In 2058...

So here's another undistinguished 90s OVA rescued from deserved obscurity: Sonic Soldier Borgman 2: New Century 2058. This three-episode show is a sort of pendant to the 80s Borgman series and its sequels. It features a new set of Sentai Rangers... oops, Borgmen, fighting a new enemy. The only carryover from the prior series is Chuck Sweager, who has graduated from Borgman fighter to civilian team leader.

This release uses the QTS BluRay rip of the Borgman series and OVAs. Episodes 1 and 2 were originally translated by DOMO. They have been extensively checked and corrected. As usual, laalg did the translation checking, and the translation of episode 3 and the songs; archdeco did the timing; I edited and typeset; CP and Saji QC'd. (A special word of thanks to Macros74, who encoded a workraw for the third episode and did the rough timing.) As an extra fillip, Juggen provided styled karaokes for the opening and ending songs, which accordingly look rather better than the typical Orphan release. BTW, the opening song "Soldier in 2058" is an earworm. You've been warned.

Even though this is a BluRay rip, the video quality is not stellar. For example, pans are jerky. (This seems to be a problem in the QTS rip; DOMO's original SD release was fine). The animation is crude. Therefore, Orphan is only releasing a 720p version. Anyone who wants to mux the subs into the QTS 1080p rips is welcome to do so. If you want to use DOMO's SD raws for ep1 and 2 instead, you'll have to deal with the impact of the anamorphic raw on the typesetting.

Sonic Soldier Borgman 2 shows all the hallmarks of classic 80s anime cheese. The plot makes little or no sense. The "Borg, get on" transformation sequences are used over and over again to pad the anime. (And why do the villains always stand around passively while the heroes waste 30 to 45 seconds transforming and preening?) The background music is essentially an endless recycling of the OP and ED themes. There's even a moody insert song. Fortunately, the scripts were short.

The translation is straightforward. The term "youma," used for the villains, literally means "ghost" or "apparation." DOMO translated it as "demon." That's been retained, because, well, the villains look like demons, and leaving the term untranslated would just be too weeaboo. On the other hand, the Borgmen's power suits are left untranslated as Baltectors, because the term is completely made up.

Enjoy this release. Borg, get on!

Editorial Minimalism

Over the past week, I've helped two groups that are resubbing simulcast shows to tidy up the scripts. The changes I made were pretty minor: removing surplus ellipses, joining sentences that were unnecessarily separated, removing or adding commas, dealing with the occasional infelicity. There wasn't much to do, because the simulcast scripts were fluent and, according to an experienced translator, quite accurate. I also edited the songs. Again, the changes were minor.

With so few changes from the simulcast, it's a legitimate question to ask, "Why bother?" Personally, I prefer resubbed versions of simulcasts to the originals, even if the changes are relatively minor. I like having lyrics to the songs. I like having proper typesetting and having more signs typeset. I like the timing to be clean. I like the occasional translation or editing mistakes to be corrected. I like a good encode from a better source than a webcast. In all, it adds up to a better viewing experience.

You could dub my philosophy in these situations as "editorial minimalism." When the underlying script is good, I try not to change wording or phrasing gratuitously. My translation colleague on Yawara! produced brilliant scripts which hardly needed editing at all. I saw no reason to "correct" his language; and if I did without good cause, he made his displeasure abundantly clear. Editing is not about ego or imposing one's style on a script. It's about flow, correctness, and continuity. Meddling with a good script is disrespectful to the translator and (in the case of a resub) the original editor. Just as I don't want a QC to "back-seat edit" my scripts, I don't feel I should second-guess a competent translation-editing team.

This may not sit well with everyone. Some may prefer edits that produce a distinctive tone or edge, add honorifics, or localize more (or less, for that matter). I do not. Unless a resub has errors in translation or in editing, I'll abide by the belief that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." In this fall anime season, where essentially everything is simulcast, that's the only appropriate course of action. Besides, it leaves more time to work on the back catalog.

Doukyuusei Climax

Okay, this time we're really, really done with the Doukyuusei series.

Doukyuusei (Classmates) Climax is a sequel to the first Doukyuusei OVA set,  Doukyuusei: Natsu no Owari ni (in English, Classmates: The End of Summer). It has nothing to do with Doukyuusei 2/Sotsugyusei, although the heroine of the second series, Narusawa Yui, makes a cameo appearance in Climax. Like all the Doukyuusei's, Climax is a soft-core h-anime, with sex scenes that require no censoring due to careful camera angles and convenient sheets and blankets. It continues the story of Mooroka Wataru and his harem of girls (Miho, Misa, Kurumi, and Satomi) from The End of Summer. It also provides a side story about the sidekick character, Sakagami Kuzuya. As with Sotsugyusei, Climax makes very little sense if you haven't watched the prequel. Fortunately, The End of Summer was distributed on R1 DVD and is widely available.

Why did we bother with Climax? Primarily because several of the team members are fanatics about completing series. Raws were available, and so was a translation, so why not? As with Doukyuusei 2, the translation is by anonymous, retiming by archdeco, editing and typesetting by me, and QC by CP and Saji. Climax is set at a school festival, so there's a ton of signs. I tried to typeset as many as I could. However, there's a limit to how much frame-by-frame work I'm willing to do, so {\an8}Sign: style signs abound. The raws are from the Internet and are fairly terrible, with lots of interlacing and frame blending. There's even video corruption in episode 1 (around 14:33) to make the mess complete.

As I've written before, if anyone has better raws for the Doukyuusei series, the team would be willing to retime and re-release. Orphan does not have a resident encoder; accordingly, finished raws are preferable to DVD ISOs.

This is the end, for now, of Orphan's foray into h-anime. I'd still like to do the legendary 26th episode of Maze, if I can find a raw (I lost the one I had in a disk crash), but that's definitely on the ecchi side of the line.

Blazing Transfer Student (Honoo no Tenkousei)

So here's Blazing Transfer Student, another oldie with a checkered history. A set of external subs by PJS, credited to "Howard Kawaii," has been floating around for a while, but they were incomplete and in need of work. Al_Sleeper, "Mr. Never Satisfied" on BakaBT, brought this show to my attention and provided raws and the original subtitles. The Orphan team agreed to pick it up. As usual, laalg translation checked, archdeco retimed it, I edited, styled and typeset, and CP and Saji found (most of) my errors or omission and commission.

Blazing Transfer Student is a parody of 70s fight anime, particularly Ashita no Joe (Tomorrow's Joe). Based on a manga by Shimamoto Kazuhiko, it features, as Wikipedia notes, "intentionally jerky animation, dirty-looking cels, thick black lines, and retro character designs, much like Shimamoto's drawing style." There's lots of sly, self-referential comedy, including the "color commentator" for the fights being named Shimamoto, after the author of the manga, and the "deathblow punches" having names that take longer to pronounce than to deliver (a serious problem, by the way). The fight announcer, Mikami, sounds just like the announcer in Yawara!, but I can't find any overlap in the casts.

The plot is as simple as possible. Takizawa Noboru has transferred to Jyakuniku Private High School, where any disagreement can be settled with (near mortal) combat. His initial encounter with "god on duty" Jounouchi Kouichi almost ends in disaster before he is rescued by the timely intervention of the lovely and flat-chested Yukari-chan. Instantly smitten, Noboru attempts to defend Yukari-chan from the nefarious attentions of the school delinquent, Ibuki Saburou. Mayhem ensues as Noboru tries to wrest Yurari-chan from Ibuki's grasp. Many manly poses are struck and deathblows attempted before the completely predictable denouement. It goes by in two breezy episodes, leaving nary a trace behind.

The raws that we used are from a LaserDisc source, by an unknown group. They have fairly terrible frame-blending problems, particularly in the action sequences, but they're the best available.

Midori no Neko (The Green Cat)

This is another "commission" from Al_Sleeper in the BakaBT community. All he had to say was, "It's by Tezuka Osamu," and I was sold. Midori no Neko is part of an anthology series called "The Lion Book Series." It consists of six standalone episodes:

1	The Green Cat	1983
2	Rain Boy	1983
3	Lunn Flies into the Wind	1985
4	Yamataro Comes Back	1986
5	Adachi-ga Hara	1991
6	Akuemon	1993

1-5 have been translated; 6 has not, although it's available on R2J DVD. Midori predates Dallos and might have been the first OVA ever, but there's no evidence that it was actually offered for sale when it was first created.

The original subtitles for Midori no Neko were by Viki, a Russian group that works on old shows. The subtitles weren't bad, but some lines were missing. In addition, the script needed retiming and general polishing. So the usual Orphan crew worked on it: laalg checked the translation, archdeco redid the timing, I edited and styled, and CP and Saji performed QC. The raw is from onidragon.

Midori no Neko is science fiction. It tells the story of mysterious green cats "from outer space" that prey on vulnerable children and make them into accomplices for... world conquest? local gain? fun? It's hard to say what the cats are after, other than creating chaos. But the show is still fun, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. Just don't ask too many questions.

Enjoy another Tezuka Osamu show!

P.S. I'm looking for good raws for Hidimari no Ki, one of the last Osamu TV series. Please contact me if have them or know where to find them.

Doukyuusei 2, or, One Thing Leads to Another

Orphan has just released a soft-core h-anime OVA series, Doukyuusei (Classmates) 2. This is not as far afield as it might seem: one of Orphan's very first projects was Kage (Shadow), a beautiful and very violent h-anime that was abandoned midway. However, Doukyuusei 2 is not technically an orphan project; no English fansub group ever started on it. So how come?

The best answer I can offer is that one thing leads to another. In this case, Orphan redid the subs for a three-episode OVA called Sotsugyusei, which is a sequel to Doukyuusei 2. The former made very little sense, because the episodes were interwoven with events and characters from the latter. So it seemed like a reasonable idea to translate the prequel and thus have the entire series in English. Raws were available, and notwithstanding the subject matter, the project got underway.

Doukyuusei 2 has an interesting history. Made initially as a set of hentai OVAs, in 1988 it was turned into a series for broadcast TV by the simple expedient of excising the sex scenes. This was easy to do, as there was no more than one scene per episode, typically at the end. According to Anime News Network, Doukyuusei 2 was the first eroge to be turned into a broadcast TV series. If it seems utterly generic today, that's because the eroge genre has been plundered repeatedly for harem and moe series over the last fifteen years.

Doukyuusei 2 features a single male protagonist, Kondou Makoto, and a bevy of females. One, Narusawa Yui, is Kondou's childhood friend and the main female character. There are a host of other girls, as well as several male sidekicks - the perverted photographer Yoshiki, the rich snob Aritomo, the tongue-tied athlete Ayako - who are there solely for comic relief. The story starts out in "girl of the week" mode, with Makoto providing help, consolation, and sexual healing to a different girl in each episode, but it eventually settles down into a semi-coherent plot about Makoto's pursuit of Izumi the archer and Yui's brokenhearted reaction. After the usual manufactured crises, and some flashback padding to stretch the series to twelve episodes, (spoiler alert) true love triumphs.

Technically, Doukyuusei 2 is uncensored because, as is typical of h-anime of that era, all of the "naughty bits" are concealed by blankets or obscured by careful angles. Not a single scene is pixellated or needs to be. Orgasms are shown symbolically, with a scattering of sakura petals, lightning flashes, breaking waves, or rain showers. If Yosuga no Sora is not considered hentai, then this isn't either.

There's one more set of OVAs in this series, Doukyuusei: Climax. We're in the process of finishing it up.

P.S. All the Internet raws for the Doukyuusei series are terrible. If you have better raws, please let me know.

Final Yawara! Bits and Bobs

FroZen-Evil had had a last Yawara! fling by subtitling the 15 minute extra that came with the R2J DVDs. It's a documentary/promotion, combining live action footage of the voice actors in the studio with a couple of commercials, an interview with the mangaka, an episode preview, and the wonderful first OP "Miracle Girl" and ED "Stand by Me."

I've also put up a torrent of the four original soundtrack albums from the TV series:

• Yawara! Original Soundtrack (1990)
• Yawara! Sound Selection (1991)
• Yawara! Songs (1992)
• Yawara! Memories (1992)

I want to thank my fellow fansubber doll_licca for obtaining and ripping these wonderful souvenirs of the show.

And that, I think, is it for Yawara! and me. There's more audio material out there - the soundtrack from the "Wimpy Kids" movie, for example - but I'll let others take up the chase at this point. It's been great fun, but now it's time to move on to other shows. Sayonara, Yawara-chan, and arigatou.