Doryu2025

CosmoDNA's comments on Facebook regarding people's very understandble cancellation of their Blu-ray pre-orders is nothing short of astounding, especially when one of his comments regarding the first release is "Episode two is mostly talk, lots of great intrigue. Definitely going to need to translate a synopsis to get all the plot points.". Gee, I wonder if that would have been helped by some freaking subtitles available like 2199 had! Voyager's name is apparently in the end credits of 2202, leading to speculation that they might attempt selling English-subbed DVDs of the series through their website. They'd be guaranteed to be better sellers than 2199 with there being no alternative this time around.

Yeah, I figured this was all far from amicable given the suddenness of events earlier this year. I'd been reading the Bolar Wars Extended comic, but as soon as Tim switched sites I saved all the strips while they were still up, as I had a funny feeling they'd all soon be pulled. Sad to see that this is exactly what's happened, and that Tim's been screwed over in such a way; he really put a lot of love into that website over the last decade. In particular, the thought of all those translated articles and interviews now simply gone is quite sickening, but since Japan doesn't operate Fair Use, I can see where the problems probably lie. With Voyager Japan taking control, the timing strongly implies this is something to do with getting 2199 over to the U.S. at some point. I wonder if the New Jersey Voyager office has closed yet? Does that mean all the DVDs are now OOP by default? Will we finally see non-hardsubbed copies of the original movies?

Speaking of which, what exactly is going on with the original Star Blazers website? First Tim Eldred leaves and starts up his own site since he says Voyager don't want to update their website anymore, and the Voyager site is put in stasis. But, just the other day Voyager suddenly pulled all the content from their site (yes, everything has gone bye-bye) and replaced it with a stern message about prosecuting all unofficial Star Blazers websites, in what appears to be a clear message to Tim Eldred. Interestingly, the copyright on the official Star Blazers page now lists Voyager Entertainment and S. Nishizaki. This is obviously Shoji Nishizaki, Yoshinobu Nishizaki's son, and the guy in charge of the Director's Cut of Resurrection and, more importantly, 2199. I know Funimation were supposed to have licensed Resurrection, but do all these website shenanigans mean Shoji Nishizaki has taken the reins of Voyager in preparation for 2199 to officially be brought over?

Wow, thanks for that info! I usually only go off AnimeSuki, so I've missed most of these since they don't have any torrents yet! Are there any other non-torrented classic subbed anime gems out there?

Hey Area88, I have a complete bunch of timed Dirty Pair TV scripts also based on the VHS fansubs, would you be interested? Like the newer subs, they've been tweaked here and there to correct spelling, grammar, etc. If there was a nice subtitle resource/repository out there, I'd have happily uploaded them a while ago, but since Gersen and Night who used to run ScriptClub gave up the ghost almost two years ago (burying their entire script archive in the process), there's been nowhere to put them!

There is a certain torrent site out there that provides complete anime DVD-rips (a large amount of them legit R1 ones, unfortunately), but they also have more unique items such as some R2 discs re-encoded with subtitles, etc. The last time I checked, someone was successfully ripping the Orguss discs and posting them up there, although I can't remember exactly how far they got. I normally wouldn't recommend anything like this, but given that ImaginAsian have clearly been badly burnt by TitleMatch's shady dealings (resulting in the TMS Classics programme completely disappearing without comment as Keith mentioned earlier), there seems to be little other choice for anyone who didn't pick up Orguss when it was still being printed.

Wasn't it Kentai Films who did Violence Jack Part 1 with the official Critical Mass subs? Has he said he won't do the other episodes? In any case, I'll be looking forward to Fandora 1-3. Did you ever track down the pretty rare dubbed version of Fandora episode 1 to assist with the subs? I've heard horror stories about it, but I'd much rather hear it for myself!

It's always been my understanding that only the first two movies were ever dubbed. There was the late 70s edited dub of the first movie (done before the Star Blazers dub), that was given a limited theatrical release in the UK, followed by a later video release. This one cut out quite a bit to keep the running time low, and seems to have been based on the Japanese TV broadcast of the movie that actually had a new (shorter) ending animated for it, where Starsha is merely a hologram. The second movie was dubbed by Voyager themselves and released straight to video. Despite being a video release, they too cut out huge chunks of the film. Never heard of any of the other three movies ever being dubbed after these attempts, although Final Yamato which is still apparently the record-holder for the longest animated film would've been quite an endurance test anyway!

I used to love this show as well, and I particularly liked Kentaro Haneda's elegant score for the series. In fact, quite a few people who worked on Macross, aside from the great Haneda also worked on various episodes of this series, including Noboru Ishiguro and Haruhiko Mikimoto. I've made it a point to find out as much as I can about the series, since to this day it remains something of a rarity. For a start, the actual intended name of the original Japanese version wasn't TechnoVoyager, but rather TechnoBoyger (yes, missing an 'a'!), an apparent portmanteau of Technology, Boys and Voyager, three things that essentially encapsulated the series for its intended audience. So the 'TB' thing on the vehicles was meant to be there from the beginning! There were only 18 episodes of TechnoBoyger in Japan, but actually 24 episodes of Thunderbirds 2086. When TB2086 was made, they didn't just dub the existing 18 episodes. Instead, some of the existing animation was replaced by new animation between the two versions, and of course 6 whole new episodes that had been in various stages of development in Japan were finally completed. Even though there's two versions of this show, episodes are surprisingly rare to locate. Until early 2006, no episodes of TechnoBoyger had ever been repeated or released on home video. Thankfully, they were eventually re-broadcast on an anime channel in Japan. A total of 17 episodes of Thunderbirds 2086 made it to home video in the UK, and Japan also got some TB2086 episodes on tape in English with Japanese subtitles, making a grand total of 19 episodes that were released in one format or another. I've never seen anyone who had even close to this number of episodes to trade. In fact, several years ago, I put out a plea for any and all TB2086/TechnoBoyger episodes and got one response from a guy in Australia who apparently ran his own TV archive. He said he had amassed 11 episodes of the Japanese original (prior to the 2006 repeat), and would be perfectly willing to trade any of those impossible-to-find-at-the-time episodes for any other similarly-impossible-to-find TechnoBoyger episodes he didn't already have locked away in his basement. Considering he was merely an obsessive collector of Television rather than specifically a TB2086 fan, I understandably found his offer pretty selfish and rude! Ah, the perils of actually trying to enjoy this show! Hopefully ITC Japan may put out a hybrid collection of both versions of the series at some point.

Is it worth mentioning that while ostensibly Aura Battler Dunbine TV was released in its entirety, that the final two volumes (11 and 12) are for all practical intents and purposes impossible to find these days? If someone was out to finally purchase the series in English, they'd have a very hard time getting past Volume 10!

As long as it's not TRSI, or they finally drop the "scan in your credit card 'cause we don't really trust you" routine, things should be OK!

I hope so three... (ah, sue me!) Truly excellent news from a company rep who's candid enough to actually admit to not being able to get another TMS show at the present time (Rose of Versailles). Makes a nice change from those continual 'cannot confirm or deny' annoyances with regard to older series, particularly the still-unlicensed Dirty Pair TV. Anyway, Orguss in particular is a very canny license for iaTV, since it actually already has a partial dub (not perfect, but it may attract a few more customers), and since it's heavily related to Macross, that's going to guarantee the show a certain amount of recognition automatically, especially when you consider that no new genuine Macross material has been licensed since the mid-90s. I hope they can get Space Adventure Cobra and Cat's Eye 2 next!

Yeah, some episodes were skipped and I think at least one was combined from two original episodes. In the UK, we got the "Australian" dub as well; seemingly this is the only version that was fully completed, expalining why that version was syndicated and why that was the one released by Media Blasters.

I wouldn't mind d/loading this as well, but have yet to crack that 404 barrier!

Believe it or not, They Were 11 was released on R1 DVD by CPM! As I recall, it was discounted pretty soon after it's release; an all-too typical sign of how lesser-known 80s anime fares in the current market. So naturally, you can chalk me up as another fan of 70s/80s/early 90s anime too. For the 80s, OVAs were fantastic at telling short stories where literally anything and everything could happen, with no concessions needed for broadcast. And even on that point, 80s anime series in particular seem to have had a certain sensibility about them that to this day makes them far more appealing to me than newer series. Most 80s shows had so many different and engaging elements to them that there was always something interesting for someone watching almost any given series. Most latter-day TV anime is clearly being made for a far more fragmented market, with some shows being only uber-serious and others consisting of little more than heavy fanservice. Once upon a time, you'd almost be able to find series that had all of this stuff and more! Looking at things from a more historical perspective, in this respect it does seem as if anime might have been a little more 'mainstream' in the 80s, explaining why any given series could be incredibly diverse. At least, that's my humble take on it!

Yeah, this is a great OVA from those golden days when they were so prolific! I downloaded this and Hikaruon a while ago and was impressed by the second Pink Noise production too. I've heard tell that there was a torrent at some point for Body Jack, but it obviously disappeared long ago, because I never found it... There's still a few other really nice 80s OVA torrents out there, like Dragon's Heaven and Cosmo Police Justy, so my search wasn't completely in vain!

The material you're speaking of was all released on DVD in Japan, but only as a limited edition extra disc in some of the MegaZone 23 boxsets a couple of years ago. From what I can tell, it's pretty much pointless trying to get one of these discs separately now since the auctions for them have dried up on Yahoo Auctions. In any case, they (quite predictably) went for quite a lot of money.

That bootleg set contains those first 24 eps as Area88 said. As recall (it was admittedly a while ago), the compression artifacts weren't overly distracting, but the subs could definitely have been better. They were formatted and timed decently enough, but the actual translations left much to be desired. I think Eiji becomes Alex for example. Regardless, despite the average quality of it all, it would have been nice if those old Taiwan bootleggers had actually finished the show! However, looking at it another way, unless someone improbably puts up some nice fully translated scripts of the entire series on the internet (although with ScriptClub still being down that would be a bit of a challenge), you're probably not going to be seeing even the first arc of the series with any reasonable idea of what's going on.

There was a nice bootleg DVD set released a few years back with Chinese/English subtitles. The bad part is it came out just when the bootleggers stopped doing 80s anime, so for Layzner they only did the first 24 episodes or so (up to the end of the first story arc) and left the rest. Layzner was also one of two series (the other being Giant Gorg) that Bandai US actually once said they'd release before quietly forgetting about them, blaming bad masters. Odd that they never thought to check those masters first...

Yeah, you're telling me - I really lucked out on getting one of those sets. They must have had pretty low print runs in favor of the more economical models. ILA did some episodes of Space Adventure Cobra as well, which also caught my interest. Of course, when I first got them they were still doing BT before they switched completely to IRC. Checking their often inflammatory posts, they were heavily against BT seemingly because it was easy to use and if you didn't know how to get stuff with IRC then you simply wouldn't get their stuff. I actually went to their IRC channel one day to try and get some of the IRC-exclusive releases and was greeted with a really charming message that went along the lines of "No Jews or Brazilians allowed"! Then I simply waited half the day to end up getting nothing! It's a real pity they have to be so seemingly awkward and unpleasant about their releases, only dispensing them out to loyal sycophants, considering the classic anime they release is exactly the kind of stuff I'm interested in and that comparatively few fansub groups do.

I heard that on one of the sets going around, that the subs cut-off halfway through the episode. As far as I recall, that doesn't happen on my set, but mine's actually a bit different to all the ones I've seen on eBay. As far as I can tell, the way the bootleggers used to work is that at first, they'd very faithfully duplicate the Japanese DVDs disc for disc, simply adding Chinese and English subtitles. The important point to remember is that these initial sets had the same number of discs as the Japanese originals, so the video is usually of higher quality. Then at some point, those sets would be compressed further (resulting in fewer discs), and it's those sets of any given series that were given the widest distribution, especially on eBay. The Orguss set I have is from Taiwan (not HK), and is labeled "Indian". Indian also got to release the first nine episodes of Dirty Pair TV with selectable subtitles (I've only very rarely seen that set online!) back in 2003. Sadly, it was around the 2002/2003 mark that the bootleggers simply stopped doing older, unlicensed series that have a snowball's chance in hell of coming out officially in English, like Captain Harlock, Queen Millennia, the rest of Galaxy Express, the rest of Dirty Pair TV, Dorvack, Zillion...etc.

There was another Megazone 23 DVD set released in Japan earlier this year. A very limited number of these sets came with an extra DVD containing the original Streamline-produced dub of MZ23 Part 2, in addition to the original few minutes of Megazone-styled footage from Robotech: The Movie labeled as a "Special Film". I checked Yahoo Auctions the other day and one of those discs was going for about 25000 Yen! This is as close as Robotech: The Movie will ever come to DVD!

Your description reminds me a lot of the early OVA Birth, which has variously been translated under the titles of Planet Busters or World of the Talisman. As has been said it sound like a lot of 80s sci-fi anime, but this one does certainly have an ancient underground city in it. Birth is on R1 DVD however.

With regard to Jetfire/Skyfire - yes, the character was based on the Valkyie toy, with a heavily re-designed robot and plane mode for the Transformers cartoon as everyone knows. But...what some people aren't aware of, is that Jetfire was animated with the original Macross Valkyrie design in one Transformers animated production. Namely, Jetfire's original commercial which, like all G1TF commercials, featured specially made animation from Toei. It's funny to note what's written under Jetfire's profile in the original Transformers show bible: "Note: JETFIRE has been "transformed" into SKYFIRE -- with a different model -- due to legal reasons. Do not use this character unless necessary." Here's a copy of Jetfire's model sheet for the commercial:

Straying off-topic somewhat... This one is known as Phoenix King and was probably made just before the Transformers' toy line was launched in the US (after all, it's one thing to rip-off a Japanese cartoon, but quite another when it comes to US shows). Phoenix King is actually available on DVD (in Germany of all places), and that disc does actually have an English-language soundtrack, presumably done by the original distributors (not by the Germans). Needless to say, it's dreadful, with almost nothing to recommend about it. Funny thing is though, that the film itself is credited to a Hong Kong producer by the name of Joseph Lai. It seems that he "repackaged" quite a few of those Korean rip-offs and gave them an English soundtrack. It's something of a pity (and a blessing, no doubt) that he didn't dub Space Gandam V!