The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 80s Part 2

Without a doubt, the 80s was a decade filled with truly iconic TV anime, and a lot of them have seen official English release, whether that be back in the 80s, 90s, & 00s during the original rise & (near-)fall of the English anime industry, or in the more recent "modern" era that is mostly defined by streaming. Titles like Dragon Quest: Abel Yusha Densetsu, Samurai Troopers, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ninja Robots Tobikage, Galactic Patrol Lensman, & Sherlock Hound all had some sort of English TV broadcast during the next three decades, even if some never got fully aired, while titles like Zillion & Super Dimension Century Orguss were some of the earliest TV anime released straight to home video dubbed, without airing on TV first (though, again, weren't necessarily fully released at the time). Meanwhile, titles like Patlabor, Armored Trooper VOTOMS, Maison Ikkoku, Dancouga, & Machine Robo all first saw official English release during either the 90s or 00s, while the likes of the Japanese Transformers trilogy of The Headmasters, Super God Masterforce, & Victory, as well as Mecha-Doc, Gold Lightan, Urashiman, Giant Gorg, Video Warrior Laserion, Psycho Armor Govarian, & Xabungle all eventually saw official English release in North America during either the 2010s or this current decade, even if some might only be via streaming.

As time goes on I imagine TV anime from the 80s will continue to get mined from for official English release every now & then... so what other titles are still waiting for their chance?

At the start of Part 1 of this 80s-themed list I put a number of titles down as "Honorary Mentions", citing their sheer lengths of "between 75 to 128 episodes" as the reason... and yet we begin Part 2 with a TV anime that, in total, is 72 episodes. However, aside from technically being fewer episodes than the titles I listed as being "honorary", there is also another reason for me deciding to include this one that we'll get to. Anyway, after a stint as an assistant to (a pre-Team Astro) Norihiro Nakajima, Motoka Murakami made his debut as a mangaka over in Shonen Jump in 1972, the issue following Team Astro's debut in fact, & that was magazine he stuck with up through 1977. After four short-lived manga, though, Murakami decided to move to a magazine that better matched the kind of manga he wanted to make, which wound up being Shonen Sunday. After finally having a small hit with 1977-1979's F1-focused Akai Pegasus, Murakami truly became a major name in manga with the series Musashi no Ken/Musashi's Sword, which ran from 1981 to 1985 for 25 volumes. The story initially focused on the childhood life of Musashi Natsuki, the son of two talented kendoka who swears to defeat Kunihiko Todo, his father's rival after Kunihiko accidentally killed Musashi's father with a thrust. However, Kunihiko himself retires from kendo in shame after the accident, so Musashi instead decides to surpass Shura, Kunihiko's son. However, halfway through the manga the story time skipped a few years & followed a now 15-year old Musashi as he continues improving his skills.

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 80s Part 1

If the 60s was the decade where TV anime got its start & wet its feet, while the 70s was the decade where TV anime started wading into the vast ocean of production, then I think it'd be fair to say that the 80s was the decade where TV anime truly started to go into the deep end. This was the decade where studios & productions arguably started to truly expand out & experiment, likely due in part to the boom of the OVA market that happened during that same decade. The (eventual) success of Mobile Suit Gundam led to a focus towards telling more serious & dramatic stories in mech anime, even if it wasn't a "real robot" series, like Space Warrior Baldios, God Mars, Space Runaway Ideon, Aura Battler Dunbine, Round Vernian Vifam, Zeta Gundam, & Blue Comet SPT Layzner; there were still plenty of less serious mecha fare, but dramatic storytelling definitely took a priority. It was also the first decade to really feature a focus on reviving/rebooting the classics of those early days, as alongside what was now the standard once-per-decade revival of GeGeGe no Kitaro there was also Ashita no Joe 2 (which adapted the second half of the iconic manga), Tiger Mask II (starring a brand new person taking up the masked identity), God Mazinger (a complete re-imagining of Go Nagai's genre-defining icon), & brand new interpretations of Astro Boy, Tetsujin 28, Osomatsu-kun, & Sally the Witch. The 80s also has its fare share of decade-defining works, like Tsurikichi Sanpei, the Rumiko Takahashi TV trilogy of Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, & (just barely counting for the decade) Ranma 1/2, as well as Creamy Mami, the first Glass Mask anime, Dirty Pair, Blue Blink (the last anime Osamu Tezuka worked on before his passing in early 1989), & Yawara!.

The 80s was also the decade that truly began Shonen Jump's dominance when it came to TV anime adaptations of its various manga, as the massive success of Dr. Slump Arale-chan in 1981 led to the near-guaranteed assurance of other adaptations from that point on, including Space Adventure Cobra, Kinnikuman, Cat's Eye, Fist of the North Star, Saint Seiya, Dragon Ball, Kimagure Orange Road, City Hunter, & too many others to name in just the 80s alone.

This was also the decade where the Japanese anime industry truly started to make an impact abroad, so much so that international companies were not only simply licensing like before but were now making entire co-productions with major anime studios. While Star Blazers (the English adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato) technically debuted in September 1979 it ran primarily during the 80s, and it was followed by things like Voltron (which used both Beast King GoLion & Armored Fleet Dairugger XV), Saber Rider & the Star Sherriffs (i.e. Space Musketeer Bismarck), Macron 1 (which combined GoShogun with Aku Daisakusen Srungle) & Robotech (the fusion of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada). Meanwhile, many animated productions of the 80s that would normally be seen as "Western" were actually either co-produced by a Japanese studio or simply had a Japanese studio provide some (or even much) of the animation itself, as seen with titles like Ulysses 31, Mysterious Cities of Gold, Transformers, G.I. Joe, Rainbow Brite, & Thundercats. The (end of the) 80s was also when we started seeing the very first companies forming with the distinct intention to bring over anime in its original, uncut, & Japanese form with English subtitles, namely U.S. Renditions, AnimEigo, & Right Stuf... though their actual first releases wouldn't come out until (depending on the region) the literal tail end of 1989, if not the start of 1990; the very first official English manga releases happened in the 80s, too. Without a doubt, while the 60s & 70s were an important first step in TV anime finding their way into international homes, it was during the 80s that "anime" first truly started making waves, so much so that the very idea of an anime "fandom" truly started becoming a thing during this decade.

Because of that notoriety & general push a lot of the biggest names when it comes to TV anime of the 80s have already seen an official English release, in one way or another... though there are still tons of gaps left to fill in, and that's where this list comes in. Just as with prior lists of this type in prior months I do have to exclude some titles & simply mention them here as Honorable Mentions, with Metal Armor Dragonar being the sole exclusion due to it being in an older list I made of a similar enough concept, while titles like Fang of the Sun Dougram, Touch, Mister Ajikko, & Captain Tsubasa are being excluded simply due to their massive lengths of anywhere between 75 to 128 episodes. So, once again, let's tune up the band & see what's left of the 80s to potentially mine out for official English release, because... ♪The rest is yet to come, and babe, won't that be fine?♪

Those Who Hunt Elves I & II: You Can't Do That On (Prime Time) Television

The 80s in Japan could probably be described, in some way, as an "Age of Excess" when it came to the anime industry, and specifically when it came to the Original Video Animation/OVA. With the release of Dallos starting in late 1983, & especially with Megazone 23 in 1985, the idea of producing anime straight to home video blew up & created an entire new vector for anime to be produced via... and, best of all, money was easy to come across, so effectively ANYONE with an idea, money, & a path to distribution could create an OVA, for better or worse. The Japanese economy was booming from 1986 to 1991, which allowed the OVA market to expand to ridiculous heights, but nothing lasts forever & in 1992 the "bubble economy" burst. While OVAs still continued to get made throughout the 90s, they were nowhere near as prevalent as they were in the 80s, and for the most part tended to get made in relation to TV series that were already known to be popular & successful. However, entering into the second half of the 90s some people took note of "aniraji/anime radio", which were radio shows aimed at otaku that broadcast in late-night, i.e. after 11:00 pm, and while the idea of late-night anime had existed since the literal start of the concept in 1963, those kinds of shows were specifically aimed at "regular" adults who simply would be interested in watching anime that related to them, i.e. sexuality, dirty humor, mahjong, etc.

But could those very otaku who were listening to aniraji be willing to watch anime in late-night... and, in turn, buy merchandise related to those anime, i.e. manga, telephone cards, figures, home video releases, etc.?

In the end TV Tokyo wound up being the network that was willing to give this concept a try, but it did so via brokered programming, i.e. the time slots would be purchased by the producers of the anime themselves. Quite literally, this would be an "anime infomercial" where the anime itself was the infomercial for the associated merchandise that otaku would purchase, which is what the real point of all this was: To get otaku to buy swag. In order for this idea to really work, though, the first show to be aired via this "late-night anime infomercial" format would ideally be something that could never be allowed to air on more standard time slots anime was generally associated with, i.e. weekend mornings & prime time during weekdays. Luckily, in the pages of MediaWorks' Monthly Comic Dengeki GAO! there was just the manga that would be perfect for this concept: Elf wo Karu Mono-tachi/Those Who Hunt Elves by Yu Yagami. A dropout from Osaka Sangyo University, & former assistant to Yu Kinutani, Yu Yagami debuted Those Who Hunt Elves in early 1994 & would eventually finish it after a nine-year run in 2003, with a total of 21 volumes (plus a "DX" volume), though he would eventually return to it a couple of times with Those Who Hunt Elves Returns (a single-volume revival from late 2007 to early 2008) & Those Who Hunt Elves 2 (a digital serialization via Comic Meteor from 2013-2018 that totaled 10 volumes). There was also 2009-2011's Ageha wo Ou Mono-tachi/Those Who Chase Ageha, but that's totally unrelated & Yagami likely only titled it similarly for funsies.

Why was Those Who Hunt Elves the perfect anime for this new infomercial-esque concept? Because the entire gimmick of the series was that a bunch of people from Earth get teleported to a fantasy world, and the only way to get back home is to find fragments of a magic spell... and the only way to find the fragments is by stripping female elves of their clothes, since the fragments have become tattoo-like marks on their bodies. Yep, there is literally no way in hell that concept would have ever been approved for a morning, afternoon, or prime time TV anime slot in Japan in the mid-90s, and even as late as 2015 the Chinese Ministry of Culture literally included Those Who Hunt Elves as one of 38 different anime & manga that it had banned in China, alongside the likes of Elfen Lied, Blood-C, Corpse Party, Death Note, School Days, & Highschool of the Dead; to be fair, the list also included Inferno Cop. Anyway, the Those Who Hunt Elves anime would debut on "October 3, 1996 at 25:45" & run for 12 episodes, where it wound up being a success, leading to the idea of the "late-night anime infomercial" becoming more widely accepted... and today is the primary way the vast majority of TV anime gets made, but I've already been going over that history this entire year. One year later, on "October 1, 1997 at 25:45", a second season titled Those Who Hunt Elves II/Second (which is likely why Yagami went with the Arabic numeral for his manga sequel) would air on TV Tokyo for an additional 12 episodes, and around 1999 ADV Films would start releasing the first season via both dubbed & subbed VHS tapes, before eventually re-releasing it on dual-audio DVD in late 2001 & early 2002. Those Who Hunt Elves II would then see release in 2003 via dual-audio DVD only, and afterwards both seasons would always get re-released together as a 24-episode series, whether it was by ADV or (later) Sentai Filmworks via DVD boxsets in 2005, 2009, & 2016, or SD-BD boxset in 2019. ADV would also release the original manga in 2003 & 2004, but only put out the first seven volumes, stopping just shy of where the anime adapted up through, which looks to be Volume 8. To be fair, the show has been out been out of print for the better part of the past decade, & currently isn't streaming anywhere in English right now.

Anyway, my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial continues, on the literal day of the anniversary itself, with a review of the one that started it all, Those Who Hunt Elves (I & II)!

An Overview the Early Years of the "Modern Day Late-Night Anime Infomercial": 2001

After a seemingly full embracing of the concept of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" in 1998, things slowed down rather hard 1999, before becoming an almost literal trickle in 2000, which saw only nine TV anime debut in late-night; even a network like WOWOW had decided to instead debut its new programming in prime time. However, of those nine in 2000 six of them all debuted in October of that year, so it did look as though the format was maybe on the upswing, in some form. That would essentially be confirmed in 2001, as that year would see 21 brand new anime debut in late-night, as well as the continued run of Hajime no Ippo on NTV, throughout the year. Still not quite as many at 1998's 26 new shows, but certainly an improvement over 1999's 15, and this time around there's no Wonderful to inflate the numbers even higher! For this year we'd see some really interesting "first-evers", including the first TV anime to (allegedly) air in HD, the first late-night anime to be co-produced by an English anime company, & the first UHF anime to truly "break containment" (so to speak) & become a notable hit, alongside a number of both iconic & cult classics; also, only a mere three anime featured in this piece have yet to see official English release.

In other words, 2001's history of late-night anime can probably be best described as "The Calm Before the Storm" that would be the complete upheaval of how TV anime would primarily be made moving forward... and we begin things off with a title TV Tokyo would spend the entire year airing in late-night!

January 2001 would see only one new anime debut in late-night, but like I just indicated it's a big one that would run throughout the entire calendar year. Debuting over on TV Tokyo on "January 8 at 25:45", & replacing the variety show Sakura-yu featuring singer/actor/political analyst Kiyoshi Nakajo, Grappler Baki (or Baki the Grappler, as it's officially known in English) was an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Keisuke Itagaki that ran in Weekly Shonen Champion from 1991 to 1999 & detailed the journey of Baki Hanma, a powerful & talented fighter who fights & trains to one day surpass his utterly undefeatable & seemingly indestructible father, "The Ogre" Yujiro Hanma. Today, the Baki Series is currently made up of six manga totaling over 150 volumes of manga (& TV anime adaptations running up into the fourth manga), not to mention tons of various spin-offs, & is still running to this day. However, back in 2001 Itagaki was only on the second manga (New Grappler Baki, or just simply Baki), and the only prior anime adaptation was a 45-minute OVA in 1994 produced by Knack & released under Toei's V-Anime label. This time around, the Grappler Baki TV anime was produced solely by Free-Will, a record label run by Hiroshi "Dynamite Tommy" Tomioka that's best known for helping popularize visual kei; the animation itself, though, was done by Group TAC. Where Knack's OVA only adapted portions of the early part of the manga, which saw Baki fight in an underground arena, the TV anime actually adapted all 42 volumes of the original Grappler Baki manga (minus a handful of scenes being skipped over), though it did change things around by adapting the story purely in chronological order, so where the manga started with young adult Baki in the underground arena the anime began with teen Baki & his backstory regarding his mother. Halfway through the anime changed its title slightly, becoming Grappler Baki: Maximum Tournament (to relfect the story arc that the entire second half adapted), before ending on "December 25, 2001", where it was replaced with... the Japanese airing of The Naked Chef, starring Jamie Oliver; again, late-night has no continuity between shows.

FUNimation would license & release the anime as Baki the Grappler from 2005 to 2007, first across 12 dual-audio DVD singles, followed by two "shove the singles in the artbox" boxsets in 2006 & early 2008, & then a complete 48-episode boxset in late 2008. The international release was notable for replacing the two OP themes by Ryoko Aoyagi with the song "Child Prey" by dir en grey, though Aoyagi's two ED themes were kept intact, and even the Japanese credits were changed to reflect dir en grey's song, so this was a change implemented by Free-Will themselves, not FUNimation. I've even been told that Episodes 45 & 46 feature extra scenes in the Japanese DVD release that were not included internationally, likely also done by Free-Will. Regardless, the fact that Free-Will was the sole production company behind the Grappler Baki TV anime means that it very well could never see a re-release, since Free-Will is a music company first & foremost, despite all of the modern Baki anime produced by TMS being direct sequels to it.

Obscusion B-Side: Propeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship: Possibly the Worst Case of Unfortunate Timing in Video Game History

While some people would prefer if their enjoyment of entertainment media wouldn't be affected by the outside world, especially since said media are sometimes a way for one to take their mind off of the real world, it's just something that can't be done at times. A perfect example would be when a game's release is affected by a real world tragedy of some sort, because maybe said game comes a little too close to said tragedy, though obviously it wasn't intentionally so. For example, the North American release of Resident Evil Survivor infamously not only saw a delayed release than it did in Japan & Europe (August 2000 vs. January & March 2000, respectively) but also had support for the GunCon light gun peripheral completely removed, despite it being the intended way to play the game. While never admitted officially, it's easy to guess that Capcom likely made the decision after the Columbine High School massacre that happened on April 20, 1999, and the idea of using a light gun for a game where you had full control of the character was maybe a little distasteful; Columbine was also why Sega never released the first-party Dreamcast light gun in North America. Another example was MotorStorm: Apocalypse, which was originally planned for release for March 16, 2011 in Europe & Australasia, followed by April 12 in North America, but after the "Great East Japan Earthquake", & the following tsunamis, happened on March 11 that year the game's release was delayed everywhere except for Australasia. After all, racing around devastated city environments seemed a tad callous after what happened in the Tohoku region of Japan.

However... at least those games still came out!

Likely the most infamous example of real world tragedy affecting the release of a video game would have to be Propeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship for the Sega Dreamcast. Developed by the legendary Sega AM2, produced by the iconic Yu Suzuki, & directed by Makoto Osaki (who directed Daytona USA 2 & would later direct Virtua Fighter 5), Propeller Arena was often seen at the time as a sort of sister game to Wow Entertainment/Sega AM1's Alien Front Online, as both were games designed primarily around online play with what was then a brand new concept for consoles: Real-Time Voice Chat via the Dreamcast's plug-in microphone, which debuted with Seaman. But where Alien Front Online was a tank combat game that was an expanded port of an arcade game, & only featured online play & voice chat via modem, Propeller Arena was all about aerial dogfighting & included support for the Dreamcast's rarely-used Broadband Adapter, which would make it the first console game to feature real-time voice chat over broadband, over a year before Microsoft launched Xbox Live in November 2002. Propeller Arena was showcased at E3 2001 that May, followed by a short postponement that meant that it would see release about a month after Alien Front Online's August 7 release in North America. Still, the game's development was 100% complete & Propeller Arena was all set for release in North America first on Wednesday, September 19, 2001...

You all know what happened a week prior to release.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were hit by two hijacked airliners, while on that same day a third plane crashed into the Pentagon & a fourth plane was prevented from hitting the Capitol Building by the self-sacrifice of the passengers on board, resulting in the plane crashing in an empty field in Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the idea of a game that's all about dogfighting no longer looked like something that made sense to release just eight days later, especially when one of the stages was a cityscape littered with skyscrapers that planes could crash into (though, being an arcade-style game, the buildings were indestructible). While it would have made sense for Sega to simply delay the release of Propeller Arena, there was another problem: Sega had already announced its plans to discontinue the Dreamcast & switch over to being a third-party company back in January. Only 12 more games would see release on the Dreamcast in North America, post-9/11, before everything came to an end, with the final game (NHL 2K2) coming out on February 12, 2002. In short, there was simply no way for Sega to just delay Propeller Arena, since by the time it wouldn't have felt as insensitive (even if the cityscape stage was removed) the Dreamcast would have been long dead; Europe's final games for the system were later that April, but even that wouldn't have been enough time. Now, sure, Japan would continue to see official Dreamcast releases up through 2007, & Sega's own final Dreamcast game (Puyo Puyo Fever) would be in 2004, but Propeller Arena was a game designed specifically for non-Japanese audiences and online play (which, by 2004, only Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2 still had servers up), so it's entirely possible that the game was simply never even intended for Japanese release, in general; also, there was some licensed music in the game, too.

It's now 2026, 25 years after 9/11 & the cancellation of Propeller Arena, which had long been leaked to the public online (multiple times over, including a build literally dated 9/11/2001) & even just earlier this year had its online functionality made operational for the first time ever by the fan community. While I can't really judge said online play functionality myself, as stuff like FlyCast & DCNet is admittedly beyond me, I can judge the rest of the game as it's been known (more or less) ever since the initial leaks, so let's see if the last-minute cancellation of Propeller Arena resulted in the loss of something special for the Dreamcast, or if it was for the best that it never actually came out.