xdaniel

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tfw you randomly stumble upon most episodes of the German dub of a kinda obscure (?) tokusatsu series that aired here in the early '90s

...or in a not quite so tl;dr form:

There's a tokusatsu series by Toei from 1990/91 called Tokkei Winspector (or Special Rescue Police Winspector), which is part of a franchise or meta-series called the Metal Heroes Series. It's the only show in that series that aired in Germany and, as far as I can remember, one of very few, if not the only tokusatsu series shown here, that was not reworked/adapted/mangled Power Rangers-style by someone like Saban. It was also shown in some other European countries like France and Italy, although I know nothing about those versions.

So, Winspector aired here in 1992/93 on RTLplus (today's RTL Television), with a second broadcast in 1994/95, followed by... apparently nothing! From all the information I can find, those were the only two broadcasts of the series in Germany. That was it.

I have very vague memories of watching the show during those two broadcasts, with things like how the main characters looked and the main hero's car WinSquad in particular having stayed with me since then. I'm also fairly sure that a friend of mine in the mid-90s had a transforming toy version of the car, as featured in this ancient commercial.

Someone supposedly contacted RTL in 2015 regarding the series, as rumors were circulating that ex. the tapes had been wiped, and was told that RTL still has the full series in their archives, and while they no longer have any rights to it, an interested label could potentially release it on DVD. Nothing ever came of that, as far as I'm aware.

Since I was last reminded of the series years ago β€” which is when I had first read about the above rumors β€” people have come together and gathered as many dubbed episodes as they could, remastered them using Japanese DVD rips for the video, etc., resulting in 45 out of 49 episodes of the German dub now being available on ex. the Internet Archive.

Also, something I just found out about while typing up this post, Toei has apparently put the whole series on YouTube with English subtitles among other languages, but it's only showing me episodes 1 and 2, and 47 hidden, unavailable videos. So it's probably region-locked. Maybe you have better luck wherever you're located?

...well, long and convoluted story short, I guess I'll be revisiting some vague, buried childhood memories over the next week or so?


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in reply to @xdaniel's post:

That's genuinely wild someone would bring over a tokusatsu series so intact in that period to Germany of all places. The other countries you mentioned would've been among my first guesses for places outside of, like, Latin America to do anything like that. I'm curious what it was that the German licensor saw in it that made them think it would be appealing specifically in that market then.

And yeah, I can definitely confirm that the region lock on that YouTube playlist is definitely real because here in Japan, I can access a whopping 0 episodes, ahaha. I would've been shocked if Toei of all companies was being generous domestically, but I still had to check for science, ahaha

I (re-?)watched the first episode of the dub earlier and was honestly surprised just how Japanese they kept it, too! Besides main character Ryouma being renamed to Robin and robot Bikel renamed Brian, there was nothing that seemed bowdlerized, with character names unchanged, place names unchanged or translated when sensible, etc. There were some cut scenes according to the archive.org description, but it seems that, overall, it made it here pretty much intact, yeah!

As for why a tokusatsu show made it here in the first place, at that time... you tell me! ^^" I know that another station here, Tele 5, was airing anime like ex. Queen Millennia here around 1990, so maybe some licensor looked at what else Japan might have to offer in terms of entertainment for kids or teens, and came across tokusatsu in general, and (somehow) Winspector in particular? I really don't know. Alternatively, maybe the German dub is based on ex. the French one, someone from RTL saw it there and thought "hey, that might work here as well", and got in touch with the French broadcaster?

No matter what, yeah, it really is wild.