Twelve Older Anime That Deserve License Rescues XI: Vertical Hold Syndrome Part 1

A large factor in what titles I select for each of these license rescue lists every year is honestly a rather simple one: It could use a release that would allow for better quality, such as with the audiovisual side of things. Easily the biggest jump, in that regard, would be if the only prior way to buy an anime in English was on the Video Home System, better known under the acronym VHS. Developed by JVC & introduced in 1976, VHS would defeat Sony's Betamax in the format war of the late 70s & early 80s, becoming the de facto only way the wide majority of home consumers would watch (&/or record) things at their own leisure, up until the debut of DVD. Even then, though, DVD didn't actually fully surpass VHS until 2008 (i.e. AFTER Blu-Ray had already won the HD format war!), & VCR/DVD combo units were still produced up until 2016, when Funai Electric finally stopped doing so; there were even VCR/BD combo units!! In fact, VHS still exists to this day in some way, as you can still purchase blank VHS tapes for recording purposes, and while VHS hasn't been supported as a standard release format since A History of Violence in March of 2006, it still does see the occasional support as a limited edition novelty, such as with 2010's The House of the Devil, the V/H/S horror anthology series, & even as recently as 2018 with Transformers spin-off Bumblebee.

As for anime in North America (we'll get to Japan next time), VHS looks to have effectively died out after 2005 following dub-only releases for Duel Masters & Yu Yu Hakusho, after subbed tapes stopped coming out around after 2002/2003, with FUNimation actually cancelling the release of the tape that would have finished out all of Yu Yu Hakusho; there's word of Hello Kitty: Stump Village getting a VHS tape in 2006, but I can't proof of it. That being said, people at Discotek Media have admitted to tossing around the idea of putting out a VHS release as a novelty, but don't know what title to do it with. Regardless, let us celebrate the long (& seemingly never ending) life of VHS with a license rescue list of anime that, to this day, you can still only get with an English translation of via VHS!

We're starting things out with an interesting pick, namely because while the series it belongs to was part of the very first license rescue list in early 2011 & was actually rescued, this specific part of the franchise has yet to have been picked up. Also, this is likely the last of Western Connection's UK-exclusive releases that I'll ever do, mainly because I don't know if eventually including stuff like Le Deus, Samurai Gold, or Idol Defense Force Hummingbird might be a case of me getting desperate for picks, as I'll admit that this specific list is already going to be digging deep enough to start with. So, to recap, Dancouga: Super Beast Machine God is a mech anime produced by Ashi Productions in 1985, and though it was originally cancelled early during its TV run, it did remain popular enough to receive three OVA continuations from 1986 to 1990. In the mid-90s, Central Park Media licensed the TV series, & OVA finale Requiem for Victims, & released all of it across eight subbed VHS tapes, under the name Super Bestial Machine God Dancougar; it was through this licensing deal that CPM also "accidentally" licensed Machine Robo: Revenge of Cronos. Then, in 2017, Discotek Media would finally give Dancouga a new release via a sub-only DVD boxset for the entire TV series, & in late 2020 would put out a sub-only Blu-Ray boxset that also now included Requiem for Victims & the final OVA, the four-episode Blazing Epilogue, which had never seen official English release before.

Weren't there three OVAs produced, though? Yes, and that's where Western Connection comes in, because CPM actually was NOT the first company to release Dancouga in English!... Maybe. To be honest, finding exact dates for anime during the VHS days can be tricky, but it could very well be that WC's UK-exclusive release of 1987's feature-length God Bless Dancouga, though simply titled "Dancougar" here, predated CPM's TV series release, even if only by a few weeks or months. What's even wilder, though, is that WC only ever released God Bless, with the TV series technically never having been officially licensed for UK release, even to this day. The reason for this, which also ties into why Discotek's BD boxset doesn't include this specific OVA, is simply because Ashi Pro doesn't handle the licensing for God Bless, but rather it looks to be handled by Toho, which is where WC got a lot of its anime from during its run. To this day, the UK VHS release of God Bless Dancouga remains the sole English release, and while I'm sure Discotek will be willing to license it for American release should the BD boxset do well, there's still something interesting about the version WC put out...

Props to The Melancholic Middle Aged Anime Fan for
proving that this version of God Bless Dancouga exists!

You see, for whatever reason, the master Toho provided WC with was a bizarre one, such as removing the God Bless Dancouga title card with stock footage... And showing the entire thing in 4:3 open matte format, despite it technically being produced with letterboxed format in mind. Because of this, there are shots in which you see the where the actual animation cels end, resulting in characters being awkwardly cut off, and if there's no background at all (like in the second shot on top) you simply see the white of the plate everything was photographed on! Without a doubt, should Discotek ever license rescue God Bless Dancouga, I'd be willing to bet that Toho will NOT provide them with this master, no matter how much they might ask for it to include as an extra... And that's terrible, because I'd love to watch the "UK Cut" of God Bless Dancouga. It's a really good & fun OVA on its own merit, but seeing it in this form would be amazing.

If there was one creator ADV Films supported heavily in the company's first decade+ of life, it was the venerable Go Nagai. From roughly 1998 to 2005, ADV would license & release 10 different anime based on the works of one of the most influential mangaka of all time (plus re-releases as far out as 2009), but while Black Lion, Devilman Lady/The Devil Lady, Getter Robo Armageddon, Kekko Kamen, New Cutie Honey, the Mazinkaiser OVA, & Shuten Doji all received a DVD release of some sort, there are three Go Nagai anime that ADV released, some of its earliest in fact, that to this day have remained exclusive to VHS. First up in this list the OVA based on one of Nagai's second-tier hits (i.e. still very successful, but not on the level of his biggest franchises), The Abashiri Family. Debuting in the very first issue of Akita Shoten's Weekly Shonen Champion magazine in mid-1969, Abashiri Family was Nagai poking fun at the controversy his debut serialization Harenchi Gakuen was making in Shonen Jump at the time, so he created a series starring the most notorious crime family in Japan (likely named after Abashiri Prison in Hokkaido), one that has no problems being violent when provoked, & lead character Kikunosuke was the sole female, so she'd wind up losing her clothes often during fights. The manga would run until 1973, lasting 15 volumes, and in 1992 would be adapted into an anime, though the execution would be anything but standard.

In 1991, Gakken & Pony Canyon experimented a bit with a product called Anime V Comic Rentaman, which was treated as a "video magazine" for the anime market at the time, and each "issue" of Rentaman included mini-episodes of four anime: Akai Hayate, Hisashi Eguchi's Kotobuki Goro Show, Baku Yumemakura's Twilight Theater, & The Abashiri Family. Unfortunately, only four "issues" of Rentaman ever came out, but at least with Abashiri Family it still resulted in a complete story, one which sees Kikunosuke get enrolled at Paradise Academy, as her father wants the family's criminal ways to end, but the school itself is a deadly one, where the teachers will literally torture & even kill students who don't behave. ADV would license & release this series on VHS in 1998, now treated as a feature-length movie split up across four parts (same as what happened in Japan with a standalone 1992 release), and in true Go Nagai fashion the anime holds nothing back when it comes to sexuality, violence, & pure bat**** insanity; no English dub exists, as ADV only ever released a subbed VHS tape. Since then, The Abashiri Family anime has effectively become forgotten with time, and while even Japan has never received any sort of release beyond VHS & LD, I'd imagine it's more due to a lack of interest than anything regarding licensing. The standalone release of Abashiri Family makes no mention of Rentaman, while Soeishinsha helped produced it, and that company is still in active operation, as seen with Discotek's re-release of infamous OVA series Angel Cop not long ago.

In fact, AnimEigo's Robert Woodhead was recently able to locate the original film masters for both Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 & Project A-Ko, both thought to be long lost, and Soeishinsha was partially responsible for both of those anime as well. For all we know, there's a film master for the Abashiri Family anime in Soeishinsha's vault just waiting to be given an HD remaster all its own!

Ryoichi Ikegami is one of the most celebrated manga artists of all time, with him having a pure, innate talent at drawing such sleek & detailed characters & environments. I'd argue that Ikegami's exquisite style is a major factor as to why he's seen very few of his manga adapted into anime, with to my research there only being three, & all of which were released as OVAs: Wounded Man, Crying Freeman, & the subject of this entry in the license rescue list, Sanctuary. Running from 1990 to 1995 in Big Comic Superior, Sanctuary is one of Ikegami's collaborations with Sho Fumimura, which is an alternate pseudonym for the legendary manga writer Yoshiyuki "Buronson" Okamura, & follows two Japanese survivors of the Cambodian genocide committed by Khmer Rouge in the 70s, who together promise to create a "sanctuary", but take different paths to make that dream a reality: Akira Hojo takes the path of the yakuza, while Chiaki Asami enters the world of politics. Naturally, this eventually results in the two's friendship being tested, as each side has to do things that the other wouldn't approve of, even though they both have noble intentions.

After 12 volumes, the manga would come to an end and only then did the adaptations start coming. Across 1995 & 1996 there was a trilogy of live-action movies, and a few months after the last movie saw release in Japan a 50-minute OVA adaptation came out, directed by Takashi Watanabe (who, coincidentally enough, also directed the Abashiri Family OVA). Viz Media started releasing the manga in English around 1999, and to help promote it the company also licensed the movie (the first one, at least) & the OVA, giving both of them VHS releases. While the movie looks to have only received a subbed tape, the OVA saw both subbed & dubbed tapes, with the dub being done over at Ocean Studios & directed by Karl Willems. To be perfectly honest, my experience with Sanctuary is rather limited, having only seen the "interesting" Manga DVD adaptation it received in 2003, and though that adaptation itself was easily the worst of the three Manga DVDs that were produced, the excellent story still shone through well, so I'd definitely love to experience Fumimura & Ikegami's iconic political thriller in a much better form. Today, Viz's various VHS releases for both the live-action movie & OVA range wildly in prices, so while this entry is more specifically for the OVA, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a license rescue for both productions, especially if we can get the entire trilogy of movies this time around.

While there have been a few exceptions across the past 11 years of license rescue lists, the large majority of the anime I've included did at least see a complete release, and even the ones that were not fully released still saw at least some notable amount of it released in English, i.e. "at least half of it". This, however, is a truly unique entry, because this is an anime that only ever saw a single episode released in North America. In fact, I believe AnimEigo founder (& co-creator of influential PC RPG Wizardry) Robert Woodhead actually went on the record & stated that this was the least-selling anime AnimEigo ever put out, hence why we only ever saw a single episode. So why is it on this list, then? Simply because it's still an interesting look at what was once a highly notable subculture in Japan: Bosozoku.

Originally inspired by American greaser culture & western films, bosozoku is Japan's equivalent of "biker culture", and while it's nowhere near as notable as what it once was during the 70s, 80s, & 90s, it still exists in the country to this day, even having been reclassified as a "pseudo-yakuza" organization in 2013. It was so notable during those specific trio of decades, though, that Japan saw many fictional stories made revolving around bosozoku, including various movies, manga, and even some anime, & you can find bosozoku influence in various iconic manga throughout time. One specific manga about the subculture was Shonan Bakusozoku by Satoshi Yoshida, which ran from 1982 to 1988 in Shonen King magazine (plus a special one-shot in 2017) & detailed the life of Yosuke Eguchi, a high school student who has to balance his time as leader of a biker gang & being a member of his school's handrcrafts club, showing that he has a softer side; if you can't tell, this partially a comedy. In the middle of the manga's run, an OVA adaptation by Toei Animation debuted in 1986, and over a (more or less) one-episode-per-year schedule, 12 episodes would come out all the way until 1999, each of which running about an hour long, and in 1997 there was even a two-episode spin-off OVA, Shin Shonan Bakusozoku: Arakure Knight. In the midst of this OVA's release in Japan, AnimEigo gave it a try, releasing the first episode on subbed VHS in 1994 under the name Shonan Bakusozoku: Bomber Bikers of Shonan; there was no dubbed VHS. AnimEigo even admitted in the liner notes that this was "somewhat of an experiment for AnimEigo, as it is part of a genre of Japanese animation that is almost unknown in the United States", so props to the company for at least giving it an attempt, where others most certainly wouldn't; too bad we never got "the one where they go up against a rival gang of vampires", though.

Aside from the apparent low sales, however, I'd imagine that Shonan Bakusozoku would have simply been tough to fully license anyway, namely due to the sheer amount of music it uses. Aside from having rock musician Sho performing the first OP & ED theme, & even voicing Yosuke for the first episode (the late Kaneto Shiozawa would take over for the rest), every single episode has its own ED theme & a wide variety of insert songs performed by a bunch of artists (Sho, Loudness, Hironobu Kageyama, Dangan Bads, etc.), which I'm sure could be a logistical nightmare for licensing. That being said, Toei did eventually put out an HD remaster for the entire OVA series across six Blu-Rays in 2014, so I guess you can use the old adage of "Never say never". It might be an extremely restrictive niche of a subject (the only fansub effort so far just transplants AnimEigo's one-episode subs to the HD remaster), its music rights might be too complicated to deal with, and its status of "It sold so poorly that AnimEigo never wanted to touch it again" doesn't help its chances, but I think Shonan Bakusozoku deserves a spot in this list, if only so that it doesn't become lost to time in English-speaking anime fandom's collective consciousness.

It's #2 of the "Go Nagai VHS-Exclusive Trilogy", and this time it's based on something that Go Nagai had help with conceiving! So who could possibly be so wild & crazy that even Go Nagai would want to work with them? Why none other than Kazuo Koike, co-creator of Lone Wolf & Cub, Crying Freeman, Lady Snowblood, Mad Bull 34, and various other manga that are known for their adult storytelling, featuring all manner of violence, sexuality, or just pure insanity, if not simply having all three! The end result of this collaboration between Nagai & Koike was Hanappe Bazooka, a manga that ran in Weekly Young Jump from 1979 to 1982 & lasted 10 volumes. It tells the story of Hanappe Yamada, a lecherous high school student whose life becomes all manner of messed up when a pair of demons step through his TV, fall lustfully in love with Hanappe's mother & sister, turn his home into a hangout for other demons, and endow Hanappe's index finger with the "Hanappe Bazooka", which can both blow things up as well as make any woman he points to experience extreme lust for the young man himself. Naturally, Hanappe has no real control over actually utilizing this awesome/perverse power (depending on the situation), so he's constantly getting into trouble, whether due to him blowing stuff up or making women want to bang him, regardless of whether he meant to do it or not.

Hanappe Bazooka was adapted into a ~45-minute OVA in 1992, featuring a young Kappei Yamaguchi as Hanappe (which is honestly brilliant casting), and ADV would later license & release the OVA on a subbed VHS tape, likely around the same time as The Abashiri Family; much like that OVA, there is no dubbed tape for Hanappe Bazooka, in my research. To help lengthen the content featured, however, ADV's tape also includes a rare bonus feature for the medium, in this case a making-of featurette that plays after the OVA, and ADV made no attempt to mask the risqué content, citing that it contains "graphic violence, nudity, sex, extremely adult situations, and lots of very gross jokes involving a multitude of bodily functions!"; again, this is from the minds of Go Nagai & Kazuo Koike. Beyond that, much like The Abashiri Family, the Hanappe Bazooka OVA effectively came & went, with ADV obviously putting more attention towards longer-form anime productions based on Nagai's works as time went on, though this OVA did at least get a DVD release by Pioneer in Japan in 2001. Does Hanappe Bazooka truly "deserve" being on this list? I honestly can't answer that, but I will say that it's not like one can just ignore something co-created by two minds as legendarily wild as Go Nagai & Kazuo Koike.

So... it's finally come to this, hasn't it? Now, to be fair, I've never had much of a problem including the rare anime in these license rescue lists that aren't what one would call "good". Mad Bull 34, Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned, Angel Cop, Dark Warrior/Makyo Senjo, Crystal Triangle, & Garzey's Wing have all been deemed worthy of license rescue by me, and two of them even got new releases! My reasoning for including them pretty much just comes down to the simple fact that they are either enjoyably bad to watch in a "So Bad, It's Good" kind of way, or they might be able to offer something unique with a new release, like how Dark Warrior/Makyo Senjo has two different English dubs, or how Discotek's release of Angel Cop includes both the original Manga subtitle translation as well as a new one that doesn't try to mask the antisemitism, and even includes extras that help explain both why it's there in the first place, as well as how Manga went about handling that issue. There IS value in some stuff that isn't "good", but it's a very fine needle hole to thread.

Make no mistake: AWOL -Absent WithOut Leave- is NOT a "So Bad, It's Good" watch. It's a mind-numbing chore that wastes both your free time as well as its own 12-episode run, with a first half in which often barely anything notable happens within the course of a single episode, and while the second half does improve, it can still be a slog to get through. However, there is merit in it being license rescued, but it'd effectively require putting out the same exact show twice in a single release.

You see, it's obvious that the people who made AWOL in Japan back in 1998 knew just how pitch-poor (Get it?) the pacing was for the show... because Japan never received a home video release of AWOL as it was aired on TV. Instead, Japan received AWOL Compression Re-MIX, which re-edited the 12-episode series into four 45-50 minute OVAs released on VHS & LD, tightening up the pace across the board & even removing the entirety of Episode 3, because it had absolutely no point in the plot of the show itself (though, ironically enough, it was arguably the best episode in the series). However, when AnimeVillage.com licensed AWOL from d-rights, likely as part of a larger package deal, what they received was NOT the masters for the re-edited Compression Re-MIX, but rather the original 12-episode TV series! Because of this, those six subbed VHS tapes (plus one dubbed tape later on when the company became Bandai Entertainment) remain the sole home video release of AWOL in its original TV form, & ironically enough now command wild prices over in Japan. If AWOL was to ever get license rescued, & d-rights (now ADK Emotions) still handles international licensing for it, it'd have to be released as a boxset containing both the original TV series AND AWOL Compression Re-MIX. Simply put, there's no worth in just re-releasing the chore of a watch that is AWOL TV on its own, but at the same time I wouldn't want that original version to be left out in the cold in favor of its (admittedly improved & semi-recommended) OVA re-edit.

Will this ever happen? I highly doubt it, barring Discotek truly running out of stuff to license from the d-rights side of ADK Emotions (which, to be fair, actually isn't all that unlikely), but weirder things have definitely happened.

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And that brings an end to Part 1 of this look at anime that, to this day, remain stuck on VHS in North America & could use a digital renaissance. Come back later this month for Part 2, where we continue to peruse the old, dusty, magnetic tape vaults of Viz, ADV, & AnimEigo, while we replace the sights of Western Connection & AnimeVillage.com/Bandai Entertainment with both a company we've only seen once before in these license rescue lists, as well as one that I can guarantee we'll only ever see once.

God Bless Dancouga © Asahi Tsushinsha (now ADK Holdings)/Ashi Production

The Abashiri Family © 1992 Dynamic Planning/Studio Pierrot/Soeishinsha/NEXTART

Sanctuary © Sho Fumimura・Ryoichi Ikegami/Shogakukan・OB Planning・Toho・VAP

Bomber Bikers of Shonan © 1986 Toei Co., Ltd.

Hanappe Bazooka © 1992 Kazuo Koike/Go Nagai/Dynamic Planning/Nippon Crown

AWOL - Absent WithOut Leave © et/BeSTACK・Project AWOL