Shoujo Commando IZUMI Episodes 7-15 + Full Series Batch

WARNING: There’s a 24hz strobing effect in episode 13 at 20:47, skip to 20:51 if you’re sensitive to that.

Here’s a gift for the holiday season: The last 9 episodes of Shoujo Commando IZUMI! As if by coincidence, episode 8 is a really solid Christmas episode, featuring an actor who some fans of Kamen Rider Zero-One will recognize!

Speaking of Kamen Rider alumni in this show, episode 9’s villain is played by Akira Hamada: Mr. Titan from Stronger! That episode in specific is the only one that feels out of place, in that the organization doesn’t show up at all. It’s also a VERY obvious marketing stunt for A-JARI, the band that performed the show’s first ending theme and background music. The previous year, they performed the theme song to another sukeban action show, Sailor Fuku Hangyaku Doumei, and they show up as the villains in one episode.

It’s rare that a tokusatsu-adjacent show of this vintage has a very solid thematic core, but IZUMI really pulls it off. It’s a total blast, and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did working on it.

As is tradition for when we finish a project, I had the team members give their own thoughts on the show. Starting with Shourikan, the translator:

“I gotta say, Tokugami always asks me to translate the most obscure shows (well, obscure for me, at least xD), but they never fail to amaze me. He asked me to write a few words, so here they are. Beware of spoilers!
I wasn’t so sure about Izumi at first, but the story was intriguing enough that I gave it a try, and ohh boy, was I hooked! It’s a weird show, in terms of pacing: the story begins at full speed, with Izumi’s escape from the facility and the assassin sent after her (great cameo by Super-1, by the way), before taking its foot off the pedal to allow us to enjoy Izumi’s school life with everyone and some fun adventures with her P.I. business. That A-JARI episode was great, even if the songs were kinda tricky to translate. Then we have an unexpected extension after episode 13, in which they had to find a way to drag the story out for a little longer… You’d think they would mess it up and make really bad episodes, right? Well, wrong! The final couple episodes don’t feel unplanned, at least to me, and they wrap the story up very nicely. It’s also a joy to see the kids enjoying their school life a little bit more!
The best part of this show tho, IMO, are its characters. From Izumi’s struggle to find her place in the world, all the way to the absolutely brilliant Takeo Chii as detective Fujiwara, going through the Burger-In/SSG crew and the big bad Ishizu, every character in this show is just a treat to watch.
I think if everyone who watches this has as much as a third of the good time I had translating it, it’ll have been time well-spent. This show is a gem, and more people should know about it, so spread it around! It’s fully subbed, come on!”

And SpaceQueenEmily, the co-editor:

“I was very grateful to be offered a position to help release this show. I was unaware of it before we started work on it, and it was a really pleasant surprise! Engaging, fun, and even genuinely heartfelt. Thanks to everyone who reacted positively towards the project, and for patiently waiting until the project was all wrapped up nicely with a little bow. I assure you, you can blame the wait on me entirely, and I hope I’ve done the show justice. This was my first time assisting on any sort of fansub, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to be able to have been a part of it. Maybe we’ll meet again on some other show some day! But until next time, you’re the target! Bang!”

As always, you can download the episodes at the Releases Page, so gather some friends (preferably on a video call) and watch them together!

The Kagestar Episodes 1-12

Hey, the word 突然 isn’t in the site’s header for nothing.

Yes, we’re back! Back with a friend too! This show has always been on the fansubbing shortlist for both bluephlash and I, so when Gust uploaded rips of the DVDs late last year, we started this collab release! This was one of the collaborations he was referring to when he made the post announcing his retirement from fansubbing.

This show is probably the black sheep of Toei’s 1976 tokusatsu offerings. That year had the back half of Goranger, Ninja Captor, Kyodyne, and Bibyun. With the exception of Captor, the “Sentai that’s not a Sentai”, all of those are Ishinomori shows.

These 12 episodes don’t provide much of a story arc. There’s no main villain, the villains of the week are a parade of goths and furries, and it’s very much like a Silver Age comic book in the design work and plotting. The show starts with an interesting aspect: The superheroes are separate entities from the main characters. Mostly. It seems only one or two of the writers on the show were aware of this fact. Kyodyne did a similar thing in its first cour, before changing into standard henshin hero fare. The next batch sees a major shift in focus, with the introduction of Doctor Satan!

Just a few localization notes before we go:

• Kageo and Suzuko’s names are puns. “Kageo” contains 影, the kanji for “Shadow”, and “Suzuko” contains 鈴, the kanji for “Bell”.
• Given Suzuko’s name and the fact that she has a bracelet full of bells, her superhero identity would be written “Bellstar”. Both bluephlash and I agree that this name is stupid and dumb and awful, so we’ve opted for “Bellestar”, which incorporates the French word “belle”.
• Their airship is called the “Kagebōshī”, which is a play on the Japanese word for “Shadow Puppet”. We’ve opted to use “Silhouette” as the name.
• The heroes’ motorcycles are called the “Kagerocar” and “Bellecar”, despite being, you know, motorcycles. This is apparently a result of the late 70’s Supercar Boom causing “car” pronounced in English to become a trendy word in Japan.

We’ll be doing the show in 3 batches: 1-12, 13-23 and the movie, and 24-34.

Here’s the team:
Translator – bluephlash
Timer – Nemet
Typesetter/Editor – Tokugami
Raws – GuSTaVauM

Read the other release post at Metallic Fansubs, and download the episodes at the Releases Page!

Shoujo Commando IZUMI Episodes 4-6

WordPress won’t let me put in a ‘winking with tongue out’ emoji here like I did on Twitter.

Back to IZUMI! We’ve got a 2-parter and the first of the standalones. Some have complained that episodes 6-9 are a bit off-tone, more resembling a normal drama than the bombastic action stuff of the first five. They’re all tonally consistent, but the regular villains are also barely there. Episode 6 also adds a narration to get people up to speed on Izumi’s backstory, which gets fully clarified in episodes 4 and 5. For now though, take these episodes; they’re all tons of fun!

Sincere thanks again to Shourikan, who I commissioned to translate, and SpaceQueenEmily, who helped with dialogue editing!

Download the episodes at the Releases Page!

Shoujo Commando IZUMI Episodes 1-3

*Brushes cobwebs off the site* Has it really been almost a year since I last posted? But come on, I’m too legit to quit!

We’ve got a real treat this time. 1987’s Shoujo Commando IZUMI. During pre-production, it was going to be a fourth installment to Toei’s popular Sukeban Deka series. Potentially due to slacking ratings on Sukeban Deka III, they made a decision to start fresh with an original concept not based on pre-existing material. IZUMI leans heavily into homage territory for a lot of its imagery. It references everything popular in the 80’s, from Commando itself, to Female Convict 701 Scorpion and Stray Cat Rock, to Miami Vice and Riki-Oh, to Bionic Woman and The Terminator. There’s truly nothing like it. The “sukeban action drama” sub-genre was sort of diversifying during this time period. The previous year had Sailor Suit Rebel Alliance, and after IZUMI, Toei would produce Hana no Asuka-gumi. Fun fact about the former, actually. The theme song to that series is used as background music for an action scene in episode 1 of this show! It was performed by 1980’s Japanese rock group A-JARI, who produced all of the background and lyrical music for IZUMI. We’ll discuss them more thoroughly in a future release, as they’ll get a bit more important.

A common theme among sukeban action dramas is the tendency for the producers to push their lead actress as a pop idol, and this one is no different. Izumi herself is played by Izumi Igarashi, who was previously in Toei’s Be-Bop High School films. She sings a few songs for the soundtrack too. She kept a decent acting career going until getting married in 2001 and retiring from the industry.

The other young main cast members don’t have very much to speak of (some of them don’t even have JP Wikipedia pages). That is, aside from Takeyuki Yue, who plays Ken. He’s still acting in dramas today, most recently in Keiji to Kenji this past January.

The adult actors are some real heavy hitters though. Ishizu, the villain, is played by Hiroyuki Watanabe, a major actor who some of you may recognize as Kouga’s dad in GARO and Kamen Rider Gaoh in the Kamen Rider Den-O movie. Detective Fujiwara is played by the late great Takeo Chii, who is significant here, as he’s Orion from Strada 5! This was after he hit it huge with a major role in Taiyo ni Hoero starting at episode 526, after which point he would be typecast in the “ruggedly handsome middle-aged man with a big heart” role. (By the way, go watch a few clips of Chii’s Stroll from the mid-2000’s, where he encourages people to go on walks, it’s absolutely delightful.) Despite being in incredible shape through his 60’s, he still sadly passed away of heart failure in 2012.

Also, keep an eye out for a tokusatsu-centric cameo in episode 2. The sniper is played by Shunsuke Takasugi, Kamen Rider Super-1 himself!

Special thanks to Shourikan, who I’m commissioning to translate the show; GuSTaVauM, for providing raws; and SpaceQueenEmily, who helped me with a few notes on character voice!

Download the episodes at the Releases page!

Tokusatsu GaGaGa Episode 7 (END)

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Oh hey, it’s over.

Seriously though, thank you all so much for the surge in support of this show ever since we announced working on it back in January. And thanks for perservering as we dealt with the consequences of our hubris in thinking we could get this show out the week after it airs. It’s never too late to finish what you start, though. This show has been a total blast to work on, and I really hope you’ll stick around for whatever projects we’ve got coming up next, especially if GaGaGa is how you discovered us!

Big thanks to the Rider-Time team for retroactively allowing us to use their existing script, as well as bluemoon and Panini, without whose insanely generous help, these past 7 episodes could not have been done.

What’s next? Probably gonna get back to Kyodyne after, like, 7 months without it. Additionally, we’ll work on a V2 batch for GaGaGa, to fix all the (some might say debilitating) issues we find. The show has Blu-Rays coming, so if someone rips those, we’ll use those too.

Tokusatsu GaGaGa Episode 6

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Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!

Between finals, medical issues, and a whole host of other things that got in the way, we’re back with more GaGaGa. And this episode is a total doozy. Episode 5 has one of the most heart-warming endings ever, and Episode 6 has the most heart-wrenching.

And hey, it’s not a Big Nova show if there isn’t at least a month-long gap between releases. We’ll be back with 7 shortly, but this debacle has taught us all a valuable lesson about hubris.

TOKUSATSU GAGAGA Episode 5

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I think we’ll just ditch the strict release schedule and say “The episodes will be out before the next one airs”.

But yes, more GaGaGa! This episode adapts one chapter from volume 8 of the comic, but then it jumps back to adapt the fast food chapter from way back in volume 1, leading to one of the most heartwarming episode endings yet. Judging by the episode preview, that’s going to be standard; adapting even further ahead, but also heading back to volume 2. There’s only 2 episodes left, and we’re all excited to see what happens.

TOKUSATSU GAGAGA Episode 4

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Sorry about the delay again, was too busy over the weekend to work in a timely manner. Anyway, episode 4!

I haven’t read far enough into the comic to know exactly which chapters this episode adapts, but I know they’re mostly in volume 3. It’s a good episode, though! Some notes before we go:

• The Bee Boys call their fans Honeys, y’know, because they’re bees.
• The TV show the Bee Boys go on is a parody of an actual comedy show, called You wa nanashini Nihon e, where the hosts ask random foreigners why they came to Japan. The parody version says “OMYA”, which is the Nagoya dialect’s version of the word for “you”.
• A definition pops up on screen for “イベ”, which is an abbreviation for “event”. For a lack of this same abbreviation in English, we’re using the word “gig”.
• The logo that appears when Nakamura makes her big speech and turns to the side is a reference to the classic Miyazaki movie Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. In the spirit of this, we’re calling it Nakamuraä of the Yearning to Go Home.

TOKUSATSU GAGAGA Episode 3

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Time for episode 3, actually on-time this week!

This episode breaks form and adapts the last two chapters of volume 2 and the last 3 chapters of volume 3, with a little bit of volume 4. The skips were kind of necessary, given that if it was adapting 5-chapter chunks of the comic, Kitashiro would be introduced when the show’s over halfway through.

Just some notes before we go:

• Jushowan’s extra hero is named “セロトル” (Serotoru), which we’ll romanize as “Celotol”. If you drop the extra L, it’s an anagram of “Ocelot”. Given that the Jushowan members have names based on cats, this makes sense.
• The three words on the arrows that strike Yoshida are “年” (toshi), “年齢” (nenrei), and “齢” (yowai). All three of them mean “age”, and we’re told that there’s no real difference in nuance to speak of, so we just used three synonyms for age.
• There’s a deeper pun to the Bee Boys’ name than what we put down in service of making it translation-note free. They’re an 8-member group, and as the show says it, “Eight” and “Bee” have the same pronunciation (hachi). Thankfully, “8” also looks like “B”, so there was a way around it.

Special thanks to bluemoon for helping translate and accommodating our busy schedules!

TOKUSATSU GAGAGA Episode 2

Sadly, the words “Super ass” do not appear in the episode.

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Sorry about the delays, but if you’ve been following Big Nova for any amount of time, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.

This episode more or less adapts chapters 5 through 9 of the comic, with the bulk of adaptation being chapters 5, 6, and 9, but it also adapts a section from way ahead in chapter 17. It appears the next episode is going to cover the back half of volume 2, going into volume 3.

And just a few TL notes before we go:

• Kano’s mother speaks with a Kansai accent, possibly even an Osaka one, of which I’m told is similar in scope to a Boston accent. We localized it with more contractions and “ya” instead of “you” (not as bad as Changerion episode 34, though, so don’t worry)
• Some details about the fake series Yoshida mentions, “南十字軍サザンクラウザー” (Minami Jūjigun Sazan Kurauzā):
  • “Minami Jūji” is the Southern Cross constellation, also known as “Crux” or “Crucis”, and “Jūjigun” is the Crusaders.
  • Instead of making an obtuse pun like “Cruxaders”, we’re going with “Crucis Force”.
  • Technically it should be romanized as “Southern Krauzer”, but since it’s the “Southern Cross”, we’re going with “Southern Crosser”.
  • There, was all that explanation worth it for something that appears for 2 seconds?
• Charahiko’s little “upholstery” thing is real-time word association on his part, going from “naisho” (secret) to “naisō” (“upholstery” or “interiors”) and “naikaku sōri daijin”. We tried to localize it with some further word association, but if it falls flat, you know why.

And clarifying for a TL blunder from last time: “Damian” is how the kana onscreen are commonly romanized, but none of us noticed that it’s a joke about The Omen, with a kid whose name is “Damien”. We’ll fix it for the V2 of episode 1 and any future episodes.