As many of you know, in addition to my own subtitling projects and joint projects with other groups, I also help out (shiteatersubs) with their releases of Dr. Slump & Arale-chan. I’m responsible for subtitling the OP/ED credits, as well as a QC pass. Subtitling Dr. Slump is a project I never would have been able to tackle on my own due to the high episode count, so I’m very happy to be able to help out with this.
Sad news this year, as Dr. Slump and Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama passed away on March 1st, 2024. This release is meant to honor Toriyama’s legacy, by allowing English speaking fans access to one of his greatest creations.
I figured a good April Fool’s release would be something you’d never expect to see released by TSHS. I actually don’t hate this show or anything, but I find the main characters rather bland and uninteresting. I do like the Japanese opening theme, and The Rocket Gang are cool villains.
This batch of subtitled episodes actually started life back in the analog VHS subtitling days. Special thanks to SakoeraTyan for help with styling and QC, and Some-Stuffs for the OP lyrics and the Rocket Gang’s motto.
Here’s our first release for 2024, another episode of Osamu Tezuka’s groundbreaking first anime series. This episode has some impressive credits, written by Masaki Tsuji and directed by Rintaro. The latter even appears in a fourth-wall breaking opening, voiced by Shoji Ichimura.
This episode features the debut of a new recurring character, Atom’s “older brother” Cobalt, a robot created by Professor Tenma before he made Atom. Cobalt has the same 100,000 horsepower as Atom, but he doesn’t have Atom’s seven special powers. He’s a bit of a bumbler, but he is kind and good-hearted like his younger brother.
Episodes of the 1959 live-action version of Mighty Atom are also available from Mega.
Obviously I don’t have the resources to do a complete subtitle of all 193 episodes of Mighty Atom, but hopefully I will be able to continue releasing a few odd episodes of the series now and then. I really wish Right Stuf would release this whole series in Japanese with English subtitles, or somehow work out a sub-license with another company like Discotek. It’s a shame that so many anime shows from the 1960s are available only as English dubs. Massive props to Funimation for their deluxe release of Speed Racer, complete with subtitled Mach GoGoGo (both the original series from 1967 and the 1997 remake). That’s the way you do it!
In episode 13 of the fourth series, Nezumi Otoko’s latest scam involves Yokai House, a haunted house with a ¥1,000,000 guarantee to scare all who attend.
Thanks to Hokuto no Gun, our partner group on these 60s and 90s Kitaro episodes. You can check out their website here.
GeGeGe no Kitaro (2007) – Episodes 46-49
And finally, here’s four episodes of the fifth series, a joint project with Skeweds Translations. Many thanks to everyone at Skeweds, you can check out their site here.
Based on the gag manga by the duo known as Fujiko Fujio, here’s the very first segment of the original black and white anime. The first series featured Machiko Soga as the voice of the mischievous ghost, who in addition to voicing 007 in the 1968 Cyborg 009 series, later went on to portray villains in many live action tokusatsu series including Rainbowman, Denjiman, Sun Vulcan and Zyuranger. This first segment was taken from a TV special about the work of Fujiko Fujio (A), and also features an introduction by Machiko Soga herself.
About 5 years ago I subtitled the second segment of episode 12. I haven’t made any changes to that segment, but both of the old links are dead, so I thought I’d include it here as well. These two partial episodes are all I have of the original 1965 series, so if anyone else can find more please let me know!
This original monochrome Q-Taro series is very rare, never having been released on home video in any format. Many thanks to cartoonist Charles Brubaker for providing the raw sources for both of these partial episodes! He also wrote an article about the series on the Cartoon Research Site, you can read that article here.
So many legendary franchises have been launched by manga originally serialized in the magazine for the manliest of boys, Weekly Shonen Jump. Mazinger Z, Cobra, Kinnikuman, Dr. Slump, Hokuto no Ken, Dragon Ball, City Hunter, Sakigake!! Otokojuku, Saint Seiya, Rurouni Kenshin, One Piece, Naruto, and countless other fan favorites made their mark on the public, often being spun off into popular anime and merchandising empires.
One of the first strips in Shonen Jump to really become a massive hit with the public was Hiroshi Motomiya’s Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho, which made its debut in October 1968 with issue #11. The story’s protagonist is Mankichi Togawa, a middle school delinquent being raised by a widowed mother in a tiny rural fishing village. Mankichi is known as “the boss of the brats,” due to his devoted following of downtrodden younger kids.
With the huge success of the manga, this anime adaptation debuted the following year, in September 1969. Unlike the standard format of 25 minute weekly episodes that has been the norm for most televised anime, Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho was shown as a daily serial, with each story comprising of six parts running about seven minutes each, shown from Sunday through Friday.
Here’s the third serial, a joint production between TSHS and Hokuto no Gun. You can visit their site here.
Here’s the latest episode in our joint project with the /m/subs crew. When we started this project, we had a complete set of Lensman episodes, but in variable degrees of quality. As we’ve slowly moved through the series we’ve had great luck in upgrading the episodes with LaserDisc rips from Alrow, Betamax rips from Dougo13, and VHS rips from Laurine. Episode 23 was one of the problem episodes, spliced together from two different sources, in fact it had a spot of about 43 seconds where there was no video at all.
That has changed now, with episode 23 now the highest quality of any of our Lensman releases. Massive thanks are due to Kineko Video, a professional fan-based community specializing in anime film scanning & video transfers, for finding and transferring the 16mm print of this episode. So not only does this one look even better than the LaserDisc episodes, we’re able to offer it in HD resolutions as well.
Here’s an episode of the OG Saint Seiya anime, as it was originally broadcast on Japanese television complete with commercial breaks. This is near the end of the third story arc of the Sanctuary chapter, where Dragon Shiryu battles Gold Saint Cancer Deathmask.
When I was growing up in the 1970s, afternoons on the UHF airwaves of the Chicago area were full of cool Japanese superhero shows and cartoons, particularly on WSNS TV-44. Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot (Giant Robo live-action), Ultraman, Space Giants (Ambassador Magma), as well as anime like Speed Racer (Mach GoGoGo!) and Prince Planet (Yusei Shonen Papi) all got me hooked on the Japanese style of storytelling that seemed so excitingly different from what I was used to from US television.
Spectreman was probably my favorite of these shows at the time, and this is one of my favorite stories. The plot owes a debt to “Flowers for Algernon,” the Hugo-award winning story by Daniel Keyes about a developmentally disabled adult who volunteers as a test subject for an experimental intelligence-enhancing surgery.
In Spectreman’s version of the story, Charlie Gordon becomes soba shop delivery boy Sankichi, Algernon the mouse is replaced by a dog named Bobby, and the process only goes awry when evil space ape Dr. Gori gets involved. Tragedy ensues, and as per usual for this show said tragedy involves groovy giant monster suits. I love those P Productions monster suits.
This Spectreman two-parter was written by Haruya Yamazaki, the same person who wrote the Kiriland episodes of Lensman. He was a prolific scriptwriter for anime & tokusatsu series for many years, and wrote about half the episodes of 1978’s Space Pirate Captain Harlock, one of my all-time favorite anime series.
I released the first of these episodes in 2021, and finally got around to finishing the conclusion this year. I found a formatting error in one line of the ED lyrics of episode 48, which I have now corrected.
Many thanks to August Ragone for letting me use his translated lyrics to the opening and ending theme songs, and for much needed assistance with the end credits. August also provided that cool scan from the Chicago Tribune’s TV listings from January 8, 1979.
Also a big thank-you to KiyanShahab for providing the DVD source. He has also completed a restoration project of the English dub, with that amazing theme song. Check out his archive.org page here, or his YouTube channel here.
THE SKARO HUNTING SOCIETY 