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 lifeformPeople 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.
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