/m/subs and TSHS finally present version 2 of the Lensman movie, complete with deluxe extras. It took a while to pull all of this together, but hopefully you will find it worth the wait. Version 2 of the movie takes a lot of the American LD footage from the MWizard release. It’s still not perfect, but a helpful quality upgrade (perhaps someday a fan will come forward with a 35mm print?) Subtitles for the movie have been improved as well. Extras include the subtitled 30 minute Making of Lensman promotional feature, subtitled toy commercials and TV trailers for the movie, lots of soundtrack albums, lots of image files, and for the first time a COMPLETE set of scans of all the Lensman series from Eternity Comics.
Get the movie and other goodies from Nyaa or Mega.
Also /m/subs and TSHS are subtitling the Lensman – Galactic Patrol TV series. Here’s episode 1, which has a completely different origin story for how Kim Kinnison became a Lensman. I’m guessing the Lensman TV series was rushed into production to capitalize on the success of the movie, because it takes a few episodes for the layout artists to get up to speed on the character designs. There’s some cool artwork and backgrounds in the early episodes, but the drawing style gets consistently better as the series continues.
Get episode 1 from Nyaa or Mega.
Massive shoutout to Alrow for providing the Laserdisc source for Making of Lensman and episodes 1-6 of the TV series. Also thanks to Laurine and AnimeSennin for VHS sources to upcoming episodes. Lots of people came together to help with this project, thanks are due to Marty McFlies, Sky79, GMAX_JP, legendary old school translator C. Sue Shambaugh, Starseeker, Shidoni, Crush-Zombie, Ametuchi, RX782, khoda (Remi Shimada), /r/translator, MWizard, OldSkoolFan, Piyo Piyo Productions, macros74 and everyone at Baka-BT for their patience, and everyone else who also helped contribute!
Short anime fandom history lesson. Back in the day, C. Sue Shambuagh learned to read Japanese, and started translating using print sources such as anime film comics and Japanese scripts that came as freebies in the monthly anime magazines like Animedia or Animage. You could send her a self-addressed, stamped envelope (SASE) and she would send a list of her script translations, she sold photocopies of them for $2-$4, depending on the length of the script. It’s impossible to understate the effect she had on the early days of fan subtitling…a sizable percentage of early analog fansubs were made using her scripts. She translated the first 44 episodes of Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and of course inspired Anime Central to eventually complete the series.
I used to buy scripts from Sue back in the day, and I wrote to her a few years ago (with an envelope and stamp, just like grandpa used to use!) asking if she still sold copies of her old scripts. She wrote me a very nice letter in return, saying that they were all boxed up in a far corner of her basement. And so endeth an era…
Old school fanzine scribe Dave Merrill wrote an article about Lensman on his excellent Let’s Anime site, you can read that here.
THE SKARO HUNTING SOCIETY 
Hi. Can you explain how this relates to the Power of the Lens/ Secret of the lens movies? From what I understand, both those movies are dubs of the Japanese Lensman movie which itself was a recut of the the first few episodes of the TV series? Harmony Gold’s version in 1998 was Power of the lens and Streamline’s version in 1990 was Secret of the Lens. And your release is the original japanese version.
At least, that’s according to wikipedia, but I’ve seen both movies and they seem completely different.
Am I getting this right or ?
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Lensman – Power of the Lens was Harmony Gold’s 1988 English dubbed version of this movie, with about 18 minutes cut out to bring the running time to 90 minutes. Streamline later re-dubbed the uncut version of the movie for release in 1990, using some of the same voice actors. This new Streamline version was simply called Lensman.
Lensman – Secret of the Lens was also made in 1988 by Harmony Gold. It’s a 90 minute English dubbed compilation of the first few episodes of the Lensman TV series.
This release is the original Japanese version with English subtitles, however it also contains the 1990 Streamline dub as an alternate soundtrack that can be selected in your player, for people who like that sort of thing. Power of the Lens and Secret of the Lens are also included in the bonus features.
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Regarding the Lensman TV series, so all that is available are the 1st 6 episodes? The other 20 are lost forever?
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No, I have the whole series from a variety of different VHS sources. The quality of the VHS recordings varies, obviously none are as good as the laserdisc release but we’re still planning on subtitling them all.
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wow thanks
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Thanks for the updated film and the extras and for the Let’s Anime shout-out!11! I think we got our Queen Millenia script from Sue Shambaugh, back when Corn Pone Flicks fansubbed that film.
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Yup, the CPF Queen Millennia movie did use Sue’s script, probably with a bit of editing and QC by Matt. When I bought the laserdisc of the movie I ended up transcribing the CPF version and tweaking the timing to make my own S-VHS master tape.
By the way, I haven’t forgotten about that script you sent me, got some work done on it this week in fact…
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Reblogged this on Anitendo.
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Thank you so much for subbing the Galactic Patrol! I knew if I was patient you’d get around to it, and here we are!
Thanks again, now I’m going to go watch it.
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Lensman is also the direct inspiration for Konami’s “Gradius” shoot-em-ups.
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The Let’s Anime article mentions that Lensman was the inspiration for the Namco shooter “Bosconian”.
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That the articles where I got my statement from:
http://shmuplations.com/gradius-machiguchi/
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I wouldn’t doubt someone at Konami had seen the Lensman film or TV series prior to creating Gradius and was inspired from it in the artistry of that game.
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Holy crap. This is awesome! Thank you guys so much. Hookers and potato salad for all involved!
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Screw the potato salad. Just get the hookers. 🙂
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thankyou so much from australia. i watched this many times as a child and recently rewatched the dub just wishing it was in the original jap audio with subs.. thankyou thankyou thankyou
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Thank you for putting in so much effort for this. I’m trying to find the film, but it looks like it is no longer in the Mega folder. If it is still possible, I would love to get a copy of the latest version.
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We’re planning a re-release of the movie some time later this year, in conjunction with a batch of series episodes and some more soundtracks and bonus items.
But for now, I put an h265 encode of the movie in the softsub folder. It looks considerably better than the old version that I removed. We’re experimenting with some other encoding enhancements, but there’s only so much that can be done with such a mediocre LaserDisc transfer.
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Awesome, thank you very much. I had a previous version, but I didn’t finish it because the english dub cut out at a couple different parts. This one appears audibly complete. Good luck on the project, I’m looking forward to the results.
If you haven’t already, I would definitely look into the research these guys have been doing on preserving laser disc rips.
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