Download links are near the end of the post, for anyone who wants to scroll past the rambling history lesson.
In the mid 1980s, the very first anime feature film I ever saw in Japanese with English subtitles was My Youth in Arcadia, on a crackly, multi-gen VHS tape. The rumor was that the original tape that this was several generations down from was recorded somewhere in Canada, possibly as part of a series of other subtitled anime films. Decades later I would discover that original tape was actually the property of Dougo13, recorded for him by a friend from cable TV in Vancouver.
The 1979 version of Cyborg 009 was the first subtitled anime series that I got the chance to see. It aired in California on one or more regional UHF stations, and I still remember a tape from Laurine that was labeled “Cyborg 009 with(out) subtitles,” because some of the earlier episodes were shown in pure Japanese (see also: Galaxy Express 999 broadcasts by Entel Communications in New York, which didn’t start subtitling them until episode 6). I don’t have any of my old Cyborg 009 broadcast tapes, but if I remember correctly the credits were something like “Subtitled by Fuji-TV San Francisco, Translated by Laura Noda.”
Fast forward about 15 years, and I discover that the series is being fan subtitled by a group called Nora Inu “G” (people who like fansub history can check out his old web page here, courtesy of the amazing folks at archive.org.) I did some VHS trading with Getta G back when that was still a thing, but we ended up losing touch for several years after he retired from the fansub scene.
Finally after all these years Getta G is subtitling once again, be sure to check out the NoraInuG YouTube page here. I’m hoping I can release his subtitled Cybot Robotchi episodes on this site fairly soon, and the series he’s currently working on, Moeru! Onii-san (The Burning Wild Man), has to be seen to be believed.
Sadly he no longer has any of his old scripts or VHS tapes, which like so many old VHS analog subtitles have become darn near impossible to find these days. A few Nora Inu “G” gems resurface on the internet occasionally, but at least now his subtitles of the entire run of Cyborg 009 ’79 can be enjoyed by all.
Analog VHS subtitles can seem somewhat primitive given how much better subtitling technology has gotten in the last couple of decades. The scripts for the first 16 episodes were available for download from his old site a long time ago, which of course means they made their way to the various script sites and got a DVD remaster at some point. I’m pretty sure those are still available on Nyaa, but for this collection I’ve chosen to stick with the original VHS versions, in all their grimy old-school analog glory. At some point I’ll get around to making shiny new digital versions from the BD sets, but for now the whole series is finally available to download in one batch.
If you like this release, be sure to leave a comment thanking Getta G for all of his hard work. Better yet, visit the Nora Inu “G” YouTube Channel, and thank him there personally. Thanks are also due to The MASter K for translating the first eight episodes, and the aforementioned Laura Noda for the 1980s Fuji-TV translations, many of which were used as starting references for the more detailed Nora Inu “G” translations. Editing assistance was provided by Zen-Zen for 1-24, Sandra for 17-50, and Eric for 17-20 & 25-50.
If you only have time to watch one episode, I highly recommend #12, the Masaki Tsuji masterpiece that really got my attention and sold me on the show when I was watching that first tape from Laurine. Also, there’s a very random coincidence in the soccer episode (#31) where one of the rival players is named Beckham (at a time when the real-life Beckham was about 4 or 5 years old).
THE SKARO HUNTING SOCIETY 
I have wanted this series forever! Also, do you know where I could get Violence Jack manga to download?
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Violence Jack manga is apparently being done by Hokuto No Gun:
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i have found some old fanusubbed saint seiya movies (movies 3 and 4) in a thrift store, and i paid 2.50 for both of them (1.25 each) they seem to be from different subtitlers, and while i saw the 3rd movie, i have not seen the 4th. the third movie had total crabsticks but was understandable what was going on (i mean its a shonen battle anime movie with a 1 dimensional plot)
regarding norainuG, ive actually met him on discord a few months ago when he stumbled in /m/subs discord, and has been somewhat vocal on stuff back in the day. he’s really chill and kind of weird meeting people in the scene older than my parents….
actually i just gave him a link here
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Very awesome.
I didn’t discover anime until the late 90s via renting VHS tapes of Ranma and Devil Hunter Yohko, and the whole “tape trading” thing was something I was vaguely aware of but was never able to do (since all my anime tapes were store-bought, and thus would’ve been worthless, even if my anime collection wasn’t actually shared between me and my sis). Chances are, every anime I wish I could see subtitled got a VHS sub at some point and I just don’t know about it and they’re lost to history.
This being an example. I first became aware of Cyborg 009 when Cartoon Network ran the 2000s anime, and always wanted to see the 1979 version (because I like the 70s and 80s)… and now I know someone actually did the series back in the day.
What I wouldn’t give for a time machine…
All this of course is a long-winded way to say YESSSS! THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER!
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Yes, the 70’s is my fave decade and the 80’s is right up there. This thing didn’t use my nick I normally use of Ladynaye, but I’ve been lurking around here!
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Oh, of course I remember you, Ladynaye! You’re the gamer who loves Tatsunoko and 70s anime in general, who hooked me up with all those rare Gatchaman discs in the early 2010s (thanks again!). Did you ever get around to watching the end of Dairugger XV? Those last few episodes are amazing!
Good to hear you’re still lurking on my site. I will try to remember your new screen name, but the aging process hasn’t been easy on my brain, so you might have to remind me again.
I’m not the best person in the world to ask about manga. I love manga, but subtitling and other video collecting pursuits mean I rarely have time to read it these days. I know Violence Jack can be read online here: https://www.mangadex.org/title/3708/violence-jack but downloads I’m not so sure about. Maybe there’s some software designed to download titles from online manga sites?
By the way, BD upgrades of Gatchaman and Gatchaman II can be found on Nyaa, though I haven’t had time to download or watch them myself yet.
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never watched dairugger or golion but i did watch a bit of voltron but only the golion episodes when i was a kid
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I was a teenage anime fan (sounds like a movie title) by the time Voltron aired, so I found the obvious censorship issues very frustrating. The original GoLion was soooo much better. Here’s an example of a scene that was heavily censored in Voltron, from a grungy old VHS fansub tape I made in the late 1990s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1zO4WRKDKI
Darius showed some of my GoLion subtitles at Anime Weekend Atlanta, and he said people loved them. This was many years before the series got an official DVD release in the US. In fact at that point in time the series had never been released on any home media format in Japan either.
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fansubbed tapes were a thing in the 80s, i thought anime in america didnt start showing up via fansubs until the early 90s
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The 1990s were when fan subtitling really exploded, due to better and cheaper computers, and the growth of anime fandom in general. That’s probably when the word “fansub” came into existence…I don’t remember ever hearing that portmanteau in the 1980s. But I assure you, fan subtitling was definitely a thing in the 80s, despite how hard it used to be to get the primitive equipment. There was a genlock box made for the Commodore Amiga, and some people would use the Chryon character generators from their local cable company’s public access department. It took a thousand hours to subtitle anything, because there wasn’t any easy way to time the subtitles, it was all done by trial and error until Kotus wrote the program SubStation Alpha in the mid 1990s. I wanted to be a fansubber so bad in the 80s, but I had neither the equipment nor the patience to do it before SSA.
1980s fansubs that I can think of, off the top of my head: the Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie, Megazone Two Three Part 1, the Albatross: Wings of Death episode of Lupin the 3rd (directed by Hayao Miyazaki and subtitled by J. J. Johnson III), Project A-ko, and Urusei Yatsura episode 1. I’ll bet DeTroyes, Deon, Steve H, Cap’n Dave, or Dougo13 could remember more titles than that, but there weren’t a huge number of things fan subtitled until the 90s. Very few people into fansubbing now still remember that it was a thing in the 80s.
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actually scratch that, im dyslexisc, i know golion was violent as fuck. is it worth a watch or should i just watch the one super robot that didnt get into voltron (forgets its name but the op is very catchy but also annoying since it starts like GANGANGANGANGANGAN)
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You’re probably thinking of Go Nagai’s Getter Robo, which I do highly recommend. I can forgive the shouty parts of the opening theme because it’s such a badass song in general.
GoLion is definitely worth watching in my opinion. Other super robot recommendations off the top of my head: GoShogun, Daimos, and of course good ol’ Mazinger Z, the O.G. original gangtsa of Go Nagai super robots.
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its aparently called albegas, all i know is that it was supposed to be bunched into voltron as well idk where but it never was. its op is really catchy tho (i have not seen it but i plan to if there are subs for it) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8t4cHz9IAQ&list=PLpQN_WnleWtCo9RRenThkM2A9dJeqDQUQ&index=232&t=0s
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Right, Albegas. It’s an okay show, but it’s never been fansubbed. Luurah wanted to subtitle it around 2013 or so, but I don’t think he ever found a translator for it.
I’ve heard that at one point World Events Production was planning on dubbing Albegas to make another season of Voltron, but the GoLion episodes were so much more popular than DaiRugger in the US that that they ended up ordering that cheap-ass second season of original Lion Force episodes from Toei instead. Those episodes were godawful, and of course “Sven” and “Lotor” were still alive, to match the typical narrator fake-out that had ruined the dramatic conclusion of GoLion.
There was an old promo tape made by WEP when they were first trying to market Voltron in syndication, in which the three different Voltron teams were GoLion, DaiRugger, and another show called Daltanius. I can’t find my old VHS copy, but I’m pretty sure it’s on YouTube.
The writers of Voltron never bothered with actual translations and just made up their own stories, much in the same way Voltron’s “director” (hah!) Franklin Cofod had previously turned Gatchaman into the anemic, idiotic, Battle of the Planets.
Because they were just watching the episodes with no translation and making shit up, one of the things that makes for unintentional comedy when watching Voltron is how much of the dialogue is just describing things that the viewer can already see happening on screen, like it’s an SAP audio description for the visually impaired. “Look, he’s attaching chains to that thing! Now he’s dragging it off the ground!” In the original Japanese version, when it’s time to form GoLion, it’s just “GoLion, gattai! Let’s GoLion!” and some cool music. I don’t have to remind you all the overly descriptive crap they babble in the English version…ending with “And I’ll form…THE HEAD!” What utter garbage.
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this has been very interesting, i think this’ll show my age but i remember first checking it out on netflix back in the early 2010s when i was like 10. i remember getting into G1 transformers, GI joe, and He-man when i was 7 in the late 00s because my dad gave me some DVD-Rs and was like “son these are good cartoons, not this shitty bakugan crap!” (which i was into because everyone in school was into it, even though that dub has seriously not aged well) i mainly got into older anime because i like the look of hand drawn animation and this might be a generational thing but im impatient as hell so i binge watch a lot
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If you like hand drawn animation and like to binge-watch, this is the show for you: https://www.crunchyroll.com/giant-gorg
Great character and mecha designs, and a well crafted plot that really pulls you along from episode to episode.
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ive heard of this from all places from an anituber named kenny lauderdale (i did find his channel before he had a lot of subs) but i might give it a go since it reminds me of when i used to catch those johnny quest reruns on boomerang back when i was in elementary school. discotek licensed it iirc so might pick it up.
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I love you Getta G! Now to Nanto, are you still planning to remaster this?
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Yes, we will be doing BD remasters of all the Cyborg 009 ’79 episodes. A really nice guy from Sweden sent me the BDs a while back. It’s taking me a while (as usual, with all my other projects), which is why I released this VHS batch so people who have been waiting so long have a chance to see them all.
I still haven’t decided whether we’re going to do a fairly straightforward remaster with minimal changes, like you did with the DVDs of 1-16, or mostly start fresh with a new translation. I have Japanese closed captions, which be of help with either of these solutions. But of course we will NOT be using Google translate (ever), just someone who reads Japanese fluently.
But at least we’ve finally started moving forward with more episodes of Cyborg 009 ’68, so it’s only a matter of time before shiny new color episodes start showing up here.
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im guessing his name was ralem? he sent me the raws for patrol kun and inka *generously persuaded me* to QC it for them
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Late as fuck to the party, but wow, amazing find you got there.
This series was dubbed in my native language, but the localisation team famously took a few minor liberties with the script to add more comedy – not parody dub thankfully, just a few more jokes than the original, but I’ve always been curious to see what the original dialogue was like, especially in certain episodes.
Thanks a lot to GettaG for finding all the tapes, and to you for sharing.
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No, these encodes came entirely from Nanto’s collection; my Cyborg 009 1979 masters (along with many others) are no more. Even if I still had them, I don’t have the equipment to convert VHS analog recordings into digital mpeg files.
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Kudos to Nanto for taking the time to encode and upload these episodes I worked on back in the late 1990s to early 2000s. I’m glad to see that they held up pretty well after all these years for all those people who’ve been dying to see the rest of the series now have a chance to. It’s pretty ironic how I completed the 1979 Cyborg 009 series only a few short months before the 2001 Cyborg 009: The Cyborg Soldier premiered. Back then there wasn’t a whole lot of interest in the title, but enough to give me the incentive to continue on and complete the title. Once the 2001 Cyborg 009 series gained traction in North America a few years later, renewed interest in the 1979 series emerged, but by then I had already threw in the towel to fansubbing.
I’d like to thank Nanto who after all this time finally succumbed to pressure from all interested parties into getting this release out, as it seems that he’s the only one left who still had this series on VHS and had the equipment to convert them into a digital format.
As for Moeru! Onii-san (The Burning Wild Man), the entire series, the OVAs and the mysterious Moeru! Onii-san & Kimagure Orange Road special are finally done. I find it odd how that’s another series that was languishing around in utter obscurity despite being a Shonen Jump title. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was extremely lucky to have acquired the versions I obtained in 2004, as the majority of them come with the “Moeru! Onii-san corner” segments that were omitted in the VHS rental market releases in 1989.
Cybot Robotchi is even rarer, and I’m utterly baffled at how that title got overlooked when Amazon Japan had streamed that entire series for a few years before pulling it off it’s streaming service. I came across the first three episodes by random, and felt compelled to translate those episodes as those could be posted up on Youtube without encountering any copyright restrictions.
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I’ll bet there must be someone in Japan who capped the all of Cybot Robotchi when it was available from Amazon JP. I’ve been asking around, but no luck yet. Would it be okay for me to post those three episodes that you subtitled? I made some minor grammar and timing edits.
Good work on finishing Moeru! Onii-san, including the OVAs and that rare Orange Road/Moeru! Onii-san special. I was wondering if you could send me the uncut version of that special? If I posted it here, it might attract some attention from people who know Kimagure Orange Road but have never heard of The Burning Wild Man.
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The uncut version of the Moeru! Onii-san & Kimagure Orange Road TV special has been posted over on Nyaa.si. Let me know if you encounter some trouble accessing it
You’re more than welcome to post the three Cybot Robotchi episodes. I figured there’d be mistakes because I wanted to get those episodes out as quickly as possible, and I didn’t have anyone to QC them for me.
Thanks once again
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I had not noticed that all of your Moeru! Onii-san episodes & OVAs had been posted to Nyaa, I’m eagerly downloading them now. That show is so off-the-chain funny, it’s weird that so few people seem to have heard of it.
Cybot Robotchi torrent is going up soon, probably Sunday night or Monday. Anyone who likes Dr. Slump should definitely give this show a try. And of course I will keep you informed if more episodes turn up.
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finnaly i can watch this!
i only watched 2-3 episodes some time ago!
thank you very much! 🙂
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