Happy Halloween from Kitaro, Akuma-kun, and Dororon Enma-kun!

While knocking on the front doors of strangers and sticking your fist into a shared bowl of candy might not be the move this year, you can always count on spooky Halloween episodes from TSHS and our partner subtitling groups.

GeGeGe no Kitaro (1968) 18-20

Here are a couple of newly subtitled episodes from the original black-and-white Kitaro series, as well as a re-release of episode 20. Some people wonder why we subtitled episode 20 out of sequence a few years ago. It’s because it’s the only episode in the first series to see a major role for Neko Musume/Cat Girl, who would become a core member of the “Kitaro family” of characters that appeared in every subsequent series of GeGeGe no Kitaro in every decade since.

This is a joint project with Hokuto no Gun. Check out their site here.

Get episodes 18-20 from Nyaa or Mega.

And in answer to the obvious question, yes, we are also working on a batch of the first 20 episodes.

Akuma-kun (1966) episodes 1-2

The 1968 GeGeGe no Kitaro anime wasn’t the first time one of Shigeru Mizuki’s horror manga was adapted for television. That honor goes to this 1966 live-action version of Mizuki’s Akuma-kun. The title character was played by Mitsunobu Kaneko, the year before he landed the lead part of Daisaku Kusama (known in the US as “Johnny Sokko”) in the live-action version of Giant Robo, one of the very first tokusatsu series I ever saw when I was growing up.

Get episodes 1-2 from Nyaa or Mega.

There’s a good article about the Akuma-kun live-action series here, at the Black Sun site.

After a one-off appearance in a rare live-action 1986 TV special, Akuma-kun finally got a 42 episode anime adaptation in 1989, which also spawned two of those Manga Matsuri/Anime Fair mini-movies. In fact both of those movies have been subtitled by Inka-Subs, who have also subtitled more cool stuff like Galvion and the 1989 Jungle Emperor remake. Check out their site here.

Dororon Enma-kun (1973) 1-5

A few years back I subtitled some random episodes of this classic Go Nagai horror series, about a demon prince from the Underworld who hunts down renegade Yokai that are wreaking havoc on Earth. Now I’m going back and remastering these episodes using the heponeko 720p encodes, and filling in some of the gaps while I’m at it.

Get episodes 1-5 from Nyaa or Mega.

I’ve talked before about how Toei Animation started doing some really innovative work with color in the early 1970s. Dororon Enma-kun is a very good example of this, with some amazing use of color both in the ink & paint department and the backgrounds. These episodes looked great on DVD, but the HD versions look even better.