Drawing Historical Figures as Anime Characters

welcome to dropy where we take your dumb ideas and make even dumber drawings i'm jacob i'm nathan i'm karina and i'm julia and we're going back in time to the era known as anime history wow so long ago that was it's anime history coming back as per your request specifically voted on by the patreon audience thank you very much for the patreon supporters we've each picked a historical figure to talk about and we've done a speed draw of them in an anime-esque style and we're gonna we're gonna teach

you a little something maybe here i love history uh nathan do you wanna do you wanna go first i wanna go first why don't you tell us a little bit about what you did uh so i chose a fellow by the name of marie antoine karem all right pronunciation oh yeah it was pretty good thank you it's yeah the a frenchman many consider to be the original celebrity chef oh i'm into it should we go ahead and get it started yeah let's get it started i'll tell you about this guy all right three two one go i just

wanted to do a a history about someone who didn't do any war stuff sure yeah he did and and what's what's the opposite of war is eating yes and so i i googled a bunch of like culinary history lists and this guy kept popping up on all of them and so of course i went with a jojo style because he's a fancy french patisserie guy so let me tell you about him born in 1784 to a poor family in france was abandoned at age 10 oh no uh during the height of the french revolution i was about to say as does

thems be revolution times yeah gets gets his first job working as a kitchen boy at a parisian chop house at age 10. by age 14 he uh becomes formally apprenticed to uh sylvain bailey who is a famous patissier with a shop near the palace royale and he starts he starts making a name for himself he starts making these real elaborate patisserie sculptures that they put in the shop's window and he's just getting a lot of uh attention from all the the nobility going around seeing his his stuff uh by th

e time he's 19 he opens his own patisserie shop and he gets the attention of this uh french diplomat named charles maurice de talleyrand perigord oh yeah i love that guy he's a he's a big name yeah and so this this dude he's like impressed by this kid and so he gets he gets um some money from napoleon to make this like this uh chateau in the french countryside sort of like a diplomatic like meeting zone and so he takes he takes karem with him to be his like chef there and he and he issues him a

challenge which is to create an entire year's worth of menus never repeating a menu for the entire year i'd be like no which feels like such a like anime thing yeah really yeah there's definitely a food wars season about this yeah and uh and he freaking does it he he nails it and after that he's like set he goes he bounces around for all sorts of different nobility working as a private chef for for various folks briefly even the tsar of russia although i think he he never actually cooks anything

for the czar of russia he just like goes uh over there for a little bit do you think he had a day where he was just like oh god i don't know what i want to do for november 14th this is salad day that's it this is but yeah like he's he's credited with a lot of stuff uh with regards to uh french cuisine he's he's credited as the inventor of the the toke uh chef's hat that's big and like i i'm like other i'm sure other like he's not the first person to wear a hat as a chef but like he he he liked

to wear like a real tall one he was also the inventor of his namesake karem fresh hey yeah but um well i'm glad i'm glad you mentioned that because he did extrapolate the i read this and was like this also sounds very anime the four the four mother sauces oh yes that's his power ah so that's what i've got in the background here the four mother sauces do you know what the four mother sauces are say them yeah it's uh hold on i got them written down everything was peaceful until the pasta sauce att

acked until mayonnaise town attack it's uh espanol which is the brown one uh the velote which is the this uh that like orangy one it's like a clear um stock based sauce alemand which is like a uh and again apologies for the pronunciation that was pretty good actually which um is similar to the velote but thickened with egg and flavored with lemon and then bechamel which is a cream sauce and i think later on chef augusta escoffier decided that there were actually five mother sauces and that alema

nd is a uh a secondary sauce uh it's a daddy sauce too yeah uh to the velote and so they they remove alamonde and add uh tomato and hollandaise as mother sauces instead but the the four that uh that uh karem came up with are the the four i've depicted here that's awesome this image and uh yeah i just you know it's a cool fancy chef man and you know he's famous for making elaborate sculptures out of patisserie so i i gave him a a bread sword because because why not it's an animal yeah it's anime

history we can take some liberties i will say that uh just a fun aside and the month is the word for german so it's just a german sauce well yeah and one of them is espanol so yeah yeah i guess it's just they just named them after places real creative with the sauce names yeah and uh this rules and then at the very end i realize i have the shading on the chef's hat coming from the wrong side so it's the power of the mother sauce yeah it casts its own light its own beautiful glow so uh there's th

ere's karam anime karem my fancy french uh chef boy that's so fun i love those so cool i'm so glad to learn i just i love fancy i love these houses i love these sauces [Laughter] great work nathan also i suspect this will make a very powerful thumbnail image so i thank you i thank you for that oh you're quite welcome okay i'm going to go next i will say out the gate um i decided to do like a little comic for this one i was feeling like doing a comic because i wanted to get like a certain uh like

shonen comic vibe so it's it's mostly just like my style but i just had i was just in the moods that's what i did hell yeah and i did a woman named gertrude benham and she was an english explorer and mountaineer uh in in the early 1900s when it was uncommon for a woman to be doing that sort of stuff and not only did she do it but she did it better than pretty much anyone else uh could have done it so i'll get into it and then i'll tell you about her three two one go okay so gertrude benham the

thing that i think is the most impressive to me is that she didn't even do any of this stuff until she was like an adult older than us wow like she she took care of her parents in their old age and then their parents died and she was 36 and she was like all right i'm out and she just like went out and became a famous mountaineer and explorer at 36. hell yeah things she was known for she climbed at least 300 peaks over 10 000 feet tall and she circumnavigated the globe seven times damn uh largely

on foot she like walked the entirety of africa damn that's a lot that's a lot of steps yeah um and she has kind of this whole history of like doing things and then um making male explorers pissed off [Laughter] uh a couple of stories that the existence of women kind of pissed off male explorers yeah also my favorite thing is that the first thing she did when she set out to explore she went to canada because she was enticed by advertisements promoting the rocky mountains um when she arrived she

had set her sights on the valley of the ten peaks in alberta and one of the toughest peaks there was called mount faye which was named for charles fay an american mountaineer who had not actually climbed it yet but he was like he just called dibs i want the confidence of that man to be like yeah i'll get to it but name it after me anyway he was actually going to do it at the same time she arrived there but he failed to do it and she took a different route and succeeded oh damn um so he found out

she had already done it and got mad and he was like well fine i won't name that one after me i'll name the second highest one after me but she had already climbed that one too amazing brutal uh then the thing she's possibly the most known for and what i'm depicting here in this little comic she was the first woman to summit kilimanjaro and also the first like european in general to summit kilimanjaro she went to go do it it was considered one of the most treacherous of any climbs because of sud

den blizzards that could happen and when she went to go do it she passed a unit of german soldiers that warned her they said and i quote that it had not been completed by any britisher man or woman and very seldom by anyone else but she decided to do it anyway she went with some local guides and the local guides when they passed uh a heap of skeletons on the way up the local guide said no we're not gonna continue and she was like to see a skeleton let alone a heap never yeah let alone keep um bu

t she was like well i'm gonna keep going anyways so the guides turned back and she kept going and uh and reached the top and climbed to the top of kilimanjaro and uh she was also like notoriously modest so this is possibly why she didn't receive like a lot of historical praise because she just did this stuff and then people just like found out later that she had done it her first 12 peaks were that of meringues what whenever you make a meringue you want us to speak that's when you know the merin

gue no nathan's was the cook she's an explorer yeah we're on a different one now she has nothing to do with meringue um you said it so confidently i'm trying to learn from that dude oh yeah it's just like this mountain's mine i'll climb it someday this joke is good i'm gonna say it peaks of meringues um anyways to finish up her story her last expedition was in 1935 her plan is to take one last trip around the globe imagine saying that i'm going to do one last trip around the whole globe victory

seven times already yes and then she was gonna settle down on britain's south coast but during that journey she died aboard a ship off the coast of east africa someone pushed her no one knows like how she died someone pushed her that dude faye was like i'm tired of your [ __ ] yeah i'm gonna get on this boat and i'm gonna push you you and your meringues if it was the anime she met some aliens who were like you really want to come explore we we got some stuff for you too oh yeah and she went to s

pace hell yeah in this comic here i wanted to depict the moment where the german soldier told her to turn back and she was like nah no and you'll see i saved the dialogue for the very end because i didn't want to give away my anime ass dialogue uh until it was done but this is so good thank you i really liked how the sort of character art turned out i thought it was very charming looking i didn't uh mention how my guy died because kind of a bummer uh but since you mentioned uh year's death pushe

d off a boat by faye my guy died because of all of the uh toxic uh fumes he inhaled from working charcoal burning uh stoves his entire career that is a bummer crap well sorry bud but he's remembered you know his legacy lives on yeah that's what's important so i'm adding in the dialogue now you can see the german soldiers saying what he said for real says ma'am you need to turn back this peak has never been climbed by any british or man or woman and very seldom by anyone else and so i have her sa

ying fine by me i'm not like anyone else she has the power of friendship and anime on her side yeah i think she didn't have the power of friendship because she was like notoriously a loner like she never married she never uh had any real like relationships time for that when you climb in peaks i know but she was like she just like to go out on her own into nature and explore stuff though oh yeah get a girl for her and at the time too that was like for a woman to be like i'm 36 i'm not gonna get

married i'm just gonna go climb mountains for the rest of my life like that's you gotta be brave too the only place i can out run misogyny is running away from it constantly yeah on a mountaintop it'll never catch me so just add a little action lines there and then jacob this is so cool so cool thank you i hadn't done a comic in so long since you know since i worked for college humor because i think i burned myself out on comics pretty bad but it was it was really fun to to do this it kind of ma

de me remember why it's fun to do like comic stuff yeah so thank you gertrude venom for reminding me why comics are fun thank you thank you but yeah this is it for me and that means it's karina's time next my time i also didn't do in a particular style it's my style i'm a professional artist too i'm doing it in my style and i did balto the dog yeah yeah we love the dog yeah i love the dog do you want me to just jump right into it yeah let's go alrighty three two one go so december 1924 through j

anuary 1925 there was this big diphtheria outbreak in nome alaska a little secluded i guess town they had one doctor and this doctor discovered that they were just like out of the antitoxin to help treat this outbreak and so they have to find a way to like get a delivery in before um you know it starts spreading and just killing everyone in this tiny little town so um but the problem is it was like winter so everything was like covered in ice ports were closed they couldn't like fly in anything

so they were able to get some anti-talks into or they found some in anchorage alaska and were able to get it to nana but uh they still had 674 miles so to like deliver it and they had no way of doing it other than sled dog yes so they set up this relay consisting of like 20 teams of mushers and dogs and they were going to like bring the serum to the town and they were they had to like do it really fast or else the serum would go bad due to like the really harsh weather conditions because it's th

is is like dead of winter in alaska it was like as cold as like negative 62 fahrenheit negative 52 celsius very cold scary cold and so we all know balto from the [ __ ] animated movie where he's supported kevin bacon but um he there wasn't only one team doing this really like in the movie it was 20. and a lot of it was covered by a different team there was this guy uh leonard sepula and he was like this really esteemed dog breeder and racer and he whole he held like world records so he covered m

ost of the route because he started in gnome and then picked up the serum like part away in and his route included two passes over the shortcut over the norton sound which is this big body of water that's like frozen over and it saves a day of travel but it's like constantly moving and the ice can break at any moment like submerging you in just freezing water in the middle of this giant thing of water so that was just very dangerous and yeah he had to cross it twice and he did successfully and u

m i'm reading my [ __ ] anyways and the wind chill was really cold it was oh yeah i paused because my roommates made food and offered me some my bad it was so perfectly this route also included wind chill as cold as 85 to negative 85 degrees fahrenheit and um they couldn't rest because they were on such a short time to like deliver this before it went bad and right at the end they also had to do a grueling eight-mile climb up a summit oh my god and this team was led by togo it's not balto also w

as the dog that led the team that did the final two legs of of the delivery so it went like uh sepala and togo did like 200 how many 260 miles of this like 670 something mile route and then um they passed it off to this other guy uh charlie olson who then did a few more miles and then passed it off to gunner and then um because then had to like there was a blizzard and even though he didn't have the longest leg it was still a really dangerous leg because the blizzard would not stop so he had to

set out in the middle of a blizzard he had no visibility and he had to count on balto's like sense of smell and direction to just lead him because he couldn't see even the dogs closest to him he actually uh his thing flipped his sled flipped at one point due to like the incredibly strong winds and he lost the cylinder of the serum in the snow and he had to like search for it with his bare hands and um yeah it's a really like exciting story because it sounds completely unreal but um they they did

it they even got there a little early because balto's team wasn't supposed to arrive or they weren't supposed to do the last leg of the race but they arrived kind of early and the guy who was supposed to do it was still asleep so instead he just kept going and delivered the last leg and they were able to get those auntie sims there in time treat the people that were already like suffering and there were no more reported debts that rules that's awesome so in the aftermath a lot of uh balto was t

he one who got a lot of the fame because it was like the one that delivered the final leg of the like did the final leg so it delivered the serum so even though togo was like the dog who led most of it balto was the one who was famous and probably got more celebrated got a whole kevin bacon movie got a statue in central park although technically the statue is dedicated to all of the dogs and mushers it is of balto but uh and the guy the guy who owned togo was like kind of upset about this um but

i'd argue that togo went on to live the better life but yeah and so my concept was a sports anime and this is balto and togo they were like rivals which one's balton which one's togo balto's the shorter one uh cause he he was younger so and then togo is the one he's kind of banged up because he was doing all the the harsh runs they're both so cute they're so dreamy i love your decision to make them dog boys yeah because it's a sports anime and i like to think that like their coaches put a lot o

f pressure on them to like be better and competitive but at the end of the and like their rivals but at the end of the day like they're just they're they're helping people so you know they're they're winning wow and they're friends in my mind it was so hard to remain silent yeah at the beginning because like the instant you started drawing this i was like i'm gonna freak out i'm about to lose my freaking mind about these dog boys i didn't want to interrupt you i was talking about history you cou

ld have cut in at any time no i was saving it for the end but i could be hype this was such a treat oh my god they're so cute this is my anime sports anime balto this is amazing awesome job karina yeah and togo never forget togo never forget togo is important i won't forget yeah it wasn't even in the kevin bacon movie although i discovered in doing this that there is a togo movie now that's good yeah so good for him good for togo good for togo really really did so much but they both did and they

were both crucial neither movie has as good yeah character designs as these yeah yeah this should be the next animated version of balto this is my pitch to whoever wants it yeah absolutely yes so this is anime balto hell yes julia me are you ready to do yours yeah i didn't write down notes for mine so whoopsies but i did watch two documentaries about uh my person yesterday and also uh i should say that i should have done what karina and jacob did which is draw to my style but i did it in anime

style which we know that i hate doing and i'm not very good at but i wanted to reference sort of like a classic look anime since we're doing like a history thing so i based my designs off of the super dimension fortress macross movie cool yes so it's like an 80s it's an 80s the animation in it is beautiful i suggest everyone look it up on youtube later but uh the character that i did and it felt like cheating to do her because she's uh wonderful she is a black bi icon french resistance supportin

g entertainer jazz icon josephine baker yeah yeah so let's get into it all right three two one go all right so josephine baker was born in the early 1900s she was born in missouri like i said she uh is a black woman she wanted to do dance so when she was a kid she would try to start her career by kind of doing like street dancing unfortunately she was in the early 1900s of america missouri she was black so she wasn't very well received because of racism unfortunately i've heard of it yeah we may

have heard of it and so she tried to launch her career here she went uh to new york she tried to launch a career in harlem uh it just wasn't working it wasn't fitting her she wanted to do her career her way she didn't want to do sort of like the the sort of pigeonholed sort you know racist jobs that she would be like allowed to do so she went to france to try to launch her career and they went crazy about her they absolutely loved her off the bat they loved everything she did they were absolute

ly obsessed her shows like sold out constantly and she designed all of her uh dances all of her costumes all of these things and she absolutely loved france so she was having a great time she was very successful for years and years and years and at some point she tried to come back to new york because they were like oh you're really popular over there but they wouldn't let her go through the front door at the place that had hired her like the venue so she was like okay i'm never coming back so s

he went back to france renounced her american citizenship because france was so excited that she was back that they threw like a parade for her they had this whole parade they had a whole party for her because they loved her so much she did a lot of so the reasons that she was so successful in france uh part of the reason was that she always had these pretty like controversial dances she became like the icon of the jazz age because she did all of these like very loose like swing dances like the

charleston and that had like never been seen before so you know it was it was controversial because it was so like you know quote-unquote sexual it was so like wild you know wild looking and it france was very embedded in like ballet and things like that so this was something that was totally different and they thought it was like such a cool new art that was being brought so they were really excited to see you know something new and they just genuinely really liked her they even liked the fact

that she like tried to speak french but wasn't very good at it yet they just loved that they were like cool yeah we love that you want to be french you are french now welcome um so she she said uh she has a quote where she said that she has two loves uh her country and paris uh her country being france so she also like dated whoever she wanted she dated women she dated men and she was very public about it she married a bunch of dudes a bunch of times and she just like wildly married and divorced

like whenever she wanted she got like a baby cheetah as a as a pet she like kind of just did whatever and she was just like i have freedom here to be who i want to be so i'm going to embrace it and french women uh loved that because they were like we want to be josephine baker you want to be who you want to be so there was like she had this hairstyle and french women were like they so desperately wanted to be like josephine baker that there were all these articles of like how did she get her ha

ir does she there was like a theory that she shaved her head and then she had this beautifully sculpted like wig every time so french women started to do that like if you look up jazz age posters it's usually based off of josephine baker so she had a really successful career in france uh and and she was super rich she was actually uh the best paid entertainer in all of europe at the time wow yeah which is super cool and then world war ii started and she retreated to one of her houses in the coun

try but she was known by basically all politicians around the world like everyone loved her she was world renowned so the the french government contacted her and asked if she would support the french resistance war effort and she said absolutely so she gave her house as a base for the spy network for the very beginnings of the spy network before it was even like you know uh established and she would uh write invis an invisible ink on her uh sheet music like things that she heard from parties bec

ause she was she would attend parties of like people uh like politicians from like the the axis powers like japan she attended with them she attended with the germans and she would write all the information that she would glean from those meetings and send it to the french officials and she used to um write secret messages and then hide it in her underwear because she no one's getting in there no one's getting in there because she's a celebrity like they're not gonna they're not gonna strip her

you know make sure she didn't have anything on her they just let her go because they loved her so much so then she would pass that that information in france she's the uh most highly decorated american buried in france oh that's cool yeah so eventually she was uh allowed back to america or well she went back to america to do some performances but because of like jim crow laws she didn't uh she wasn't having a great time i'll say that but she kind of like broke broke those barriers a little bit a

nd people loved her uh she was still having like a really hard time in america with all that but she um she she kind of like never really stayed here because she always felt mistreated yeah um understandable yeah absolutely but when uh the civil rights movement kicked up she was one of like the the key people of the civil rights movement uh and she was supposed to kind of like replace uh martin luther king as like the head speaker for the for the movement uh but she said for the safety of her fa

mily she didn't want to do that so she went back to america she went back to france and she stayed there until she died she had 12 children that she adopted from 12 different countries of the world to show that everyone can get along and yeah she just lived a really rad life of doing what she wanted and and fighting for what she thought was was right and what is right and that ass she's just like a really cool lady this is a really cool drawing yeah you started this off by saying you hate drawin

g in the anime style and aren't good at it and then you busted this out like really suits it thanks yeah this is so good i did a little nod to the uh macross logo with the the baker at the bottom but yeah yeah it's anime styles are very hard for me if they're not uh like jojo but yeah yeah you did a great job she has joe in her name she does she could be a jojo you should have done that yeah josephine baker rules well this has been the comeback of anime history yeah uh we should definitely do mo

re of these yep i think it's super fun and super interesting so if you liked this let us know in the comments other historical figures you might like to see us cover yeah and uh we'll we'll do that in the future also if you want the chance to vote on episodes like this you can support dropy on patreon and uh every month if i remember on time we have a poll for what kind of episode people want to see next and this was one of those votes so that's why this came out as soon as it did because people

people showed up and voted for it so thanks to everyone on the patreon i'm so glad it did yeah i'd love to learn you gotta show up to those polls show up to the polls it's important and if you like drafty in general maybe you can't support the patreon or even if you can you can support us for free by clicking that like clicking that subscribe hitting the bell hitting the bell and shouting the word drafty out the window as loud as you can yeah we're listening we're listening we'll hear it one sh

out equal one good yes one shout equal one good we're sorry sorry sorry sorry