The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 70s (& Some 60s, Too) Part 1

Well... that two-part list of various TV anime from the 00s that have yet to be licensed for official English release seemed to do pretty good. Therefore, allow me to run this concept into the ground for the next three months by covering the decades prior to the 00s! I had decided to start with the 00s, instead of going purely in chronological order, simply because the 00s was an interesting decade where a lot of its output was essentially stuck between a rock & a hard place. The amount of TV anime being produced each year in that decade only increased compared to the year prior, but the industry outside of Japan still wasn't quite in a place where simulcasting was feasible on even a fraction of the scale it's at today, and with the anime bubble bursting in the middle of that decade many titles wound up getting lost in the shuffle, licensing-wise.

In comparison, the earliest days of TV anime in the 60s & 70s were much more simple & straightforward.

A fine selection of anime from the 60s & 70s,
some that have been licensed, & others still not.

While there was a handful of anime produced for TV prior to the debut of Tetsuwan Atom on Fuji TV on January 1, 1963, it was this adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's iconic manga that really established the standards that are still followed to this day. It's success would lead to other studios making their own "TV manga" productions in a similar manner, which included the "limited animation" style that allowed weekly production to even be feasible; Toei attempted to make Ken the Wolf Boy without limited animation, but eventually had to switch over. Atom was so instantly successful that NBC & the late Fred Ladd debuted it in the US as Astro Boy on September 7, 1963, and while the term "anime" wouldn't really be a thing in English lexicon until at least the mid-to-late 80s (& even then only in extremely small circles) this was the embryonic start of the medium's slow but gradual increase in popularity that is now undeniable today. During the 60s & 70s a fair amount of TV anime would get licensed & dubbed into English for TV broadcast, often (but not always) under new names, resulting in the likes of Kimba the White Lion, Princess Knight, Speed Racer, Gigantor, Tobor the 8th Man, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, Tekkaman the Space Knight, Force Five (comprised of five different Toei mech anime), Tranzor Z, & Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years (though that last one also involved an 80s anime), among others. Some went on to become massive hits for their time (only to later be mostly forgotten), while others failed, but some went on to only bolster the growth of anime in English-speaking regions.

As time went on, & the English anime industry would start to truly come to form starting in the late 80s & early 90s, the anime of the 60s & 70s would sometimes still be given a chance in English, usually in the form of re-releases of those old dubs for nostalgic purposes (though sometimes given proper attention in their original form, like ADV dubbing all of the original Gatchaman in the 00s), but sometimes they were licensed for the first time, and on rare occasion even got TV time as the new millennium started up, like with the original Mobile Suit Gundam & Lupin the 3rd Part II; those attempts at TV airings in English tended to fail, but attempts were made nonetheless. After the anime bubble burst, & things started to even return to some sense of "normalcy" for the companies that either survived or were formed from the ashes, there started to be a little more focus put towards "filling in the blanks" when it came to iconic classics of those earliest decades finally being given official English releases. This is what resulted in titles like The Rose of Versailles, Dororo 1969, Devilman, Casshan, Cutie Honey, Nobody's Boy Remi, Osamu Dezaki's Treasure Island, a whole bunch more of Lupin & various mech anime, & even most recently stuff like Future Boy Conan, the original Humanoid Monster Bem, Aim for the Ace!, & Sasuke being given their first official English physical releases, while the likes of Ashita no Joe, The Gutsy Frog, & Ninpu Kamui Gaiden at least have been given official English streaming options at one point or another. Anime fandom has finally gotten enough older members to make releases of old (& maybe a little crusty) anime from the 70s, plus the rare pick from the 60s, somewhat viable today.

While prior lists with somewhat similar themes as this list that I made didn't feature any 60s or 70s anime in them, I did restrict myself to titles that had reasonable lengths to them, i.e. nothing more than a year's worth of episodes. Therefore, the Honorable Mentions for this list would be some of the most iconic classics that I felt were just too long to even consider as theoretically viable for licensing: Ken the Wolf Boy, Star of the Giants, Tiger Mask, Attack No. 1, Time Bokan, Dokaben, Sally the Witch, & Himitsu no Akko-chan. So let's just get right into things because... ♪The rest is yet to come, and babe, won't that be fine?♪ Hey, the song actually fits here, because Sinatra's cover came out in 1964!