Do any anime fans 15 years or younger even read this blog? Maybe, maybe not, but it's time I make the majority of the people who actually do read my ramblings feel old!
The mangaka collective known as CLAMP is one of the most beloved groups in all of manga, and while the members of CLAMP have changed throughout the decades the quality of their work has (for the most part) remained relatively high. They truly made their name throughout the 90s with titles like RG Veda, Tokyo Babylon, Magic Knight Rayearth, X, & Angelic Layer, so by the early 00s they were already essentially legends when they debuted ×××HOLiC in the pages of Weekly Young Magazine in early 2003. Pronounced simply as "Holic", as the x's are meant to represent the various "holics"/addictions that people can be found as having, the manga follows Kimihiro Watanuki, a high school student who can see various spirits & the like, something he finds very intrusive in his life. After finding a mysterious shop run by Yuko Ichihara, a seeming witch who can grant wishes, Watanuki asks Yuko to grant his wish of removing his ability to see spirits. Yuko accepts, but only if he works for her as her assistant, which in turn results in Watanuki being sent on various jobs involving the supernatural. ×××HOLiC is also strongly connected to another manga CLAMP debuted in 2004, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, mainly by way of the latter's deuteragonist, Syaoran. The ×××HOLiC manga technically ended in 2011, after 19 volumes, but in 2013 CLAMP debuted ×××HOLiC Rei, a sequel that hasn't gotten anything new since Volume 4's release in 2016, though CLAMP seemingly still considers ×××HOLiC Rei as simply being on hiatus, not outright halted; both manga series have been fully released in English, initially by Del Rey Manga, & later by Kodansha Comics.
In 2006 a 24-episode TV anime adaptation of ×××HOLiC by Production I.G. debuted on TBS in Japan, and in 2008 it was released in English by FUNimation across six dual-audio DVD singles. Following that was a complete collection DVD boxset in 2009, as well as re-releases in both 2010 (via the Viridian Collection label) & 2011 (via the S.A.V.E. label)... and then that was it for the ×××HOLiC anime in English, aside from the 2005 ×××HOLiC movie that came first, A Midsummer Night's Dream, being released alongside the Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle movie as a double feature in 2008 (which itself got re-released in 2010 on Blu-Ray, & 2015 via S.A.V.E.). Now, to be fair, there is no Blu-Ray release for ×××HOLiC TV in Japan, and considering the time it was made in it's entirely possible that the best it could even get is maybe an upscale, but even a modern-day SD-BD boxset would at least be nice to see, especially since it's not even available via streaming today; it might have still been available via FUNimation, but Crunchyroll certainly doesn't offer it now. However, there's more to this entry of the license rescue list, because there wasn't just a single 24-episode season of ×××HOLiC that was animated. You see, about only a week after FUNimation's first DVD single for ×××HOLiC came out in North America a second season of the anime, ×××HOLiC Kei, debuted in Japan that added another 13 episodes & (from what I can tell) adapted into Volume 11 of the manga. After that the anime would receive a trio of OVAs, 2009's ×××HOLiC Shumuki, 2010's ×××HOLiC Rou, & 2011's ×××HOLiC Rou Adayume, which all reunited both Production I.G. & director Tsutomu Mizushima from the two TV seasons & would give the ×××HOLiC anime a total of 41 episodes, plus a (pilot) movie; the two Rou OVAs even got re-released in 2014 as a Blu-Ray that came with the special edition of Volume 2 of ×××HOLiC Rei.
Therefore, there's plenty of extra value in re-releasing the ×××HOLiC anime, as aside from making the first season available again (possibly with the movie, though that might be stuck as a double-feature with the Tsubasa movie) there's an entire second season & three OVA continuations that have yet to see an official English release.
OK, here's a good example of something I could have never included in the earliest license rescue lists, if only because it was still airing on TV for the first time in America by the time I started the blog! First published in 2000 by Scholastic, fantasy novel The Forests of Silence by Emily Rodda (a pen name for Autralian author Jennifer June Rowe) would become the first entry in a series of children's fantasy novels that would come to be known as Deltora Quest, and up through 2005 Rodda would write 15 books that are split across three series, often named simply Deltora Quest 1, 2, & 3; there are other Deltora Quest-related books, but they're all considered supplemental work. Deltora Quest follows the adventures of Lief, Barda, & Jasmine as they work to keep the land of Deltora safe from the Shadow Lord & his various forces. The series of books would sell over 18 million copies worldwide in total & win numerous awards, with Rodda herself even being deemed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2019 for her "services to literature", including her work on Deltora Quest; this is the highest honor currently available for an Australian, as "Knight" & "Dame" were disestablished in 2015.
With the success of Deltora Quest it was only natural for various companies to approach Emily Rodda with offers to adapt the novels into a different medium, like film, but she turned down each one... until an offer for an anime adaptation came up. Seeing as Rodda & her kids "love Japanese animation" and wants any adaptation of Deltora "to be cool," she jumped on the opportunity, which resulted in OLM's TV anime adaptation of the first eight books (which comprised Deltora Quest 1) that debuted on January 6, 2007. Eventually an English dub would be produced by The Ocean Group & air in early 2010 in Australia & New Zealand, follow by an American broadcast starting that October on The Hub (formerly Discovery Kids, now Discovery Family); again, this blog started later that December. Geneon actually originally announced that it had licensed the Deltora Quest anime in mid-2007 at Anime Expo, but went out of business before doing anything with it (which may explain why it took so long for the dub to get made), but in early 2014 Cinedigm announced that it would release Deltora Quest on DVD, which it did that May as a giant, eight-disc, dub-only boxset. Both Crunchyroll & RetroCrush have also offered the dub via streaming at points, but both of those deals have since expired, now making the anime hard to acquire legally, as Cinedigm's boxset isn't exactly cheap today.
However, the English dub for Deltora Quest only covered the first 52 episodes, which adapt the first eight books, but in Japan the anime was so successful that it actually ran for an additional 13 episodes, for 65 in total, which tell a wholly original storyline exclusive to the anime. Therefore, there is some potential value in giving the Deltora Quest anime a new release, as aside from offering the original Japanese version in general (I have no idea if the English dub was more or less uncut & could be synced, though) there are those last 13 episodes that never came out officially in English.
Going with a two-fer here, if only because these two are pretty much connected by the hip in many ways, and have been for over 40 years, by this point. When Beast King GoLion first debuted on Tokyo 12 Channel (later TV Tokyo) on March 4, 1981 it was simply the next entry in Toei's years-long run of mech anime that dated back to 1976's Combattler V, though this time around Toei Animation itself actually animated the show, and the same was more or less true of the mech anime that replaced GoLion, 1982's Armored Fleet Dairugger XV. While both shows performed well enough for their time, with GoLion having better ratings than Space Emperor God Sigma (the show it had replaced), the main reason most anime fans even know of either show, but especially GoLion, is because of what happened in 1984. Formed in 1980, World Events Productions founder Ted Koplar would come across GoLion (or Future Robot Daltanious, according to myth) at a sci-fi convention & felt that it would do well in English, which eventually resulted in the creation of Voltron: Defender of the Universe, a series that became a cultural icon of a success. After WEP had finished adapting GoLion as "Lion Force" it then licensed Dairugger XV as "Vehicle Force", with WEP later commissioning Toei to not just produce a crossover special between the two but also more "Lion Force" episodes, due to that run's continued popularity. The story of Voltron, WEP, & Toei is a massive one that involves multiple lawsuits, usually relating to WEP continually trying to get a live-action film adaptation made, and from what I understand the end result is that WEP (along with DreamWorks Animation) now seemingly owns both GoLion & Dairugger XV outright, instead of Toei. Therefore, even something like 2019's Soul of Chogokin figure for the Dairugger itself lists WEP (& DreamWorks) as the copyright owner, not Toei, even for the Japanese packaging that doesn't use the Voltron branding at all; just an absolute mess of a legal history to wade through.
Anyway, in early 2006 Media Blasters announced that it was working with WEP to give Voltron a brand new, digitally remastered release... which meant that MB literally had to go back to the original GoLion & Dairugger XV footage, as had both been digitally remastered by Toei for a satellite TV rerun in Japan a few years prior, & re-edit the entire show from scratch to match all of the edits made for Voltron back in the 80s (as both shows were actually rather violent & bloody), and I have no idea how MB remastered the Voltron-only Lion Force episodes that were later made. Once all of "Lion Force" had been released on DVD, though, Media Blasters decided to also release GoLion via three sub-only DVD sets across 2008, giving people the chance to watch the original Japanese version in North American for the first time ever; fittingly, MB made the later covers look more "intense" & "serious", to match the more violent & bloody OG show. Then, once "Vehicle Force" had been fully released, MB decided to also release Dairugger XV via three sub-only DVD sets across 2010, while GoLion would receive a re-release that simply housed its three sets into a paper-thin art box; Dairugger XV's later covers would be even more violent & intense than GoLion's. Unfortunately, while MB was able to release all of Dairugger XV, by the time the last boxset came out on September 28, 2010 their license with WEP for Voltron, GoLion, & Dairugger XV seemingly had expired, so that final boxset was only on the market for an extremely short time, now making it a bit of an (absurdly) expensive holy grail for English anime collectors. What's most interesting, though, is that WEP would later make GoLion available via streaming over on Crunchyroll, which is actually still available as of this piece, but has never done the same for Dairugger XV.
WEP has since continued to keep the original Voltron in print via DVD boxset re-releases, seemingly using the work MB did back in the mid-00s, but aside from that streaming option for GoLion has never re-released the original Japanese shows that comprised Voltron. To this day those DVD sets remain the most recent physical releases for either original Japanese show, as even in Japan they never got better than VHS & LD, if even those. It's especially funny as in the years since Discotek has released Future Robot Daltanious (the show WEP allegedly had originally intended to use for "Lion Force", but were accidentally given GoLion instead & just rolled with it) & Lightspeed Electroid Albegas (the show that replaced Dairugger XV & was almost adapted into "Gladiator Force"), Space Emperor God Sigma, & even the entire Nagahama Robot Romance trilogy (Combattler V, Voltes V, & Daimos) via sub-only SD-BD boxsets, which means that all that remains of Toei's old run of mech anime from the 70s & 80s are the two that WEP now has complete ownership over. Hell, Discotek has even released Space Musketeer Bismark & its own WEP-produced English adaptation, Saber Rider and the Star Sherrifs, though that looks to have reverted back to Studio Pierrot at some point.
Going with a live-action adaptation of a manga for the next pick, simply because it's both an iconic series in either medium, but there's also a little bit of English release history for this that some might not have known of. Running in Futabasha's Weekly Manga Action from 1970 to 1976 across 28 volumes, Lone Wolf & Cub by the late Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima is one of the most iconic manga of all time, and even holds reverence in English manga fandom when it became one of the earliest manga ever released in North America, originally by First Comics back in 1987. It's influenced the likes of Frank Miller, Genndy Tartakovsky, & John Woo, while the entire concept of the series (a man protecting a child as they journey across a dangerous landscape) became an entire narrative trope, fittingly called "Lone Wolf & Cub". Arguably as iconic as the manga is the live-action TV adaptation, which ran from 1973 to 1976 across 79 double-length episodes, with main character Oguri Itto played by the late Kinnosuke Yorozuya. The TV series has had a bit of a history in English, as while it's never been dubbed it it was apparently aired in the United States at some point with English subs as The Fugitive Samurai (though that might be confusing it with the 1984 movie, which also went by that name in English & was simply a compilation of three episodes), while in Canada it apparently aired subbed at some point as The Iron Samurai.
Eventually, though, Lone Wolf & Cub saw a physical home video release by way of Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock label, starting in 2008. Unfortunately, MB only managed to released the first season/26 episodes across six double-disc sub-only singles (with Episode 2, "Gomune Oyuki", not being included, just as has been in Japan), though it was re-released across two "boxsets" (in this case simply single DVD cases containing six DVDs each) in 2009 & 2010. However, this would not mark the end of the OG live-action Lone Wolf & Cub's existence via official English subs, as in 2017 Hidive would actually license rescue the series & offering it via streaming, with a new episode added every week. Hidive's streaming option eventually offered "all" 78 episodes with English subs, including all of Seasons 2 & 3 for the first time ever, and it was part of an effort from the service to offer titles outside of just anime, including some tokusatsu (namely Garo) & jidaigeki (Hidive also offered Samurai Punisher, which was the 15th entry in the iconic Hissatsu series, though apparently only the first season of that). Unfortunately, at some point in the past few years (around 2022 or so, according to the Wayback Machine) Hidive's license for Lone Wolf & Cub expired & the show left the service, with no new physical release coming about from all of this. However, now that the "entire" series has been given an English subtitle translation, you never know... maybe one day a company will decide to give Lone Wolf & Cub another go, and with a new (& "complete") physical release to go alongside it.
Released in Japanese theaters on August 17, 2002, Beyblade the Movie: Fierce Battle is a non-canon film that takes place during the events of Beyblade 2002/V-Force & introduces Daichi, a character who would be reinvented the following year for Beyblade G-Revolution. This movie would then get licensed & dubbed into English by Nelvana, the company that was bringing over the original "Bakuten Shoot" era of Beyblade anime, & it would get released straight-to-DVD in early 2005 by Buena Vista/Disney, though it eventually later did get aired on TV; by this point G-Revolution was airing in North America, so the timing made enough sense. Miramax Films would then re-release Fierce Battle on DVD in 2012 as a budget title for only $7 MSRP (this was after Disney had sold Miramax off, so I guess the license transferred over), followed by Echo Bridge giving it another re-release in 2013 via the "8 Movie Family Fun" pack, as part of a larger distribution deal with Miramax, which even included two Pokémon movies. Understandably, all of these releases for Beyblade: Fierce Battle were dub-only, and from a general perspective that makes sense. While FUNimation's DVD release of G-Revolution that came out just prior to Buena Vista's initial DVD did eventually include the original Japanese version, after fan demand, the solution required FUNi to essentially throw six episodes onto a DVD (3 dubbed, 3 Japanese), and even then the entire release was stopped after only six DVD singles, with only the last two being dual-audio. If FUNimation couldn't make it work, let alone Discotek not even bothering with releasing the original Japanese version of the Bakuten Shoot shows after releasing their dubbed versions on SD-BD in 2019, then why would Fierce Battle ever have its original Japanese version included?
Because, in reality, Buena Vista & Miramax could have easily made their DVDs dual-audio.
Yes, unlike the TV series trilogy, which saw footage alterations that made syncing the dub to the original Japanese version impossible, Nelvana actually wound up dubbing Beyblade: Fierce Battle essentially uncut. Yes, the English release does feature some visual changes, but that's solely to remove the Japanese credits & alter the title splash so that it shows the English logo for the movie, i.e. stuff that doesn't alter the actual footage or runtime of the movie itself. In fact, I even put up a version of the movie over on the Internet Archive that synced Nelvana's dub to letterboxed Japanese footage, with no alterations needing to be made, proving that there was actually nothing preventing Fierce Battle's old DVD from being a true dual-audio release outside of simply a lack interest (something that I totally don't fault Nelvana, Buena Vista, Disney, or Miramax for, either). Now, to be fair, considering how Discotek never bothered to release the original Japanese versions of the TV shows I imagine there was never any interest in re-releasing Beyblade: Fierce Battle (& who knows if they would have even realized that the dub could sync to the Japanese footage so easily, either), but at this point it now is the sole part of the Bakuten Shoot trilogy to not receive a "modern" re-release, and the idea that such a re-release could include both the original Japanese version with English subs, the English dub, & (more than likely) improved video quality sounds good enough to me. Plus, who knows, maybe one could sweeten the deal by also licensing the Metal Fight Beyblade vs. The Sun movie, which never got dubbed, & release both movies together as a sort of "Beyblade Double Feature"...
We end this part with what, according to my records, is actually the first time Discotek Media isn't acting as the "rescuer" but rather is the last company to release a title! Anyway, back in early 1990 Tatsunoko Production & Sotsu debuted Kyatto Ninden/Legendary Cat Party Teyandee on TV Tokyo... where it proceeded to do OK (I guess), before becoming more or less an anime forgotten with time in its home country; it got a video game adaptation on the Famicom, so that counts for something, right? However, when Saban Entertainment decided to license the series for English localization the following year the company would receive poorly-preserved documentation, with the often cited lore being that they didn't even get the episode scripts (in reality they did, but either not translated well, not translated at all, or simply missing portions), so in the end the writing team were allowed to simply write scripts based on what they visually saw happened in each episode. The end result was Samurai Pizza Cats, a purposefully parodic & fourth wall breaking comedy series filled with contemporary jokes & puns, alongside occasionally just poking fun at what was happening on screen; Teyandee was comedic, but SPC was even more so. While it initially aired on YTV in Canada from 1992 & 1993, & technically first debuted in the UK in 1991, it wouldn't be until it got syndicated in the US in 1996 & 1997 that Samurai Pizza Cats truly found itself a cult following that continued to adore it for years to come. In fact, when Capcom decided to release Tatsunoko vs. Capcom outside of Japan in the late 00s, there was a not-insignificant amount of people who wanted to see some sort of SPC representation, and apparently the response from Tatsunoko was mostly one of confusion, since Kyatto Ninden Teyandee wasn't all that popular in Japan.
Despite that cult popularity, though, Samurai Pizza Cats seemingly never saw a home video release back in the day, not even a VHS tape collecting select episodes, and one wouldn't come about until the 2010s. On March 12, 2012 Discotek Media announced that it had licensed Samurai Pizza Cats from Tatsunoko, and not only would they be releasing the beloved English adaptation but they would also be releasing Kyatto Ninden Teyandee with English subs for the first time ever; Madman Entertainment would do the same for Australia, but seemingly only for the dub. Amusingly enough, I believe due to some delays, Discotek would actually wind up releasing Teyandee first on April 30, 2013 before finally releasing Samurai Pizza Cats on July 30; there's also a listing for a 2015 re-release, but I'm not sure if that actually happened. Then, in early 2016, Discotek would re-release Samurai Pizza Cats via SD-BD, with the entire series fitting on a single disc due to it not being remastered or upscaled; Teyandee has never been re-released, & I believe has even been cited as being a poor seller for Discotek. Today all of these releases are listed as "Out of Print" over on Discotek's website, and even the streaming options that places like Crunchyroll & RetroCrush once offered are no longer available, either; to my knowledge, Kyatto Ninden Teyandee was never streamed.
However, it's likely because of Discotek's releases that Samurai Pizza Cats has now been on a bit of a brand resurgence in the past few years. In 2024 two of the Pizza Cats (Guido & Polly) were added to the game Jitsu Squad as support characters, just a few days prior to this piece going live a new middle grade-level American comic version of Samurai Pizza Cats was announced at AnimeNYC by Mad Cave Studios' Nakama Press label, & there's even a brand new video game adaptation of the series (by the team that made Jitsu Squad) in the works that not only features brand new animated cutscenes painstakingly made to imitate the cel-animated look of the original anime, as well as bringing back the original dub cast (or at least as much as they could)... but Tatsunoko even brought back nearly the entire Japanese cast so that it can be released in Japan as an official Kyatto Ninden Teyandee game; even Teyandee's original scriptwriter Satoru Akahori is returning as as script supervisor! Considering all that's going on with Samurai Pizza Cats 10+ years after Discotek finally gave it its first ever home video release, it's kind of astonishing that the anime isn't readily available in any way right now to help psyche people up for the new comic & game... but, who knows, maybe even that's in the works, and we just don't know it yet.
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That brings us to the end of Part 1 of license rescue list designed precisely to make plenty of people, myself included, feel old. Come back in seven for Part 2 as I go over another six anime that last saw (some sort of) release during the early days of this blog, but have since become nigh-inaccessible legally in the United States & Canada... well, OK, two of them is still actively streaming, but they both have good reasons for being included.
×××HOLiC © 2006 CLAMP・Kodansha/Ayakashi Workshop
Deltora Quest © Deltora Quest Partners
Beast King GoLion © WEP, LLC (previously Toei Co., Ltd.)
Armored Fleet Dairugger XV © WEP, LLC (previously Toei Co., Ltd.)
Lone Wolf & Cub © Kazuo Koike・Goseki Kojima・Union Motion Picture Co.
Beyblade the Movie: Fierce Battle © 2002 Project Beyblade the Movie (d-rights, Shogakukan, Takara, Yomiko Advertising, Toho, Broccoli)
Samurai Pizza Cats/Kyatto Ninden Teyandee © Sotsu・Tatsunoko Production
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