Looking for something to watch today while I work on cleaning up surveys in ESO, I was reminded to follow up on the Lensman fansubs.
You see back in 85 a Japanese studio licensed Lensman form EE Doc Smith's estate, and produced a movie and a TV series. Rather than a direct adaptation of the books though, they took the base characters from the main part of the series and did their own thing with it. (To be fair, it'd be hard to make an exciting scene out of Kimball spending weeks inside the enemy base, learning how to control the minds of insects and small animals, then guiding them to cut the psychic shielding belts of the enemy so he could take over their minds and take control of the base and eliminate the base's master, just to mention one of the major events from the books. Oh, and he guided the animals to some particularly scrumptious food for them afterwards as a reward. Then there was the time he spent weeks acclimating himself to the most addictive drug in existance so he could go undercover as a washed up asteroid miner and appear legitimate as phsyically he was totally addicted to and wasted on those drugs, while still able to tap into the thoughts of the enemy folk having a meeting in that same base at that time.)
Not totally unexpectedly, the estate has not relicensed Lensman since, and while the movie I think made it stateside once, further releases and practically -any- releases of the TV series itself were quashed. It was practically on the verge of being lost media(and in fact it was pretty much considered to be that) until a few folks from /m/ and the Skaro Hunting Society fansub groups managed to, by hook or by crook, source copies of all 25 episodes in various quality and source material. They've been slowly fansubbing it and releasing it via the usual channels for the past few years.
At this point they've got 1-6 off Laserdisc, and 7-22 off Betamax(excepting 8, 15, and 16, which came from VHS copies of copies). Turns out they struck gold however, and for the most recent release, episode 23, they were able to work with a preservation group that somehow had found some 16mm masters and was able to scan them in HD! Only 2 episodes left now, though I don't know how long it'll be before those are out. They have initial translations already done, so it's just cleaning them up, and pairing them with whatever the source is for these final episodes.
If you can get past how they don't relate to the books, and want to see what was essentialy a lost sci-fi show, it's mostly out there to see now.
Don't remember if I mentioned it before, but Galvion is another rarity that was fansubbed in the past few years, though this one was finished at the end of '20. Honestly, the show doesn't quite live up to its hype opening IMO, but the premise is that Earth was attacked by alians decaes ago, and they stripped all flight capability form humans, restricting then to cars and boats. The main characters are former criminals hired by a rich heiress to drive a car/robot transformable mech as part of a organization to do good, and stumble(and keep stumbling) onto plots by an underground organization run by most of the other rich moguls that also make use of transformable car mecha. It was cancelled before it could be properly finished, unfortunately, and unlike SPT Layzner or Gundam X it basically just ends with a bunch of loose ends. Still a decent watch though if you don't mind that.
Mostly mentioning it since Lensman's own rarity reminded me of it.
And apparently Starseeker has teamed up with the folks who did Galvion to do Gear Fighter Dendoh, so there's that too, though that's far more recent and at least had crabsticks already.
