Manga Nihon Emaki (Anime News Network offers the title translation of “Animated Japanese Picture Scrolls”) was an anthology series from that featured traditional and historical Japanese stories. The show’s chief director was Noboru Ishiguro, whose long resume includes Space Battleship Yamato, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Sabu & Ichi, Future Boy Conan, Megazone 23 Part I, Macross (original TV series & movie), Orguss…you get the idea.
The series first aired in Japan in 1977, and was shown with English subtitles in the 1980s on KHAI-TV, UHF channel 20 in Hawaii. I shared some episodes in 2014, from a VHS tape provided by Laurine and digitized by AnimeSennin. Now Dougo13 has provided me with episodes from a second tape, recorded by the same trading pal in Hawaii.
So, here’s a new batch that contains all of the episodes I posted from the first tape, plus several new ones from this second tape. Massive thanks to Dougo13, Laurine, Dave, and AnimeSennin, for their work in preserving these subtitled episodes for so many years. Now they can be shared with the world…
Now here’s an interesting puzzler. These tapes also contain some subtitled episodes of Manga Nippon Mukashi Banashi, another anime adaptation of traditional Japanese folk tales. The show had a massively successful run from 1975-1994, but I’ve been having difficulty figuring out the episode numbers of the ones on these tapes. Both ANN and the Japanese Wikipedia page for the series have listed a vast number of episode titles, but I can’t seem to match up a single one of them with the episodes on these tapes. If anyone can help figure this out I’d appreciate it, otherwise I’ll probably just end up releasing the episodes without official numbers.
A search for the text まめだ comes up with nothing in either episode list. I’ve tried this with a few of the other episodes as well.
THE SKARO HUNTING SOCIETY 
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For the Manga Nippon Mukashi Banashi situation, do you mind posting just 1 entire episode via MEGA. I’d like to take my hand at trying to figure out what exact episode it came from. There’s a bunch of fairy tale anime shows so I wonder if maybe there was some kind of weird mix up where like the OP of MNMB was used but the body was from a different show. I’ve even seen a few situation where an anime rebroadcasts and ep and changes the title card/kana spelling but the body is identical.
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Sure, that’s easy enough: https://mega.nz/#!cFdVDKrI!28KkCW2iqifqlMvKLTNE6qBVzb_kh1hKSBQdCS_e5mM
Unlike Manga Nihon Emaki, there aren’t any opening titles or end credits. Let me know if you can figure out anything, and thanks for offering to help!
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Kinda unrelated but I just noticed on AniDB that all “Mukashi Banashi” entries are spelled “Mukashibanashi,” Denshi Jisho says it’s a noun https://jisho.org/search/%E6%98%94%E8%A9%B1 so I guess that makes sense. I always thought it was two words like in English “fairy tale” lol.
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Hi there.
I took a look into the the mysterious Japanese old stories episode situation.
Itazura Mameda (いたずらまめだ) is from the Manga Furusato Mukashi Banashi series (JP Wiki Article: https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/まんがふるさと昔話). Each aired episode would be comprised of two stories: a story belonging to a prefecture in east Japan, and another story belonging to a prefecture in west Japan. The one in question belongs to the west series, supposedly from Hyogo prefecture.
Now if you go to the aforementioned wikipedia article, you’ll see that unfortunately there is no table of episode numbers along with episode titles.
Two DVD box sets were released in 2007, with the stories grouped by which half of Japan they belong to: east or west. Each half (box) is comprised of 5 discs. Now if you look at the description on the official company’s website, you’ll see that the episode in question belongs to disc 2 (http://stg.takeshobo.co.jp/book_d/shohin/A503507). Of course, there is no guarantee that the order of the episodes listed in this description or the ordering of the episodes of on the disc correspond to broadcast order.
There’s also a CD release from 1996 that is meant to accompany an picture book (presumably with pictures from the anime). In the second disc (https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B01G53E57O) which comprise the stories of west Japan, we see that Itazura Mameda is track 14. But again, no guarantee that this corresponds to episode broadcast order.
Going back to the wikipedia article again, it turns out that although 26 episode (52 stories) were produced, they stopped airing after 18 episodes on Tokyo Channel 12 (which would eventually be renamed to TV Tokyo as its known today).
Now according to this website’s description (https://mediaarts-db.bunka.go.jp/an/anime_series/841), of the episodes that did not air on Tokyo Channel 12, some of them were aired in the Kansai, and other regions.
If we take a look at the late screenwriter Takeshi Shudo’s large donation of his work to the Odawara City Library before his passing, we can see that he was the screenwriter for several episodes of the Manga Furusato Mukashi Banashi series, including Itazura Mameda (PDF: http://www.city.odawara.kanagawa.jp/global-image/units/69870/1-20110917104556.pdf , XLS: http://www.city.odawara.kanagawa.jp/global-image/units/69876/1-20110917105023.xls). If you look through the entries for the Manga Furusato Mukashi Banashi series (use “ふるさと昔話” as the search term), several of them have episode numbers attached, but Itazura Mameda does not.
From this I think we can discern that this particular story was never aired on Tokyo Channel 12 and has no official episode number. Even for the episodes that do have episode numbers attached on that spreadsheet, they clearly do not correspond to the 2007 DVD release order. For example, broadcasted episode 18’s west Japan story (豆だいこ, Mame Daiko, belonging to Nara prefecture) is on Disc 1 of the 2007 DVD release.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a complete listing of the episodes by episode number for the ones that did air on Tokyo Channel 12. The aforementioned spreadsheet was the best resource I could find as far as a mapping is concerned.
This was an unnecessarily long description of my findings, but I hope it helped.
Austin
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Also I see my brain has failed me yet again. After proof-reading a few times and hitting “Post”, I immediately discover several glaring grammar mistakes. Whoops.
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Wow! Thanks to everyone involved in caring for these old tapes.
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Thanks Nanto! And wonderfully followed up by Austin’s helpful research and suggestions!
I’ll leaf through my old Animage’s to see if they ever produced any data notes on the series. In the 1980s and 1990s (pre-internet) that was one of the very few reasons I actually bought the magazine at all … for the series episode TX lists.
If I remember correctly, TX lists of current anime series were naturally the focus, but they did also include at least one “finished” series per issue, (occasionally also covering a tokusatsu series). These were of immense value to overseas fans and traders like us when there weren’t any Roman Albums or perfect guides covering those programs to assist with labelling and archiving collection and trade tapes.
Ah me, where have the years gone?
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Wow, that’s a very interesting find. Thanks a lot for sharing.
Watching the show I noticed how the opening titles credit the “voice recording” to none other than Fujio Akatsuka. Barring an amazing case of being an homonymous, it’s an interesting tidbit of trivia.
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Hello Skaro are you ever going to release more eps of Nihon Emaki?
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