Onyanko Club in Getsuyou Drama Land - The Mysterious Murasame Castle (1986)

Sometime in 2023 I stumbled upon an article that popped up on my Twitter feed, talking about a new piece of "lost media" that had been uncovered—the media in question was an episode of a weekly Monday night anthology drama series titled "Getsuyou Drama Land". This show, having typically featured standalone episodes, usually consisted of light-hearted comedies that were either original works or adaptations of already-existing works. Said works were usually manga, such as Miyuki or Princess Anmitsu, or in the case of this particular episode...

...video games, such as The Mysterious Murasame Castle.

Having aired only once in December of 1986, this was an "adaptation" of Nintendo's Famicom game of the same name, starring Sanae Jonouchi & Masaki Kyomoto. I put quotation marks around "adaptation" because despite the name and everything else, this apparently was hardly a true adaptation at all. As described by Niko (one of the QC'ers on this project): this is mostly a jidaigeki parody of "Moonlight Mask" with "visuals taken from the NES game." (I have not seen Moonlight Mask nor have I played Murasame Castle, so I can't say I agree or disagree with this)

It has a place called Murasame Castle, Takamaru, and a bunch of things that are very explicitly "that thing/location from the game"—but it doesn't feature Takamaru taking down the four castles prior to Murasame, and it doesn't feature the alien lifeform

People are quick to shit on early video game adaptations in movies/television (made by Westerners) for being inaccurate to the source material, but if this episode really is the first "adaptation" of a game out there... well, then I guess the Japanese take the cake for being the first ones to do it inaccurately!

Having said that, and going back to what I was originally talking about earlier...

I read the article out of curiosity and saw that a YT video (it being the episode) was embedded into the article. Now, I found this to be a little unusual because upon watching the video, I saw that the video quality was way too high for it to be considered lost media. It seemed like it came from a professional DVD release rather than someone's own VHS recording of the original broadcast like I was expecting. And sure enough...

That's exactly what it turned out to be. Two box sets were released by Pony Canyon in the early 2000s containing episodes of Getsuyou Drama Land that members of Onyanko Club starred in, and the Murasame Castle episode was included in one of them. Despite being out of print, all these box sets—from what I last checked years ago, at least—had more than 10 copies available for sale online, priced at around 4000 yen, and yet *somehow* people were still dumb enough to label this as lost media. Go figure.

For the record, I have no way of confirming if this is actually true or not, but according to an Onyanko Club fan online, this episode actually isn't the "full" version. There was another Onyanko Club member who starred in this episode but due to issues regarding her "image rights", this had to be edited down so that she wouldn't show up in it. The "original" version, if you want to call it that, has not re-surfaced or shown up in any other official release. Whether that version will ever pop up officially in some capacity or another is beyond me.

As for the "production" side of this fansub project—the person who ripped the Murasame Castle episode years ago seemingly had no intention of putting up ISOs for the box set, so I decided to get them myself and got an encode of the episode while I was at it. After this was translated, I had someone else TLC this for me and that was supposed to be the end of it... until another translator I frequently work with took a quick glance at the project and commented that it still needed additional TLC'ing. My mind is fuzzy at this point—I think I had wanted said translator to help TLC it for me, but he was busy at the time so I just put it on hold for a while until I finally chucked this at two more additional translators for TLC'ing. This project came close to being on Asuka-gumi-levels of "jfc I want to be done with this project already" due to the time I spent working on it and due to how many people needed to TLC this, but I think this TV special's saving grace was that it's actually tolerable and enjoyable (to some extent) to watch, unlike that 80s Asuka-gumi OVA I did years ago.

If I have more time in the future then maybe I'll sub the other Onyanko Club Getsuyou Drama Land episodes... maybe. Don't count on it.

This release can be found at the usual spot.

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 20

 

Memole is making plans to visit Marielle again to fulfill a promise she had made previously not too long ago—Marielle is set to receive another letter from her father, this one supposedly being "different than usual" this time, and she wants Memole by her side for the occasion. However, trouble brews as the Queen of the Lone Cedar is being more aggressive than usual and begins attacking Memole & Bobo while they try to make their to Marielle's house. At the same time, George is requested by Penelope to make an effort to hunt down & shoot the Queen...

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 19

After finding out that Marielle likely has a crush on Oscar, she attempts to set up a date between the two—however, her plan backfires when Grace finds out about this and warns Marielle to back off & stay away from Oscar after accusing Marielle of trying to steal him from her. Memole, distraught over seeing how devastated Marielle becomes after the event, takes it upon herself to fix the situation by organizing a secret phone call for Oscar with the help of her friends.

Grab this release from the usual spot.

Inka's write-up:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2026/04/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no-memoru-19/ 

Batsu & Terry (1987)

Another collaboration between perevodildo and I, released under our "LonelyDildo" tag.

This project has some complicated history behind it. Not "complicated" to the point that it's essay-length or anything, but rather in the sense that what went down behind the scenes would probably have you thinking "lmao did all of that seriously happen?".

I won't sugar-coat it—I'm not completely innocent in this, as some of it does involve some pretty stupid stuff I did which I should have never done in the first place. Regardless, the short (and considerably condensed) version is this:

Another group (you can probably already guess which one if you dig deep enough) had been working on this since at least '24—Perevodildo and I had been informed sometime in the summer of '25 that that group was supposedly making new progress on the movie, but some time had passed by without any of us seeing anything further come out from it. Considering the history of the group at hand, we both had reasonably assumed that it was going to be stalled yet again, so we made the decision to just go forward with our own release instead.

Ultimately, that other release ended up getting posted first before Perevodildo and I could finish ours. However, despite it already having been uploaded, we still are deciding to move forward with our version for two reasons. Number 1 being that we already put in enough work & effort into this release of ours that we don't want to trash it now, and number 2 being that the other group's release has a couple of flaws in it that gives us the opportunity to put out a better release.

• Better encode quality—the other release uses a capture that was recorded with Domesday equipment. Despite that, the encode looks really yellow-tinted. Additionally, due to how badly this anime was mastered for LaserDisc, there are a lot of details everywhere that look really jagged—the encode used by the aforementioned other group does not fix this. The encode used for our version, also recorded with Domesday equipment, fixes those jagged details whenever applicable, has better colors, and overall looks less noisy. An encode comparison between the two releases can be found here:
  https://slow.pics/c/k9SPHCza
• Better audio quality—the other release uses lossy AAC audio; ours utilizes FLAC audio and also has had some touch-ups by Krycek7o2, who assisted with removing the hum from the audio & making sure both channels had an equal amount of volume.
• Bonus goodies—the LD release of this anime contained a trailer for it. For whatever reason, the other group omitted it, so we decided to go ahead and sub it ourselves. Trailers for Dirty Pair: Project Eden and Royal Space Force were also included in the LD, but the latter was excluded from this release as they're already in HD and likely subbed in English anyways. The former, on the other hand, was subbed & included since neither perevodildo nor I could find any evidence of it having been subbed in English anywhere.
  
  Additionally, we also included a FLAC copy of the OST, ripped from CD—this had already been uploaded publicly long ago, but just in MP3 only. Up until now, the FLAC version had only been locked behind private community sites, so I purchased & obtained a new rip of the OST. I also included my own scans of the OST's LP version.

The site where these releases usually go already contains the credits of those who contributed to this project, but considering the grand scale of it, I've decided to go and post them here too. A big thank you to the following folks:

Raw Capturing — FatGooGooBabies
Encoding — Anonymous
Audio Touch-Ups — Krycek7o2
QC — Paul Geromini & imatu
Trailer Typesetting & Movie Title Logo Typesetting — Windii
OST Ripping — squidlin
LP OST Scan Fixing — Kaleia78

Note: this is not the final version of this release. There are more additional goodies I wanted to include in here, but they realistically won't be ready for quite a while since the people working on them are quite busy with other stuff. I'll post a v2 of this with said goodies once they're ready.

You can find this release at the usual spot.

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 18

Oscar does some digging around for information surrounding the "shooting star" (AKA the ship that Memole & her people arrived to Earth on) and ultimately discovers a small island where he suspects the star crashed onto—that small island being the very same one where Planet Riruru's habitants currently reside on. Fearing that the villagers will get discovered regardless of whether or not Oscar tracks it down, Memole and her friends devise a plan to lure Oscar away from the island as much as possible.

Grab this release from the usual spot.

Inka's write-up:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2026/03/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no-memole-18/