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.

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 70s Part 2

For the second half of this list of still unlicensed anime of the initial two decades of "modern" TV anime's existence we're fully in the 70s now, so let's see how that decade played out, in terms of what was being made in Japan. By this point black-&-white production was 100% finished (Dororo had ended in September 1969), while by April of 1970 Mushi Pro's anime adaptation of Ashita no Joe would debut... and that's kind of the general idea with the 70s in anime. While there were definitely titles that came, went, & have mostly been forgotten with time (or simply beloved by small circles) this decade would be filled with so many genre-defining, epoch creating, or simply masterpiece titles on TV. Lupin the 3rd Parts I & II, Devilman, Gatchaman, The Gutsy Frog, Mazinger Z, Casshan, Karate Baka Ichidai/Karate Master, Aim for the Ace!, Cutie Honey, Heidi - A Girl of the Alps, Space Battleship Yamato, Yatterman, Tadao Nagahama's Robot Romance Trilogy (Combattler V, Voltes V, & Daimos), Nobody's Boy Remi, Future Boy Conan, Galaxy Express 999, Dezaki's Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables, Mobile Suit Gundam, The Rose of Versailles... all of these have either been licensed for official physical English releases (in North America) at one point/form or another, or at least were given official streams, even if only for a little bit. It really does make one wonder if there are any other true blue "classics" of 70s anime left to even license, or if it's just the hypothetical stragglers remaining.

The answer is that there are still some iconic titles that have yet to be licensed, as well as some lesser known but still notable works... and we begin the second half of this list with easily the most confounding gap of them all.

Seriously, how is it even possible for this anime to be in a list like this, especially considering how many other vintage mech anime of the era have since seen official English release? Anyway, in 1972 Go Nagai revolutionized how giant robots were seen with Mazinger Z, as it was the first one to feature a proper pilot that operated the mech directly via a cockpit that was a part of the robot itself. Created as a media mix project the TV anime version by Toei Animation aired on Fuji TV, and by early 1974 was still running... but Fuji TV wanted more. Therefore, Toei's Ken Ariga proposed a mech anime where the giant robot was formed by the combination of three units, each with its own pilot, and the order they combined in resulted in multiple forms. While initially confused by the concept Go Nagai agreed to move ahead, but since he was so busy with other titles he decided to hand this new mech series over to his friend & assistant Ken Ishikawa... and the rest is history. On April 4, 1974 the first episode of Getter Robo debuted on Fuji TV, which saw three pilots (Ryoma Nagare, Hayato Jin, & Musashi Tomoe) work together to protect humanity from the Dinosaur Empire using their respective Getter Machines, which can combine together to form Getter Robo, which had three different forms depending on how they combined.

The Getter Robo anime was a massive success, solidifying the concept of the combiner mecha, & after 51 episodes would be followed up by a sequel series, Getter Robo G, that ran for an additional 39 episodes from 1975 to 1976. Ironically, Getter Robo G actually saw release in English as part of Force Five in the 80s, as Starvengers, so it's actually ineligible for this list. Meanwhile, Ken Ishikawa took the concept he helped create with Getter Robo & made a manga version of the story, one that eventually would become a massive franchise of works that created an epic magnum opus for the man and showcased the maddening, frightening, & essentially Lovecraftian power that were the Getter Rays that powered Getter Robo & its successive mecha. It would be Ishikawa's manga take on Getter Robo that would heavily influence the direction most Getter Robo anime would take from then on out... and most of those later Getter Robo anime would see official English release, with the only exception being Toei's Getter Robo Go anime from 1991/1992, which itself was a loose adaptation of Ishikawa's Shonen Captain manga (that did see English release via Viz as Venger Robo, though it was unfinished here). Today, Getter Robo is seen as one of the most important & iconic works to come from Go Nagai & his team at Dynamic Pro, right up there with Mazinger, Cutie Honey, & Devilman, and the continual release (& re-release) of the later Getter Robo anime productions (Armageddon, Shin vs. Neo, New Getter, & most recently Getter Arc) in English proves that there's just enough of a fanbase for the franchise... which makes the fact that the very first Getter Robo anime has still never seen an official English release (yet the sequel did, go figure) absolutely mind-boggling, especially since we have received fully subbed releases for both Mazinger Z & Great Mazinger.

Maybe there's some sort of weird hold up, or something, but hopefully one day the very first combiner mech anime will finally get its proper due over here.

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!

St. Luminous Mission High School: Sister Christian, Toki ga Kita...

It can be fun & neat to explore the origins of various anime adaptations, because it's not always coming from something you'd normally expect, like a manga, a light novel, or even an iconic & classic tale dating back hundreds (if not thousands) of years prior. Sometimes an anime's origin can be traced back to something more unique & curious, and the subject of this review is a perfect example of that as its origin traces back to a format that, prior to the advent & popularization of TV, was once the most popular format for entertainment: Radio. While radio broadcasting is obviously still around to this day there's no doubt that its biggest heyday was during the first half of the 20th Century (the US's "Golden Age of Radio" is generally seen as from the 1920s to the early 1950s), though in Japan radio managed to hold on just a little bit longer, due to television taking just a little longer to fully reach the entire country; even by 1967, four years after Tetsuwan Atom's debut, only about 1/5 of Japan had TV access. Still, even in later years there were interesting & unique attempts at making radio more appealing to audiences in Japan, like radio dramas & talk shows that appealed to specific niches. Hell, aside from local radio, niche appealing is what most radio stations rely on now. In fact, the origin of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" that came about in late 1996 was due, in part, to the concept of "aniraji/anime radio", which were late-night radio broadcasts aimed at otaku by featuring things like interviews with voice actors & the like. Therefore, it's not shocking that eventually an entire late-night TV anime series could be created that first originated from radio.

In April of 1997 Nippon Cultural Broadcasting debuted a new late-night radio show titled Saint Luminous Jogakuin/St. Luminous Mission High School, a two-person broadcast starring Kaihei Kijima & Sister Akane, who were voiced by Tetsuya Iwanaga & Mifuyu Hiiragi [now Tomoko Ishimura], though the voice actors' real names weren't actually revealed until the final episode (though that didn't stop magazines like Newtype from spoiling the surprise early). The concept of the show was that Kaihei had just inherited an all-girls school from his recently deceased grandfather, one that's been suffering a decline in enrollment to a newly established rival school. Kaihei & Akane decide to solicit the listeners for ideas & advice that would help keep the school afloat & raise enrollment, but instead of simply calling in listeners would submit their responses via pager/beeper; it was the late 90s, so pagers were still more than popular enough in Japan. This radio show would run until March 1998, but a few months later, in July, St. Luminous Mission High School returned to Nippon Cultural Broadcasting's airwaves, now in the form of a 12-episode radio drama that was broadcast as a part of the radio show Manabi Mizuno's Harapekopai, with there being a segment on the show after each episode where Mizuno spoke with the voice cast of the radio drama. The entire radio drama would be released on CD on October 9, 1998, along with a new bonus episode, but just a few days earlier on "October 5 at 25:15" TV Tokyo debuted the first episode of a TV anime version of St. Luminous Mission High School, which replaced Serial Experiments Lain. Unfortunately, I can't tell if the anime was simply an adaptation of the radio drama, or if it was its own unique interpretation, though it was produced with help from Genco (this being one of its earliest productions, in fact) & Pioneer LDC. In that regard, it's interesting that Pioneer Entertainment (or its later incarnation, Geneon) never licensed this anime for English release.

The St. Luminous Mission High School anime was only the fourth TV anime made by the now defunct Triangle Staff, following Hareluya II BØY, Shinkai Densetsu Meremanoid, & Serial Experiments Lain, and today remains one of only two TV anime from the studio that has never seen official English release, alongside Meremanoid. However, there were still yet even more St. Luminous Mission High School productions made, as there would also be both light novel & manga adaptations of the anime, while on May 25, 2000, 17 months after the anime's 13th & final episode aired on December 28, 1998, a romance simulator for the PS1 came out by Xing simply known as St. Luminous. However, aside from being about a young man who inherits a school from his grandfather it features a completely different cast from any prior interpretation, & features none of the mystery aspect of the anime's story. It's pretty amusing that the only two Triangle Staff TV anime that have never been licensed for official English release are the two that both had notably different video game tie-ins released by Xing that came out long after each anime had ended. They were also both conceived of, in some way, by legendary writer Kenji Terada (Final Fantasy I to III, Kimagure Orange Road TV), though Terada had no direct involvement with the St. Luminous anime, unlike with Meremanoid. Without a doubt, a lot of attention was given to St. Luminous Mission High School for the better part of four years in Japan, from its debut as a simple radio show in 1997 all the way to the PS1 game in 2000, so it's kind of remarkable at just how forgotten & obscure the entire thing has become in the decades since, though the anime is at least streaming in Japan... which makes the late-night 1998 anime interpretation the perfect kind of title for me to cover here!

Therefore, my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial continues with a review of St. Luminous Mission High School!

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 00s Part 2

As mentioned last time, the 2000s were a more than tumultuous time for the industry. Japan was only seeing the sheer number of new TV anime being produced on a seasonal (let alone yearly) basis on grow larger over the course of the decade, all while the international market was seeing a major downturn due to the collapse of major outlets that supported the medium, bringing with it the end of the "anime bubble" & the gradual closure of numerous companies, most notably ADV Films, Geneon Entertainment, Manga Entertainment, & (in 2012) Bandai Entertainment. If it wasn't for the rise of Crunchyroll & the advent of legal simulcasting in the late 00s it's honestly hard to tell how the anime industry outside of Japan would look like going into the 2010s. I'm sure simulcasting would have still come about, but likely nowhere near the way it did under Crunchyroll's lead.

And, really, while the first half of the 00s certainly had their notable titles that have yet to be licensed for official English release, it's the second half of the decade where the biggest names truly reside. The first half of the decade was, for the most part, the titles that were simply skipped over by the companies during the apex of the 00s anime bubble. The second half, though, is where we start to get the titles that were skipped over more because the industry was simply going into free fall, and while Crunchyroll certainly wanted to simulcast "everything" ASAP they obviously couldn't do so right away. Therefore, here are six TV anime from the second half of the 00s that remain unlicensed, and in this case most of them are still wanted strongly to this day... but first something that's definitely less talked about & still fits in during the anime bubble days.

Despite being the most widely known manga magazine in the world, one that's still so (relatively) popular in Japan that it only recently hit a physical circulation below 1,000,000 for the first time since 1970 (while all of its competition went sub-million years ago), the actual first 10+ years of Weekly Shonen Jump (i.e. from its debut in 1968 to at least the early 80s) are almost a mystery to most fans, likely even in Japan itself. A big reason for that is due to the fact that only a handful of Jump manga during the late 60s & all of 70s actually received anime adaptations, with only four being made during that time (Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho, The Gusty Frog, Koya no Shonen Isamu, & Samurai Giants), as well as two media mix titles that weren't really adaptations (Judo Boy/Kurenai Sanshiro & Mazinger Z). It wasn't until the near-instant smash success of Dr. Slump Arale-chan on Fuji TV in 1981 that Jump truly embraced anime adaptations (& never looked back), so because of that most of the magazine's earliest hits have either remained manga-only or only saw live-action adaptations, usually via movies (but some TV series, too). In fact, only two Jump manga that date back to the 70s have since seen first time TV anime adaptations post-serialization, as Cobra & Kinnikuman both got anime while they were still running. One is Ring ni Kakero 1 from 2004 to 2011 (which, as mentioned in Part 1, got "Honorable Mention" status for this list due to it being included in a prior list of similar subject matter), while the other is the first entry in the second half of this list, Play Ball.