Trivia / Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water

• Anime First: An original anime project. While it does have a related manga, it was published two years after the anime aired and is a good deal more comedic.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Margaret Cassidy originally auditioned for the title role in the ADV dub, but Charles Campbell and Lowell Bartholomee cast her as Marie instead.
• Children Voicing Children: Nadia, Jean, and Marie were voiced by actual kids in the ADV dub.
• Creator's Pest: Anno wrote Nadia's personality wanting to show the worst side of a teenage girl in love. His desire turned out Gone Horribly Right, as reportedly the rest of the Gainax staff hated her character.
• Cross-Dressing Voices: In the original Japanese version, Jean is voiced by Noriko Hidaka.
• The Danza: In the first Italian dub, Nadia's voiced by Nadia Biondini.
• Dueling Dubs: The first eight episodes were dubbed by Streamline Pictures. When ADV got the license, they redubbed those episodes before covering the rest of the series.
• Fake Nationality: Both English dubs feature American actors using accents to reflect their character's nationality. This includes Ardwight Chamberlain in the Streamline version and Nathan Parsons in the ADV version as the French-accented Jean Rocque Raltique, Melanie MacQueen and Sarah Richardson as the English-accented Grandis, and Edie Mirman in the Streamline version and Jennifer Stuart in the ADV version as the English-accented Electra. The Streamline dub also has Wendee Lee voicing Nadia with a French accent, while the ADV dub has Ev Lunning Jr. voicing Nemo with an Indian accent.
• Follow the Leader:
  • In 2001, Disney released Atlantis: The Lost Empire, a movie with so many similarities to the Nadia anime that, according to the Japanese side, there were talks about the possibility to sue for plagiarism.
  • 2002 anime movie Secret of Cerulean Sand has basically the plot of Nadia moved to a desertic world. Interestingly, it is a Korean/Japanese coproduction, echoing the original anime and its infamous Korean-made filler.
  • Isabel Allende of all people seems to have channelled Nadia in her 2002-2005 young adult trilogy Memories of the Eagle and the Jaguar, which features a bespectacled western teen nerd teaming up with an exotic girl named Nadia who can speak with animals and discovering ancient civilizations with lost supernatural amulets.
  • The 2005 animated series Moby Dick and the Secret of Mu is even less subtle, featuring a brown-haired boy and his exotic dark-skinned female friend searching the supernatural stones of an ancient civilization lost in the sea (Mu in this case), all connected to a futuristic version of other classic of sea literature (Moby-Dick in this case), which casually features a sapient white whale similar to the whole found in Nadia.
• The Other Darrin:
  • In Japanese, Ayerton Grenavan was voiced in episodes 3 and 15 by Kōichi Yamadera but for some reason was replaced by the late Kouji Tsujitani when he joins the group towards the end of the series.
  • In ADV's dub, the Nautilus pilot was voiced originally voiced by Dan Bisbee, but when the crew returned at the end Brian Yannish took over the part.
• Pop-Star Composer: Yukihiro Takahashi, from Sadistic Mika Band and Yellow Magic Orchestra, was one of the composers for the show's songs.
• Real-Life Relative: Akio Ōtsuka voices Nemo in the TV series and his late father Chikao Ōtsuka voices the film's Big Bad Giger.
• Recycled Soundtrack: The most epic battle scores in Nadia would be later used in the score of Evangelion 3.0; both animations were directed by Hideaki Anno and scored by Shiro Sagisu, who added a full orchestral arrangement, electric guitars and chorus lines in English to the originals. Case in point, "Almighty Battleship New Nautilus" from Nadia, to "The Anthem" from 3.0.
• Referenced by...:
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion, by virtue of Production Posse, contains various references to Nadia. This extends to Rebuild of Evangelion, as in 3.0, a shot of Misato glaring at the camera while Ritsuko looks at her from behind mirrors a shot of Captain Nemo and Electra doing the same thing.
  • Craig of the Creek: In one episode, a fictional manga titled Two Piece depicting a girl highly resembling Nadia holding a giant shark is shown.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: In 2001, the French TV network Game One, decided to air an uncut version of the anime by using reinserting scenes from the Japanese Laserdisc into the bowdlwerized master tapes from AB^note The restored scenes weren't dubbed however. However, this went against the contract, and was not allowed to be released. Luckily in 2013, Dybex rereleased the complete series uncut in France.
• Troubled Production: Aside from the unexpected decision to extend the show from 26 to 39 episodes (hence the Korean-animated filler arc), there were other problems plaguing the show's production progress. Anno reportedly disliked the original script for the show and decided to rewrite it from scratch. Furthermore, any "suggestions" from NHK on how to "improve" the show were instantly disregarded, hence the Darker and Edgier tone for most of the canonical episodes. Because of Anno's demand for perfectionism, many episodes ran late, with Anno, already an infamous workaholic, spending more than eighteen hours per day on the show! At one point, after episode 20 was broadcast, it took an entire month for audiences to see the subsequent one. The budget for the show also caused Gainax to lose more than ¥800 million (half a million dollars!) in finances, as they were also denied any of the rights. Perhaps because of this, Gainax and NHK never worked together again, while Anno fell into the heavy bout of depression that led to Neon Genesis Evangelion.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The series was actually conceived by Hayao Miyazaki back in The '80s and it would be a sequel to Future Boy Conan potentially titled Future Boy Conan 2: Around the Underwater World (Mirai Shonen Konan 2: Kaitei Sekai Isshu). However, Toho and NHK rejected his pitch when it was offered to them, so Miyazaki went to recycle its script in his movie Castle in the Sky, which can still be noted in its premise and aesthetics: blue skies, ancient civilizations, flying machines, a brave boy and his more mystic female friend from said civilization who carries a blue magic gemstone, a small clan of thieves led by a woman who eventually become allies, and a paramilitary order of villains whose leader is also related to it.
  • NHK eventually offered Gainax the project. Anno liked the story, but considered the script to be "terrible" (he and Miyazaki are famous Vitriolic Best Buds about each other's styles, and to make things worse, other writers had also meddled themselves on the text) and rewrote it almost completely. He and the other Gainax heads added several other ideas that weren't in Miyazaki's story, like the space battleships and the Red Noah.
  • According to director Higuchi, King was originally conceived as an alien animal disguised as an Earthly lion, which was the reason behind all his intelligence and weird behavior. He was supposed to show his true form at the end of the series, but the idea had been abandoned by then.
  • When the series went out of schedule, Anno wanted to put it on a long hiatus and return later with all the work finished. However, the producers insisted they could not stop the broadcast, forcing him to resort to Filler, put Higuchi on command while he was working on the next part, and subcontract Korean animation companies to help with the animation. The result was the much maligned Island arc 13 episodes, which were an extra pain for Anno due to their low quality. (Ironically, they would be forced to put the show on several hiatuses anyway, including an entire month after episode 20.)
  • Another consequence of the extended episode order was Electra's betrayal. Originally it wouldn't have happened, with Nadia and her friends simply being separated from the Nautilus crew at the end of episode 21 and then reunited in the intended episode 23 (which ended up being episode 36). But instead, episode 22 was dedicated to Electra's Face–Heel Turn and minimally animated (especially noticeable during her backstory monologue). Because of this, it is extremely odd when Nemo and Electra resurface in episode 36 and there is never a single reference made to Electra's prior treason from there to the end of the series.
  • The movie was going to be directed by Anno, but he was unable due to all the burnout caused by his work in the series. Even then, the project was going to be produced by Gainax anyway, but they ran out of budget in midst of creating the story and character designs, so the studio was forced to opt out and delegate everything on Group TAC. This is the reason why the movie re-uses so much footage and feels so out of touch with the series' plot and character development.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion was initially conceived as a Stealth Sequel to Nadia, but NHK held the rights of the latter and the connection between the two stories had to be removed from the plans. Some of the original relationship remains in the 1993 Good Luck Nadia CD drama, in which Nadia's granddaughter Nadia Ito talks with a friend named Ritsuko in Tokyo-2 in 2005, as well as the "Classified Information" given in the videogame Neon Genesis Evangelion 2, which contains an Easter Egg in the form of a mysterious structure in the sea bottom spot where the Nautilus crew scuttled their last ship in the anime.
  • After Streamline Pictures dubbed the first eight episodes, co-founder Carl Macek intended to sell them for television broadcast and use the network's money to dub the entire series. However, these plans fell through. Streamline made another attempt years later to produce a dub of the remaining episodes, but Orion Home Video, Streamline's distributor, declined these plans.
  • There was actually an attempt to get the show to appear on Toonami during the block's time as a part of Cartoon Network, with Jason DeMarco himself leading the effort to get it on the block, and while it was licensed by ADV Films, it wound up being one that got away.
  • In the original ADV DVD release's interviews, Sarah Richardson said Grandis was intended to have an Italian accent (given the character's nationality) in the Monster Island dub. However, she admitted that her audition sounded too stereotypical (she characterized it as sounding like someone working at a pizza parlor). They ultimately changed the character's accent to a more posh upper-class dialect.
• Write Who You Know: Anno based Nadia's personality on bad experiences with women he had in his teen years, and also included some elements of his own younger self in her to spice it up.
• The series makes its debut in Super Robot Wars as part of Super Robot Wars X.
• Director Hideaki Anno recut the show into a six-hour compilation, released only in Japan, called "The Nautilus Story." He also changed some scenes of the show for the LD-Box release "Perfect Edition."