F2 Grand Prix (1984)

 

EDIT 6/25/2025: Due to multiple DMCA notices that I received, torrent link has been removed for the safety of this blog. The actual content itself can still be found on the usual spot—that is, if the torrent page there wasn't deleted by me.

Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

Back with another live-action movie sub! Toho's "F2 Grand Prix" from 1984—"the first and last F2 racing movie", as Wikipedia JP likes to put it. This is a drama set in the world of F2 racing, where three racers—Yutaka Imoto (Ken Tanaka), a regular, Keiji Sasaki (Toru Minegishi), a longtime champion, and Satoru Nakano (Kiichi Nakai), a rookie—all compete for the title of champion in the '83 Japan Grand Prix tournament.  

Interestingly enough, this movie was made before the F2 racing boom hit Japan—this kind of racing wasn't yet popular in Japan and consequently the movie did not do well as a result. I guess even the author of the original book that this movie was based on wasn't confident about turning this into a movie, as he seemingly went "Are you serious?" when he was approached by Toho and asked about making a live-action adaptation of his work.

I originally discovered the movie when I was going through Kentaro Haneda's movie score list many many years ago—I was under the impression this movie was never re-released again past its initial theatrical release as I couldn't find much info online but I did manage to discover that this had a VHS release, and only that. (On a similar note, I wonder if its performance affected its ability to get released on DVD...)
Unfortunately I couldn't do much about the movie because the VHS was rare as hell. I pretty much forgot about it until years later when an encoder that I frequently work with informed me that a recent HD TV broadcast of the movie was posted onto private torrent sites, and with JP captions at that! The rest is self-explanatory.

As far as video/audio quality goes: Toho clearly got this re-scanned, and it definitely beats having a VHS rip. Sadly there's a lot of film damage here (just color fading, mostly), which I couldn't do anything about. I was told that distributors typically release the raw footage on streaming sites before fixing it up for a home media release but I have no clue if Toho will do that anytime soon with this movie.

The audio is also clearly sourced from VHS—which is fine! The VHS release was in stereo and no doubt would have easily beaten the film's optical track, but there's some clicking here & there and some drop-outs throughout the movie. I can't confirm if it was mastered like that, and the audio being lossy doesn't help. The volume was really quiet, so I raised the volume a little bit. I really didn't want to do that since, again, the audio was lossy, but in the end it won't actually matter anyway (and you'll see why at the end of this post).
Also, I don't know if this was on the VHS release or if this was a consequence of not having captured the audio correctly but the audio slows down like crazy after the end credits—kind of like turning off a turntable as it's still playing and immediately lifting up the needle afterwards. It's jarring.

I'll be honest—don't expect Oscar-level quality from this movie. This isn't to say the movie is bad! It isn't, far from it. But the drama in this movie isn't really mind-blowing stuff or anything. Maybe you'll have more interest in it if you're super obsessed with car racing or something.

Some final notes:
I actually intend on releasing a v2 of this movie, but it won't be any time soon. I lucked out and managed to snag a copy of the movie on VHS—the plan is to get the audio recorded in FLAC, digitally clean it up, and paste it over the movie. I'm also intending to include some other minor bonus goodies with the torrent, and I may possibly get it translated in Spanish too but I can't promise anything about that one.

Anyways, enjoy!

 

Tongari Boushi no Memole - Episode 01

 

EDIT 6/25/2025: Due to multiple DMCA notices that I received, torrent link has been removed for the safety of this blog. The actual content itself can still be found on the usual spot—that is, if the torrent page there wasn't deleted by me.

Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

NEW PROJECT RAHHHHHH  🗣🗣🗣

TL;DR—this is another collaboration I'm doing with Inka Subs. We actually happen to have the whole show translated but only the first few have been edited (or are in the process of being edited) so far. The plan is to release these episode-by-episode and compile them into batches later.

The long version:

Memole was one of those anime shows I admittedly didn't know about for a while but I got invested into it the more I began checking it out. The art is by far probably the most beautiful that I've ever seen for an 80s anime show, and it has music by Nozomi Aoki to go along with that... I think I read somewhere that the staff wanted to make this show as if you were reading a storybook of sorts, and they absolutely nailed it with that look & feel.

Naturally, I wanted to see if subs existed online, and unfortunately they didn't. Yume—whose services I've been using for the majority of my projects—told me that this show was a dream project of his and that he had been wanting to work on it for a long time, so after some talking with the folks at Inka, I went and commissioned Yume to get the whole show translated. Overall, the translation took about 5-6 months. The rest is being handled by Inka Subs—typesetting, TLC, etc., but I'm helping out with QC as well.

I think that's about it. I announced the project on Twitter a while back but based off the replies I got, it would seem that a lot of people grew up watching this as kids—albeit, in different languages. I hope these very same people enjoy watching this in its original language with English subs :^)

Please look forward for more episodes!

Inka blog here:
https://www.inka-subs.net/2024/07/lonelychaser-inka-tongari-boushi-no.html

Getter Robo Go - Episode 29

 

EDIT 6/25/2025: Due to multiple DMCA notices that I received, torrent link has been removed for the safety of this blog. The actual content itself can still be found on the usual spot—that is, if the torrent page there wasn't deleted by me.

Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

Sho begins to feel lonely after her cousin, Saeko, gets married—Saeko and her husband decide to spend their honeymoon in Okinawa but things go awry when the Baron Yasha brothers decide to attack there with the purpose of building a Metal Beast factory there. With Saeko and the others being held captive, the Getter crew assemble and head there ASAP to stop the brothers & free the hostages.

Yu-Gi-Oh! - The Movie (1999)

 

EDIT 6/25/2025: Due to multiple DMCA notices that I received, torrent link has been removed for the safety of this blog. The actual content itself can still be found on the usual spot—that is, if the torrent page there wasn't deleted by me.

Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

Another collab with Kineko. This time it's a LD Domesday rip of the 1999 Yu-Gi-Oh! movie by Toei Animation, originally screened at one of their movie festivals or something.

Various rips existed online beforehand but I think they mostly originated from bootlegs, and you can probably already guess what the quality on those were like. The English subs were equally just as bad, so after Kineko transferred their LD copy of it, I stepped in to make new English subs from scratch.

This is now also subbed in Spanish as well, having been translated from the new ENG subs as the main base! English will be the default language here but you can switch to Spanish on the second sub track.

Bonus content includes a trailer, hi-res LD scans, the LD's analog audio track as a separate audio file (de-clicked & de-noised by me), as well as an HD film scan of a rush print containing several minutes of WIP footage of the anime.

Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald (1997)

EDIT 6/25/2025: Due to multiple DMCA notices that I received, torrent link has been removed for the safety of this blog. The actual content itself can still be found on the usual spot—that is, if the torrent page there wasn't deleted by me.

Fansub credits can be found in the link above.

A project that took way longer than it should have...
Nevertheless, I finally present to you Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald, from 1997!

This movie tells the story of the cast & crew of a radio drama's late-night broadcast—the drama itself being an adaptation of a script submitted by a writer for a contest where the winner would have their story turned into a radio drama. After having done a run-through of the drama before it's set to go live, the cast & crew are seemingly ready for the final run.

Until the lead actress of the drama (played by the wonderful Keiko Toda 😍) decides she refuses to participate anymore unless she's given permission to change her name.

With only minutes left before they're scheduled to go live, the producer gives her permission—but then the other cast members decide they want to change their names as well, and even go as far as to have the setting changed and other aspects of their characters as well! Consequently, this begins a comedic chain of events where both the cast & crew improvise the story as the live broadcast goes along, much to the dismay of the original script writer.

I was recommended this movie by a friend back in January 2023—I don't remember how the movie was brought up, but I was looking for new stuff to watch since I had caught COVID at the time and had to isolate in my room.

The movie was FANTASTIC. Literally kept me on edge and there's tons of chuckle-worthy moments as well. The subs? Not so much. The version I watched didn't have very good subs and kind of affected my enjoyment of the movie, somewhat. I later found out that there was a better set of subs out there but even that had its own issues too.

The rest is self-explanatory. This project was started in March that same year, finished with re-translation & re-timing that same month, and...well, the rest is followed by delays & stalling, from my end. I didn't send it out for TLC until May, and I didn't get it QC'ed until July later.

All that was left at that point was for me to give it a final watch so I could make any edits along the way, but it was here when I only began looking at it once in a while and there was a brief period of time where I didn't even check it for months. Ultimately this was finally finished this past week, but if I had put in the effort for it this probably could have been posted in 2023.

That pretty much sums up the history of this project, but I'm not entirely finished with it just yet. Right now I just wanted to focus on getting the movie out ASAP but I intend on releasing a v2 at some point in the future with tons of extras and maybe a Spanish translation of this movie. We'll see.

Enjoy!