Future War 198X (1982)

 
Another collaboration with Kineko Video. Today's release is one that has been in the works for a while now 🫣
How about what this movie is, for starters?

Most of you may already know about its existence, but for the ones who don't, Future War 198X is a 1982 anime movie by Toei Animation that portrays a fictional outbreak of a third World War—primarily between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Due to the movie's themes, a lot of people in Japan had protested against the release of this movie, with Toei's own animators even wanting nothing to do with Future War 198X—not only did this result in Toei Animation outsourcing the movie's animation to other groups, but they also had to hastily re-write the script to make the movie less depressing and more uplifting. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that the movie consequently reflects this VERY much, and not in a good way.

With the negative attention surrounding this movie, I think that ultimately also led to Toei sticking to releasing the movie on VHS/LD only for a very long time, until they decided to broadcast it on TV and put it on streaming in SD during these past few years. Said SD release is an abysmal tape master BTW, it really looks horrible. It did get an HDTV broadcast on one of Toei's own channels as recent as last year, though.

Having said that (and before I go into the history of this fansub project), what do I think of the movie?

I'll be as honest as possible. This isn't a perfect movie, especially with the re-written script. It has its issues... but I still very much enjoyed watching this. The score is well-composed & fits the movie, the scenic backgrounds in here are beautifully drawn, and I'm also really impressed with how it just visually looks in general, especially with the characters—I'd argue that the characters certainly look "Western" in the sense that they don't possess or carry any noticeable "anime"-like physical traits to them. The storyline, even with its flaws, is good enough to keep you engaged for an average movie night, IMO.

I cannot emphasize enough that I strongly recommend watching this yourself and forming your own opinion from there. There are multiple reviews for this movie that have existed for a long time, and are likely to pop up on your end if you search for a general review pertaining to this anime—some of these reviews are completely unfair and just outright incorrect (it's really only the reviews from Animétudes and Zimmerit). I will not discuss these reviews any further in here since I want to dedicate most of this post to this movie's fansub release instead of some shitty movie reviews on the internet.

So, believe it or not, I had actually attempted to sub this myself in 2015, when I was merely a sophomore in high school... and then quickly dropped this afterwards LOL. My memory's a bit rough, but what I think had happened was that someone on the BakaBT forums was attempting to sub it themselves and I tried to pick up from where they last off since there was no progress on it for a while. For reasons I can't remember, I never progressed on it.

Years later, this finally gets subbed... with machine translation tools, and from Greek subs of all things. The movie clearly needed a new translation. So, this is the time-frame of where things actually began:

• July 2022: Movie reels were acquired

• Dec. 2022: The first scan is done by Kineko

• Oct. 2024: The movie is re-scanned, but with better colors—the Kineko folks are generally pretty busy, hence the delay

• Dec. 2024: The movie is sent to Yume for translating

• Jan. 2025: Translation is finished, and TLC (by perevodildo) is also finished within the same month

• Feb. 2025: QC by imatu is finished

• April 2025: Originally started by me in Jan. 2025, I painstakingly did shot-by-shot manual cropping for the movie's 16:9 version. Also did a quick stitch of the movie's VHS audio to the film scan

And, well... April 2025 has been where the movie's been kinda staggering at since then, for various reasons. 
I had compiled a list of visual defects found with the scan while I was working on the subs for this movie, which I had sent over to the folks at Kineko. Due to their busy schedule, the fixes were not implemented until 2026, and I had finally gotten the final encodes for this back in July.

The audio has also fucked me over big time—the SD streaming version of this movie has abysmal audio quality, like someone drowned it underwater. The recent Toei.ch HDTV broadcast of the movie isn't as bad, but it's ruined by terrible mixing and sounds like an FM radio broadcast. Not even the VHS releases are perfect—they cut out about a second of footage (more or less) during the reel changes. To make it as tolerable as much as possible, I stitched the VHS audio of the movie to Kineko's scan and patched in any missing audio with audio from the SD streaming version (it still had some salvageable spots in it). I didn't use the LD audio because the movie fades in & out during the end of Side 1 and the start of Side 2, but in hindsight maybe it would have been better to use the LD audio combined with the VHS, because the VHS was insanely buzzy as hell and it took me a shit ton of time to fix it to the best of my ability. It was not fun at all.

Some final notes...

• The copy of this movie which Kineko had obtained on film came with the movie's first trailer. A listing for the second trailer came up for sale sometime this year, which I purchased. Both trailers have been scanned & subbed. The second trailer was a bit red-faded, so lots of shots within it were switched out with Kineko's scan of the main feature wherever applicable.
• I put up separate 4K & 1080p releases of this movie. Both of these contain full screen & widescreen versions for you to choose from. I recommend widescreen since that was the intended look for this movie.
• The quality of the main feature looks pretty good for the most part, except for one reel change halfway through the movie. Additionally, there is about half a second of missing footage near the end. Unfortunately, we can't patch it in, unless we're lucky enough to get a 2nd copy of the movie that has that shot intact.

I also want to dedicate this last section to thanking the following people:

• The folks at Kineko for giving me the opportunity to sub this movie
• Yume for translation & timing
• Perevodildo for TLC'ing this
• imatu for QC'ing this
• Japanese Hoarder for the VHS audio
• J. Taylor for swapping the messy parts of Trailer 2's scan with footage from the movie
• Krycek7o2 for additional audio fixes

Enjoy! 

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 22

 

After Memole & Oscar get to know each other more, Oscar invites Memole out on a date—and her first one ever at that, too! She has yet to realize though that the date ends in a messy way... don't worry, it's nothing serious.

Usually I'm (somewhat) descriptive with these episode synopses, but for once, this is the one episode where I really can't think of much to write at all. Not because this is a bad episode... far from it, actually! I like what I've seen of the show so far but I don't recall which episode I last saw that I *really* liked. This one had a ton of great expressions in it and lots of silly moments too—I would just suggest you go and see the episode for yourself if you haven't yet. I definitely enjoyed watching this one and I think you will too.

👉👈

 

Patalliro! - Episode 01

 

After the success that was Magical Taruruuto-kun, Perevodildo and I are proud to announce another TV collaboration project (this time under a rather tragic group name...)—Toei Animation's Patalliro! from 1982.

This is not the first time anyone has touched this show, though. Another group by the name of "aarinfantasy" had already been subbing this show in English...

...since 2006.

Yes, you read that correctly. Not only that, but they have two episodes left to finish which they've been stalling on since 2023. I've nothing against this group but even if they did finish the show, it would have been due for a re-release anyways. Not only are their video raws insanely outdated and in poor quality (they are still releasing this show via .avi files in the 2020s...), but I took a quick glance at some of their recent episodes and the subs genuinely looked a bit questionable to me. Also, it's hardsubbed. Why does anybody still think this is okay?

That aside, this show has JP CCs available for the first 20 episodes, so why not re-translate it while we're at it?

I provided a new set of encodes for this project, taken straight from the DVDs & encoded by an anonymous user. These are a huge upgrade in quality compared to whatever aarinfantasy uses. Aside from the new raws, new typesetting has been implemented by Perevo, and these are being QC'ed by a trusted collaborator who got infected with the MLP virus.

Unfortunately, within the past few weeks or so, our beloved Perevo has gotten too much lead poisoning and has seemingly gone insane from it, having regressed back into a brony during the process. Sad! Consequently, this show is being released under the "LonelyPony" label, and the other group members associated with this project got hit with whatever it is Perevo has & have reverted to using MLP aliases for this project. Probably the third-biggest tragedy of 2026 next to Yuji Ohno & Nozomi Aoki passing away, but who am I to say that?

Anyways, please look forward to this project. We'll release the other episodes whenever we can—grab this from the usual spot. 

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 21

 

Grace invites herself to Marielle's house one day to question her about Oscar, but when Marielle least expects it, a page from her diary is ripped out & stolen by Grace without her knowledge. Believing "Memole" to be a boy of sorts that Marielle is in love with, she reveals both the page and the existence of this "boy" to Oscar in an attempt to discourage him from visiting Marielle again. Luckily for Marielle, Oscar scolds Grace for her actions... but he can't quite seem to get his mind off of that mysterious "boy" that Marielle is crushing over...

Inka's blog link:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2026/06/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no-memoru-21/ 

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.