D&D NEWS: This has nothing to do with anything, but since I know how much you 

like anime, I'm gonna ask it: if each member of the gang traveled to the 

Anime-verse and was transformed into an anime character, who would each of 

them be and why?

 

PD: That's a tough one, since the characters in Japanese animation are such a 

wide-ranging bunch, some of whom aren't even human (meaning they're robots or 

animals or...you know what I mean)! But I can see a few parallels. The most obvious is, of course, Uni. It would have been a very different ballgame if Uni had been replaced by Unico, another baby unicorn with a much wider range of powers (not to mention a wider vocabulary).

Eric reminds me of a very toned-down Jinnai, the power-hungry maniac high school Student Council President in the "El Hazard" series. This rich kid lost most of his marbles a few squares back; Jinnai makes Eric look like Hank! 
 

There are a lot of high school athletes in anime; in more than just that sense, I think Diana is kin to Hitomi Kanzaki, who runs track and reads Tarot card fortunes in her spare time in the amazing series "Vision of Escaflowne".  Diana and Hitomi are both serious about their athletics, but still want to leave themselves open to romance someday.  Diana's a bit old to be Nadia, the 14 year old Polynesian circus acrobat and possessor of the mysterious gem Blue Water. But that brings us to...

Presto is the kind of guy who can surprise you in the end. Sometimes the nerdy kid with the glasses can reach the heights. Having said that, I'd compare Presto to Jean-Luc de Raltigue, the 14-year-old inventor in the TV series "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water". It's kind of a Jules Verne fantasy set in the late 1800s. If you've seen pictures of Jean, you'll note the obvious: he looks A WHOLE LOT like Presto!

The little-boy sidekick is such a standard part of the hero-team formula that finding anime roles for Bobby isn't the hard part; it's having to edit them down to one or two! He's a bit too old to be Kurio Mifune (a/k/a Spridle), the annoying little brother of Go Mifune in the series "Mach Go Go Go" (a/k/a "Speed Racer"). The kid in "Go Lion" (a/k/a "Voltron") looks too much like Presto. So I look to the series "Gatchaman" and their kid member Jinpei (or "Keyop" or "Swallow": remember this series has been called half a dozen names in the west, such as "Battle of the Planets"; let's just say it's the one with people in bird suits). And by a neat coincidence, Jinpei was recruited to the Gatchaman team when a mysterious scientist took a teenage girl named Jun out of an orphanage, but she refused to go unless Jinpei came too. So, while they're not officially siblings, Sheila's anime parallel treats Bobby's counterpart as if they were siblings: the female member of the Gatchaman team, Jun (the "Swan"), a/k/a "Princess".
 

BTW, the series was revived and re-animated in the 1990s.  Jun and Jinpei got some serious makeovers...

Your average nice-guy like Hank doesn't seem to get a break in anime; he could find himself in a romantic triangle with two girls, like Kyousuke, the hero of the long-running "Kimagure Orange Road" series. Or, like Taku Morisaki in the movie "I Can Hear the Ocean", he could get involved with a girl who proceeds to play mind games with him--and everyone else. Or, like Stomu in "Birdy the Mighty", he could get killed, with his body reanimated by the presence of an alien cop. A female alien cop, at that. Still, there are lots of team leader teen heroes in anime, and Hank was most definitely the leader of the group. I'd go back a ways and pick for Hank's counterpart a long-running favorite athlete: captain of the soccer team, Ozora Tsubasa.

On the other hand, a crossover story might be more interesting, since in recent years anime has been doing a lot with swords and sorcery. One of the best, "Record of Lodoss War", grew out of a role-playing game like "Dungeons & Dragons". The question is whether to play it straight and have the D&D gang meet the Lodoss people, like the very pretty (but very powerful) elf Deedlit, or go for comedy by having them cross paths with the powerful and uncontrollable teenage sorceress Lina Inverse and her dimbulb boyfriend Gourry from the "Slayers" series. There are literally a hundred ways to do this--some more fruitful than others.