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I have a neat find from Shudo's blogs, this time about his work on Minky Momo. He mentions some of the people he worked with that would later overlap with Pokemon, the most notable being Kunihiko Yuyama. On his time with "Sea Momo," the second series, he writes an entire blog about a person who worked on Sazae-san named "Akemi Mende." This seems to have been a pen name for Akemi Omode, a screenwriter that came on during the late-BW era, and was responsible for most of Serena's focus episodes in XY. (She also used Akemi Mende when writing the light novel of Brainpowerd and Gundam Wing with Yoshiyuki Tomino of Gundam fame)
Shudo had an unfavorable first impression of Omode when she asked to be a screenwriter for Minky Momo, because she had been trained to write screenplays at a school. Shudo rants a bit about how you can't really teach someone to write a screenplay, schools are inherently uniform and screenwriting is individual, screenwriters need real life experience, criticism and analysis are great, but don't make for good writers, etc. Here's sort of the cherry on top quote:
>Rather, I think most of the interesting and popular screenwriters are so busy that they don't have time to analyze their own creative methods, and they continue to write in their own easy way.
He also is skeptical about someone coming from writing Sazae-san, since it's a good gig, but very uniform in how each episode is structured, and Shudo wanted "anything goes" with Minky Momo. Eventually Shudo agreed to have her write, because she told him she actually wanted to write a robot story, and this struck him as unique enough from a Sazae-san writer. She ended up being a regular writer, and then collaborated with Yoshiyuki Tomino on one of the Gundam Wing manga, and his show Brainpowerd.