09 Jan 2007 0859H

Obiit: Scooby Doo character designer, inventor of ramen

Iwao Takamoto’s dead. He’s the character designer who brought you such classics as Scooby Doo; he touched all the greats, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, worked for the Nine Old Men at Disney after camp. Like so many other Japanese Americans, due to wartime hysteria and anti-Asian racism, he was interned at Manzanar, where he was observed to have been constantly sketching things, and received some informal training from fellow internees who had been art directors for film studios. And like so many other former internees at Manzanar and the other infamous American concentration camps, they’re passing away very quickly. Of all the names scrolling by when they rolled the credits on the Hanna Barbera cartoons, I’ll always remember seeing his name. Perhaps it was because as an “artistic” Asian American kid, I said, hey, there’s someone like me out there. . .

Momofuku Ando is dead. The inventor of instant ramen was 96. In many accounts of his death, it’s related that he had had a cup of chicken ramen before falling ill, but I prefer to think about how he lived his life, ’cause it’s a great story. Like all great inventors, he failed early and often but kept moving and rolling with the punches. He was the long term innovator, the kind that constantly is looking for openings and opportunities, as opposed to the one-off innovator who flares brightly and fades. I’ve had the original Nissin Foods chicken ramen, although in hindsight, I think it may have been a Hong Kong or Taiwanese knock-off version, it may have come with a packet of sesame oil, and it was one of the earliest foods I remember eating, which we called gung jai min, literally, little rooster noodles (公仔麵), but people sometimes hear the homonym, “doll ramen.” The packaging was particularly memorable: it had a window in the shape of a rooster on it and was striped in orange and white. When I picked up a pack from the Mitsuwa last year, the flavor was utterly unremarkable. Time dulls the senses but not the memory, perhaps.

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