Shotarto Ishinomori is in the Guiness Book of World Records for "most comics published by one author." His creations have led to numerous anime and tokustasu shows, including Cyborg 009, Sabu & Ichi, Kikaider, Robot Detective and the monstrously popular Kamen Rider and Super Sentai franchises. But one thing that most of his American fans have never heard of is the Toei Fushigi Comedy Series, a set of 14 different shows he created that aired in Japan from 1981 to 1993. These shows are just weird beyond belief, and this particular episode (about a war between summer and winter snack foods) is so out there I won't even try to describe it. You may laugh or you may smash your computer screen, but either way it seems like an appropriate release for April Fool's Day.
Toku fan trivia: Sayuri Uchida, the child actress who plays Mako, later went onto play Ako Hayasaka, the Blue Swallow in Jetman.
This episode was originally subtitled by Dead Fish Fansubs, a one man tokusatsu subtitling army that appeared out of nowhere, subtitled 200 episodes of all kinds of cool shows, and then disappeared just as quickly when its founder lost interest in subtitling and joined a rock band. (Oddly enough there's a current subtitling group called Deadfish Encodes, but they have no connection with the original DFF.) He started out using the screen name Booji when his early work was a bit technically primitive and often missing bits of dialogue, but his subtitles improved quickly and he changed his handle to Sinistar. I actually manually transcribed this episode myself from one of his early efforts and got my translator to do QC and fill in the missing bits of dialogue. If you come across this post some day Sinistar, thanks for all your great work. You made me and a lot of other old-school toku fans very happy.
I was originally going to make this post a lame April Fool's joke about how I'm dropping all of my existing projects to focus on subtitling more episodes of Nemurin, but I figure that kind of joke would probably cause more trouble than it's worth. Speaking of dropped projects though, it occurs to me that I probably never got around to announcing that Dororo has been dropped, due to the fact that you can now legally stream subtitled episodes of it on Anime Sols. They have lots of other great anime too, more Tezuka stuff like Wonder 3 and Goku's Great adventure, Tatsunoko classics like Space Ace, Time Bokan & Yatterman, Polymer and Gordian. I don't even want to say how many shows in that last sentence were projects that I was secretly working on at one point, but thankfully I didn't get very far on any of them and now I can just relax and enjoy watching them.
I've probably said this before, but when I decide to subtitle a show it's usually something that I've wanted to watch myself for years, and also that I figure will never be subtitled by anyone else, much less be released professionally in this country. If you have a favorite show that I've been working on and it seems like forever since I've released an episode, don't despair. If I've released more than one episode of something, and it hasn't been officially licensed for subtitled DVD release or streaming, you'll see more episodes eventually.
Also, I know a lot of people get into subtitling around college age, do it for a little while and lose interest. That's not the case with me. Subtitling has been a dream of mine for decades, and barring any unforeseen health issues or other personal disasters I'm in this for the long haul.