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This series is confusing.

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I know complaining about the Crunchyroll store is beating a dead horse at this point, but this slogan is so amazingly out of touch I can’t help but publicly mock it

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Lisa Simpson is my favorite Muskethound www.ebay.com/itm/23474898...

Inside of the case, showing 3 dogtanian discs, and one Simpsons disc with Lisa on it

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Ground Zero put out the other 2 Willy Fog recap films in English. Around the World in 80 Days was a standard DVD, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a bilingual English/Spanish one. Both of those have an advert for Journey on the start, so in theory it should be out there.

Advert from the Around the World DVD for Journey to the Center of the Earth

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Doin’ that thing I do all the time and asking the internet for help: Does anybody know if Ground Zero Entertainment ever put out an English-language DVD for The Adventures of Willy Fog: Journey to the Center of the Earth? They did do a (rare) English VHS and Spanish VHS/DVD.

Las Incredibles Adventures del Willy Fog Viaje Al Centro De La Tierra

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♪One of these things is not like the others♪

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Lolo the Penguin, The Adventures of the Little Prince, The Adventures of Pinocchio, The Adventure of Willy Fog: Around the World in 80 Days, and The Adventures with Iczer 3 DVDs

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My personal favorite “source” I’ve found is this one for Star Blazers 2199

DVD Authoring/Compression: Justin Sevakis (uncredited)

Source: I am that person

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The ANN Encyclopedia is a wonderful thing, but every once in a while you stumble across something like this. www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia...

Broadcaster: NHK (Minna no Uta) source: Obvious

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One of the inherent problems with a prequel: I have no idea who this man is, but he is central to the setting. Therefore, he will almost certainly die by the end of this game. I give it 50/50 on heroic sacrifice vs evil double-crosser. (Now watch me be proven completely wrong)

Dikotama:
You should be proud of your father. He was an exemplary Monomofu and a fine patriot

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Every once in a while, this game will recycle a background from Mask of Deception/Truth, and they stand out like a sore thumb because they’re the *only* backgrounds presented this way instead of being fully 3D modeled.

Oshtor: Where are we?

Background is the imperial palace CG from the Mask games

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Life goals www.ebay.com/itm/33655277...

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Random eBay find of the now: A Philippines-market SD Gundam Force VCD that is in some sort of English. My guess is that it’s only English dubbed like the U.S. DVDs, but maybe it has Japanese audio w/ subs instead? It doesn’t seem to specify on the packaging. www.ebay.com/itm/80071660...

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Invisible walls, my favorite. I get they can’t perfectly model a massive city, but would a tiny barricade or a grumpy old man blocking the way been too much to ask for?

Next week’s lottery numbers are 15, 49, 8… bsky.app/profile/v-i....

Screenshot of Monochrome Mobius:
About Woptors:

Press L3 button when exploring a spacious area to call your Woptor to ride, allowing you to travel faster.

Attempting to track down some info: Does anybody have the RiffTrax Toxic Box Set who'd be willing to do me a favor? On the back of the Attack of the Super Monsters case, is there any copyright info, like they licensed it from someone? Or is it just RiffTrax? www.rifftrax.com/toxic-box

RiffTrax Toxic Box advert, showing Attack of the Super Monsters DVD in a lunchbox with others

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vi @v-i.dev · 25/09/2026

with Tomorrow’s Joe, it seems the Japanese licensor kinda just shrugged and said sure about the dub

Brady Hartel @BradyHartel 3/10/24

The weird thing about the dub on this is it's fully official and for any scene where people talked they muted the Japanese audio and dropped in random royalty free music and when people stop talking it would fade back to the Japanese audio.

Justin Sevakis @worldofcrap 3/10/24

Are we sure it’s legit? I thought the licensor had no idea where it came from.

Brady Hartel @BradyHartel 3/10/24

Legit enough that they gave us permission to include it. I remember it was up in the air for a while.

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vi @v-i.dev · 24/09/2026

To whatever engineer at VTech in 1985 figured out how to save a quarter of a cent on the Laser 128 by using a metal strap to move the floppy carriage instead of a lead screw: I wish you an enthusiastic “no”

Inside of a Laser 128 floppy drive, showing a drive carriage that’s controlled by a servo motor and a metal strap. The right hand side has snapped, and now the drive no longer works

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vi @v-i.dev · 23/09/2026

Back in 2016, we did get a bannerless slipcover from Discotek with Getter Robo Armageddon, but best I can tell that was actually a mistake, as they put a massive BLU-RAY DISC sticker on the cover so people wouldn’t assume it was a DVD of some sort. www.ebay.com/itm/27840065...

Getter Robo Armageddon Blu-ray in a slipcover that says blu-ray nowhere except a giant sticker on the shrink wrap

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vi @v-i.dev · 23/09/2026

It looks like GKIDS may be going all-in on bannerless slipcovers, and my first question is “what took them so long?” followed by “why are no other anime publishers doing this?”

Lupin the IIIrd The Movie The Immortal Bloodline blu-ray slipcover with no big banner at the top

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Manga Entertainment was on the production committee, and likely owns the English-speaking rights in perpetuity. Lionsgate kept the old DVD in print until fairly recently. No idea what’s the situation on the UK side

Production:
Manga Entertainment
Production I.G

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Okay, this isn’t the original video, but here’s John Oppliger going on record about that whole “because Florida” thing www.animenation.net/blog/ask-joh...

While the selection of all of these titles is my own subjectivity, I’ll conclude by escalating my personal sentiment. AN Entertainment licensed, localized, and distributed the 2000 television series Miami Guns because I pushed for the acquisition. No one else at AnimeNation had ever heard of the title. I shared my “raw” VHS copies of the 13 episodes and emphasized the serendipity of being a Florida-based company distributing an anime set in a fictional Miami. While some proponents including Anime News Network (ANN) critic Bamboo Dong and Glass City Con organizer Chris Zasada expressed positivity and praise for the show upon its American release, other critics including ANN’s Mike Toole severely criticized it. Twenty years after the American DVD release, I now feel gratified to see the show earning a respectable 6.9 IMDB score, a reddit thread titled “Miami Guns: The best cop show parody you’ve never heard of!” and viewer reactions including, “I have to defend this anime after a lot of people were telling me how crappy it was… Miami Guns manages to hit far more than it misses.”

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That was their only other show after Miami Guns and Risky Safety, but I’m not so sure it’s what they were after. As per ANN, there seems to be little to no corporate overlap between the two, so if there was some mystery shared licensor, it’s not one that was public facing

Haré+ Guu (TV).
Omishi Magical Theater Risky Safety (TV)

Haruo Ogawara Animation Director
Key Animation
Animation Director
Animation Director
Kazuhiko Inoue
voices Reiji-sensei
voices Bezetto Serges
Naoki Aisaka
Key Animation
Key Animation
Yuri Shiratori
voices Lavenna
voices Fazzy Serges

In-Between Animation
Animation Production
Production

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Not to toot my horn, but I tend to think I have a pretty good grasp on the majority of US anime releases. So it’s always fun when I stumble across an anime I realize I’ve never heard of. Not because it was rare or anything, but seemingly due to sheer customer apathy So anyway, here’s Bottle Fairy

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Here’s a short sample of the weird, half-dubbed KimStim did for The Book of the Dead. Unsurprisingly, this dub is not included in the English-subbed, Japanese-market BD/UHD from TC Entertainment.

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While digging into English-friendly releases of Kihachiro Kawamoto’s works, I discovered something interesting: the KimStim DVD of The Book of the Dead is somehow half dubbed. They dubbed over the narrator, but not the puppets themselves, for some reason. And there’s no option for full Japanese.

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Angel’s Egg came in. Interestingly, there’s an Anime Limited logo on the box. I don’t think they’d announced a UK UHD release yet, i think this confirms it’ll likely be pretty much identical to the GKIDS one

Bottom of the Angel’s Egg box, showing GKIDS and Anime Limited logos

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We really have gotten only one new Tales game in the last decade, huh? Say what you will about the Hideo Baba-era games, but at least they were gameS (plural). We got 8 games between 2006 and 2016!

Tales of Berseriala! is an action role-playing video game developed and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and Windows. It is the sixteenth! main entry in the Tales
series and a prequel of Tales of Zestiria.!5! It was released in Japan for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 in mid-August 2016, 6] and was released worldwide

Tales of Arise!2! is a 2021 action role-playing game developed and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The seventeenth! main entry in the Tales series, the game follows a man and a woman from the opposing worlds of Dahna and Rena and their journey to end the Renans' oppression of the Dahnan people.

Tales release timeline from Wikipedia showing a large gap from 2017 to 2020

Does anybody have any info on the “KimbaKids.com” Kimba the White Lion DVD? One of the many DVDs of questionable legality containing the 90s redub, the only info I can find on it is a blurry picture from the archives of Kimba.biz. kimbawlion.kimba.biz/KimbaKids.htm

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If I bad a nickel for every PS4 JRPG that had you descend down an overgrown, window-filled office building/mall… I’d have like 3 nickels.

Screenshot on Monochrome Mobius, showing windows

Nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than spread the word of god.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya “rainbow” paperback

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The dialogue so far has been… stiff for lack of a better word. I’m not sure if this is in the original or a result of the localization, but I’m not exactly impressed.

Shunya:
Oshtor, the leaves moved! I saw it clearly!

Oshtor:
Shunya, it's just the wind. Haha, I didn't think you would scare so easily.

Shunya:
Hmph!

Shunya:
Don't make light of me!

Oshtor:
Calm down, you worrywart. If there's anything near, I'll sense its presence before it can see us. Now, can you help me look for the instrument?

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Gee, I sure wonder if I’ll get to ride a Woptor at some point in this game.

Controls menu, showing the left stick is to ride or dismount a Woptor, but is only unlocked in chapter 5

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First impressions: not a fan of how they’ve adapted Mitsumi Misato’s character designs to 3D. I don’t know if the eyes need more detail or less, but something’s just… off. Maybe it’s because they’re supposed to be children here? I dunno.

Nekone and Kiwru in Monochrome Mobius. Their eyes are very colorful and massive

Nekone from Mask of Truth. Also with big colorful eyes, but it looks less weird here, IMO

Kiwru from Mask of Truth. Same problem as before

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Onto Monochrome Mobius: Rights and Wrongs Forgotten! I got about 5 hours into this when it first came out, before I had to send my PS5 in for repair with Sony. Did you know there is no way to back up your PS5 saves without PS Plus? And that Sony may wipe your console during repair? I know now…

vi @v-i.dev · 19/09/2026

They also did some recap films of old Toei shows around 2011. While they’re not the Force Five dubs, all 3 were part of force five, and it makes me wonder if that’s what Shout had been trying to get

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vi @v-i.dev · 19/09/2026

That was almost 20 years ago, but I believe they got it from the source. Packaging says Sav! The World Productions, who owns the series outright, far as I can tell. They also did Medabots right around then, courtesy of Nelvana.

Shout, Sav! The World, and Vivendi logos on the back of Oban Star Racers dvd

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The two came from the same creator, Mitsuteru Yokoyama. Tetsujin 28-go/Giagntor in 1956 and Giant Robo in 1967. Also, a large chunk of the team behind Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still would later work on the 2004 Tetsujin 28 anime

Tetsujin 28 (2004) poster showing the main cast

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The story behind Scott Wheeler Productions is kind of crazy. (Excerpts from Fred Patten’s Watching Anime, Reading Manga). And while I can’t be 100% sure it’s the same guy, I’m pretty sure he went on to be nominated for an Oscar for his makeup work www.imdb.com/name/nm09239...

During the 1980s Gigantor seemed destined to fade into history. The new home-video market was coming into existence, but it had little interest in crude black-and-white TV cartoons. Gigantor's first "savior" was Scott Wheeler, a young Hollywood makeup effects artist who had loved Gigantor on TV when he was a child. During the 1980s he became aware of Japanese animation fandom and attended a few club meetings, including one at which Fred Ladd was a guest speaker. But most of the anime shown at these screenings was current and from Japan, not the Americanized TV cartoons of the 1960s
"Gigantor was my favorite TV cartoon when I was a kid," Wheeler said in a 1989 interview, "and my best friend's favorite cartoon, too. But they weren't showing it at any of these fan meetings. Nobody had any of the Japanese cartoons that old. But somebody told me about a fan in another part of the country who had some Gigantors on tape. So I wrote to her and

she sent me a copy of her tape. Well, I got together with my fiancee, who is now my wife, and I said, 'This was my favorite show when I was a kid!, and we looked at it and it was a twentieth generation copy of a 16 millimeter film that somebody had projected against a wall and videotaped. I just thought. this is crazy! This is the only thing that I can see of my favorite cartoon?!
Something's got to be done!
"That was how I got the inspiration to do it myself. I saw it as partly a hobby, and partly as a second job to keep myself busy between makeup assignments. I had seen Fred Ladd talking at a fan club about how he had made Gigantor and those other programs, so I knew that he was local. I found him in the phone book. I called him and I said, 'Let's do something with Gigantor,' and he said, "Well, make me an offer..: I ended up licensing the home video rights and 50 percent of the merchandising rights for Gigantor for a seven-year period."
Wheeler's experience trying to produce Gigantor for home video makes a fascinating horror story about what was wrong with the American home video market in 1989. Despite paying one of the best film-to-video transfer companies in Hollywood for its top-quality video production, its technicians were inexperienced with crude black-and-white cartoons. They thought that an image covered with large dirt specks was the way an old-fashioned black-and-white cartoon was supposed to look. Wheeler had to ask Fred Ladd to use his authority as a veteran producer to get the negatives cleaned correctly and the videos remastered.
Then Wheeler ran into a solid wall of disinterest by the national video distribution industry. "A lot of the reaction that I got from those distributors that showed any interest in Gigantor at all, was that I was putting too much on each tape. I have three half-hour episodes for $14.95. They also said that I don't have a flashy enough package. My video sleeves are illustrated with stills of Gigantor and the main characters…

in his collectors' edition of Gigantor. He premiered his Scott Wheeler Productions release of Gigantor, vols, 1 and 2, at a science fiction convention, the West Coast Science Fantasy Conference (Westercon 42) at the Anaheim Marriott Hotel next to Disneyland, at a presentation in its anime video room on Sunday, July 2, 1989. They went on general sale at the end of July; vol. 3 did not appear until 1990. Wheeler tried at first to sell Gigantor by mail order to the film collectors' market, but the sales did not even pay for his advertising in the film collectors' specialty magazines. He next turned over his videos' sales to Books Nippan in Los Angeles, which at that time was the major retailer of Japanese animation videos in North America. Fortunately, at this point the newly developing anime market came along. The Right Stuf International, which had launched the American anime specialty video market with its first Astro Boy video in June 1989, asked to add Gigantor to its catalogue. Since Wheeler had wanted to rescue Gigantor from oblivion rather than to make money from it, he was relieved to turn it over to someone eise who respected it as he did. In addition to selling Wheeler's three Gigantor videos, The Right Stuf released the remaining ten episodes that Wheeler had mastered in its own series of five Gigantor Retrospective 30 videos with two episodes each. no. 10 through no. 19, in March 1994 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the production of those episodes in Japan. There were also two Gigantor 30th Anniversary laser disc volumes (episodes 1-4, released October 1994; and 5-8, released May 1995) produced by LumiVision.
Gigantor was restored to America's awareness in other ways during the increasingly anime-conscious 1990s. The 1980 fifty-one-episode color remake of Iron Man No. 28 by Tokyo Movie Shinsha (October 3, 1980
through September 25, 1981, in Japan) was produced by Fred Ladd for the Sci-Fi Channel, where it played as The New Adventures of Gigantor…

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As for advertising, none of the early adverts actually had any pictures, but one of two of them do mention “hard cases” like this one from New Wave Wrestling archive.org/details/new-...

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Oh, I forgot to mention it earlier: the localization for the Mask games is exceptional. The sheer number of different accents, metaphors, call backs, jokes, and pseduo-Ainu terminology is impressive, and it really adds to the whole experience. The localization for Prelude is… fine, I guess

Okay rant over. Go play Utawarerumono. The original trilogy will run on a toaster with 8GB of RAM, so if you have a PC, it’s probably capable of running them at least as well as the Vita did.

Mask of Truth system requirements

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 10 64bit
PROCESSOR: Intel Celeron G1820
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: Intel HD Graphics 4000
DIRECTX: Version 11
STORAGE: 7 GB available space
SOUND CARD: DirectX Compatible
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 10 64bit
PROCESSOR: Intel Core i3-3220
MEMORY: 8 GB RAM
GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti
DIRECTX: Version 11
STORAGE: 7 GB available space
SOUND CARD: DirectX Compatible

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I’m no marketing expert, but you know what may expand brand awareness? Releasing games for the best-selling game console of all time. Or maybe even its successor which is also doing gangbusters.And to reiterate, these games have already been ported! They’ve already been translated! Just not together

Nintendo Switch 2:
Hardware: 23.68 million units
Software: 58.17 million units

Nintendo Switch:
Hardware 156.59 million units
Software: 1561.95 million units

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Shiravune would port Aquapazza to the PC in 2025, and announced plans for a translation of Zan 2 targeting 2026 (PC only, of course) And then in May 2026, Utawarerumono: Past and Present Rediscovered released worldwide. PC/PS5/Switch 2 in Japan, just PC in the rest of the world.

Past and present rediscovered for Switch 2

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In 2025, Prelude to the Fallen, Mask of Truth, and Mask of deception were ported to the Switch and Switch 2 in Japan. No international release. The problem is that Shiravune only publishes games for the PC. They’re not equipped to do a console release even if the translation is already done.

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A year later, NIS America would save the day by releasing Monochrome Mobius on PS4 and PS5 using the translation from Shiravune, but to date this is the very last English-friendly Utawarerumono release on a console.

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