. The song that came out, ‘Flight to the Death,’ retained its name from working title right through to publication.

“It’s the best thing we ever did,” says Kate Wawrzyk.

In Hollywood, Marty Eddinston was having trouble seeing the rough cuts for the movie he was paying for. He’d given WaYa a healthy ten-million-dollar budget and had expected her to complete the film within a few months with the Flying Girls animation team from Kidddz. As it was, nobody from the television show—even Head Animator Jim Fernley—had even been contacted by the enigmatic director. Rumor was that she had hired a team of animators who she had met on internet chat rooms. This being the late nineties, Marty Eddinston didn’t even know what that really meant and was too afraid to ask. He was an industry stalwart who had only just gotten an email address the year before but still did all his work face-to-face or, at a pinch, on phone calls. He liked the sound of sending faxes.

When Eddinston asked WaYa for an outline of the plot of the movie, she wrote back:

“It’s not the same as the episode of the TV show where Little Lev Leibowitz was late for his Bar Mitzvah and the Flying Girls flew him there to make sure he was on time, but there are some similarities.”

When Marty asked what the similarities were, he got a single sentence in reply:

“There is also a sad virgin in my story.”

Terrified, Eddinston considered pulling the plug, but the Hollywood trades were already talking loudly about what a bold and brilliant move he had made by hiring such a hot young writer/director. Rather than fire her and prove them wrong—exposing himself as gutless and out of touch—he decided to keep WaYa on board but try and get a look at the film he and the Kidddz Network were paying for.

Immediately upon receiving the money for ‘Flying Girls,' in the summer of 1999, WaYa had ignored the suggestion that she work with animators from Kidddz in their own studios, saying she would be more comfortable in her own workspace—the converted industrial unit in which she had filmed and edited ‘Not Every Elephant.' A week later, she signed out necessary computers, cameras, sound, and editing equipment and disappeared again. Over the course of the next year, she did not voluntarily speak to studio executives once.

After a three-month silence, the studio sent a team of producers—backed up by a couple of good lawyers, just in case they were needed—down to the WaYa workspace in Culver City, only to find it abandoned. Further investigation uncovered that WaYa had terminated the lease the day that she signed the contract to make the movie with Kidddz.

Eddinston had his accountants do some investigation into the expenses checks that WaYa sent over, but none was for a rental property. Worried that she was running off with a fortune, Eddinston called her number dozens of times before she finally answered and assured him that all was well and that the movie was going to blow his mind.

He left the call somewhat calmed. She was an artist, and obviously a genius. This was her process, but she had her own name to protect. If she fucked things up on this movie, she would never work in Hollywood again. Heck, if she straight up stole $10 million, she’d never get work in town selling tacos, let alone as a director.

Eddinston was, however, stuck in a trap of sunk cost and public anticipation. He needed to tell his own bosses how close the finished film was to being ready so that they could start putting the wheels in motion on the marketing machine that would become a juggernaut as the planned summer release approached.

He tried to find out who was working in WaYa’s animation team, in the hope of getting some of them to show more of the work with him than their art director would. He even got his assistant and interns posing with fake names on those primitive black-and-white internet chatroom message boards, but nobody could uncover a single member of the team.

The closest they got to knowing anything was invoices filed with accounting for one-way flight tickets from Korea, Japan, Norway, Ireland, and Hawaii in the first weeks of production. Maybe these were the artists that had been drafted in to work on the rainbow-shine feel-good animations of the ‘Flying Girls’ movie.

In the end, it was another invoice that sent Marty Eddinston into a full tailspin. It was from a British record label called Bowl Movement Records, invoicing Kidddz for the two-day hire of a studio in order to record a song called ‘Flight to the Death.'?? ?

“What makes ‘Flight to the Death’ sound just that little bit different to the rest of our songs is that it’s not a buzzsaw in the background. It’s the sound of a jet engine,” says Kate Wawrzyk.

“In the scene we were given on that DVD, Chi Xi—who was called Twinsy in the American cartoon—is hanging onto the cargo door of a plane in flight. Because of a curse, she and the other Flying Girls have temporarily lost the power of flight but still can’t walk on land, so they have stolen a plane to stay airborne. Chi Xi watches the RooJoo Monster flying up to attack the plane, and she realizes that it is going to smash straight through the wing and take them all down.

“She goes to the cargo door, opens it up, the crawls down. She looks back up to the other Flying Girls in the hold of the plane and, without a word, launches herself down onto the monster who is flying up. She’s got her bone amulet and her ruby dagger. She’s going to fight the monster, knowing that the only end for her is death. Whether she kills it or not, she no longer has control over gravity and the fall will end with her broken on the gorund.

“We got our sound engineer to find audio of jet engines, to replace the buzzsaw, and we doctored the recording using reverb swell to make the sound pulse in 4/4 time. That runs alone for about 20 seconds as she makes her decision and clamors down the exit. Then the song kicks in at the exact point her fingertips leave the metal of the plane. That’s the moment her fate is sealed.

“The version we recorded for the film played for 2 minutes 13 seconds, stopping suddenly when her little body smashes on the ground. We sent it to WaYa and it blew her mind.

“It was the perfect soundtrack to the second death of Chi Xi. Or it would have been if the film had even been made.”

‘The Girls Who Could Not Touch The Ground’ was created as a black-and-white comic book in the early 1980s. The artist, Toshi Hajiri, printed less than 100 copies of each of the first ten editions, paying from his own pocket. He was still at art school and didn’t eat for days to afford the cost of getting his comics into a popular local Tokyo store.

The story from the very first edition was of four teenage girls—Chi Xi, Kai-Su, Lotus, and Mai—who were friends from one of the poorest area of the city. Desperate to help their families survive, they lie to their parents about attending a school camping trip and set out into the dense forests outside of the city, in search of the treasure of Surigu, which is said to be hidden behind a waterfall in a part of the forest that can only be accessed by a few selected people.

Incredibly, the girls find the waterfall and take the treasure, but are then caught as they are leaving by the RooJoo Monster who guards the jewels. The monster kills and mutilates each of the girls in turn. However, they are then reanimated by a woodland spirit called The Wind Lark who witnesses the murders and takes pity on the girls.

The Wind Lark is bringing the girls back to life but the RooJoo Monster attacks once more, this time aiming its force at the spirit.

The girls try to escape while The Wind Lark fights the RooJoo Monster, which does not want to let them go—fearing that they will one day return to steal the treasure.

In the end, the Wind Lark dies but the girls have gone far enough away from the treasure to be out of sight of the RooJoo Monster. Never leaving the treasure, the monster cannot follow them to kill them totally once again,. However, it throws out a curse: The girls will remain trapped between the living and dead world until they are able to touch the soil of their home street once more. What’s more, they will be lifted up into the air and forced to float on the wind for eternity. ??????

Over the course of 280 subsequent comics and 50 episodes of monochromatic anime, the four friends learn to control their flight, fight countless demons, and try to get home so that they may be reborn. They sometimes help local children or endangered villagers to defeat dark enemies, then drift away again on the wind.?

As a generation of Japanese children were swept up in the winds of the story of ‘The Girls Who Could Not Touch The Ground,’ Toshi Hajiri became a multi-millionaire and a hero to the people. Fiercely protective of his story and his own legacy, he drew every frame of the comic book himself and oversaw every element of every episode that hit television screens.

When he died tragically, at the age of 35, his brother sold the rights to his work for millions of dollars within a month of the funeral. The flowers on the grave were still looking fresh when Kidddz Network got hold of the rights to make a U.S. version of what they now called ‘Flying Girls.'

Their next job was to rename the characters to make them easier for an international audience. Then there was this whole problem with the girls being zombies or ghosts or ghouls or whatever you wanted to call it. So, they tweaked that as well.

In fact, Kidddz tweaked and tweaked until they had a product that felt bit better for wholesome American kids. The ‘Flying Girls’ soon became four fun friends at Ace Valley High School who could take to the skies to help Johnny Redding catch that high-flying baseball in his big little league game, or could fly around collecting up Molly Hemsworth’s homework which got sucked away by a sudden gust of wind.

Wanda Yamada, a young Japanese-American who had grown up watching every single dark and twisted episode of the original creation, caught the new version on Kidddz. She needed to see it, just to check how angry it would make her.

In fact, it made her so mad that she often thought about it even while she was studying, or while she was creating stop-motion of body-dysmorphic elephants, or while she was collecting awards for film industry newcomers.

Then she heard that they had green-lit a film... and she decided that she should be the one to make it.

Marty Eddinston realized that something was horribly wrong when he saw the invoice from Bowl Movement Records. ‘Flight to the Death’ didn’t sound like a song from his ‘Flying Girls.' It didn’t strike him as a number that seven-year-olds could sing in the bath but could also be a cross-over hit with teenagers and even post-modern, slightly ironic adults.

He called WaYa and threatened her with lawsuits and worse. That didn’t work, so he begged and asked nicely. In the end, she made him wait a full month before turning up at his office with the finished cut of ‘Flying Girls.' It was something of a surprise that she had kept the American title.

Other than that, nothing resembled Marty Eddinston’s show from the Kidddz Network. This was grainy, black-and-white animation telling a story of four dead children trapped in a mist, trying to get home.

Not much more is known. The five people who were in the office that day are the only ones who have ever seen the movie.

Immediately after the meeting, Kidddz Network fired WaYa . Rather surprisingly, they did not pursue damages. Rumor ran that both sides agreed to a deal in which the corporation would not litigate if the director did not leak the backup copy of her version of 'Flying Girls' that she claimed to have in a secret location.

The network ran into overdrive with the 'Flying Girls' movie project, determined not to miss their planned summer release. Eventually, they simply cut together an 80-minute long montage of scenes from the existing TV series and added around 15 minutes of linking storyline animation. The whole project took three weeks and was ready with time to spare.

The movie was released in August 2001 and grossed $340 million at the box office, holding the number one spot for a month.

2021 was the twentieth anniversary of the release of the ‘Flying Girls’ movie. On the exact date, a playlist appeared on all major music sites with the entire soundtrack to the original film. When questioned, none of the artists said they had given permission for their music to be shared, but none objected. It was unclear who owned the account but the tracks were all of studio standard.

The album contained twelve songs and ran to 53 minutes in length. All vocalists were female and three of the tracks were sung in Japanese. It went as follows:

1.?????? The Dime-A-Dozen Donnas – School Yard

2.????? Muyoko Ma – Listen to the Wind

3.????? The Chiller Queens – She’s a Chiller Queen

4.????? Sophie F. Lowery – Uniform Blues

5.????? An Yamada – Mai and Lotus (Two Flowers)

6.????? Deathy Piggy Fingers – Scream Scream Fly

7.?????? Muyoko Ma – The World Without Us

8.????? Lazy Buzzsaw – Flight to the Death

9.????? Karen Konnady – My Ghost Roams

10.?? V+V=VVG – Dying to Meet You

11.??? Sophie F. Lowery – Coming Home

12.?? An Yamada & Karen Konnady – Tokyo, Tokyo

The Cartoon Capers Company, which had taken over Kidddz Network in 2017, claimed ownership of the rights to the music, as they had commissioned it to be made. They demanded that the playlists be removed—but the music can still be found on streaming sites as of the time of writing.

Lazy Buzzsaw disintegrated in 2005. “We were just four young girls looking to do something more interesting than live and die in Leighton Buzzard, so we started a band. We never expected or even hoped for success. Our drummer, Carli, and our second guitar player, Mika, were not really looking to be career musicians. We had fun for a few years and went to some places, but they both wanted to go to university. It ended. And that was fine.”

Kate Wawrzyk went on to play with other another band that appeared on the ‘Flying Girls’ soundtrack, The Chiller Queens. She also played guitar on three albums with Maxx Out and toured extensively with Ozzylator. She now performs solo as Kate Wow.

“Nothing I’ve done in my career has ever been as good as the version of ‘Flight to the Death’ that appeared in 2021. I remembered that we made it but we’d lost the tapes. We only had the two-minute version, which we made for the film scene.

“When we were done with that, we were inspired by the Smashing Pumpkins, how the short version of ‘Drown’ appeared on 'Pisces Iscariot' but the 'Singles' soundtrack had that longer cut with all the feedback and then the sounds of things slowly breaking down.

“We played five full minutes of complete anger and despair over the sound of that pulsing jet engine. No singing, just instrumentation, and pure power.

“People ask me what inspired it, and what all that noise is about. For me, it is the sound of Chi Xi ascending. She’s been tortured for years by living in a half-world, then she finally touches the ground again, and it smashes her body to pieces. We played the sound of her body being broken, and then of her damaged soul putting itself back together and ascending to, well, wherever. Maybe heaven. I don't know. All I know is that she is flying, and our music was flying with her.”

The end

'Endless Credit' is a work of fiction. All characters are created by the author and do not represent any real-life persons, living or dead. Further chapters to follow. If you are a publisher or agent interested in publishing the full book, feel free to contact me.