A Piece of History

Hey, guys! I wanted to give you all an update as well as a little exclusive behind-the-scenes story regarding this month's premium scan (which only $15+ Patrons can access!)

This month's premium scan is something extremely special, historic even. It is the original, 1969 opening animation for one of Japan's most well-known anime, Sazae-san. This series has been running since 1969 on TV and is still ongoing today, making it the longest still-running animated TV series in history.

A few years back, they started remastering the original episodes of Sazae-san into HD, something very rare for series this old and this long, but it was a nice treat nonetheless.

However, something was different about it, and something was missing.

As it turns out, while the episode content itself was just as it was shown on TV all those years ago, the Opening was actually not. They did not restore the original opening that the show aired with, and instead used a different one that would start airing later on in the show's run. Why they did this, we don't know. Perhaps they couldn't locate any surviving film materials, or maybe they were in such bad shape they couldn't restore them properly.

There was actually one instance of this original opening still in existence, and that was on a 50th anniversary TV broadcast back in 1999. Someone did capture it, but the quality is so low that it is barely watchable at all.

This is where we come in.

54 years later, we found a print with the original opening intact. We initially teased it on Patreon a long time ago before we revealed it to the public, so you guys were the first to know about it! It was sold as an auction as a test print of the third episode of the series, likely shown to sponsors and producers before it aired. The print was scanned by us in 4K, but was incredibly red faded, so we did our best to bring the colors back to how they were originally supposed to look. 

When we first uploaded a sample on Twitter, Japanese fans were taken aback. Not just for the high quality transfer, not just because of how rare the visuals are, but also for the audio. In all releases of Sazae-san, the last part of the song was pitched up for whatever reason, but this print contains the audio at the regular pitch at the end. For many years this was just a rumor in Japan that it was originally broadcast with normal pitch instead of the raised pitch, but with this print we have confirmed that the rumor was true in the end.

And ta-dah! We preserved this rare, historic opening, and now $15 Patrons can have the raw scan file! It is the red faded one, so maybe you can try out and practice some of your own color magic on it?

This has been sent to all $15+ Patrons, but will only be available this month, so if you want it, be sure to upgrade!