Welcome to Goop Tales behind the story. I'm Maria Kalenini and I'm the founder and creator of Goop Tales.

If you're new to Goop Tales and this is your first time listening to an episode, you're probably

going to want to go back and listen to the episode right before this,

which is episode 85, because the behind the story series was designed to accompany the regular

story episodes. So this is not a story. This is behind the story. And behind the story is going to provide more factual

information about the places that the goops travel to and what inspires me in writing the stories.

For example, while writing the story, I'll do it and the street signs of Tokyo, which is episode 85.

I did research about the billboards that are all around the city of Tokyo and the Japanese alphabet, also known as Hiragana.

And I'm going to tell you what I learned about them in this episode.

If you haven't already listened to episode 85,

just pause this, go listen to it, and then come back because otherwise you might be in for some

spoilers. And for those of you who have listened to episode 85, let me just give you a refresher on what it was.

It was, I'll Do It and the Street Signs of Tokyo.

As we know from the story, I'll Do It is a very eager little goop that says, I'll do it, I'll do it, I'll do it,

which is sometimes good to get a lot of things done, things other people don't want to do,

but sometimes annoying when he jumps in front of you and wants to do everything. In any case,

I'll do it does himself all the way into Tokyo, where he ends up on a cobblestone street and meets some unfriendly gremlins.

So he ends up, in order to get away from the gremlin's, he ends up hopping or I shouldn't say hopping. He ends up

maybe hopping around but getting saved by this little elfin-like fairy named Eleanor, who ends up

taking him away from the gremlins and the street below. And he gets to know the whole world of Eleanor, which is up in the

street signs of Tokyo. And he comes to find that there's this whole other life up there in the

street signs, and he makes friends with the characters up there, so he wants to create a party for

...