Today marks the beginning of the anticipated new Mazinger show in Japan. About a year ago it first crept onto schedules under the moniker Z Mazinger, implying that it would be an adaptation of the alternate universe manga of the same name. Well, clearly that's not the final name. This name implies that it's a redo closer to the true spirit (meaning the original manga, not the drawn out kid friendly TV show). Well it's not that either.
Skipping ahead a bit, let me spill the beans that I'm one of the translators with Gattai working on the project. I worked on the second half of the script and I still don't know what the fuck it is. Sorry, I do know one thing about it.
It's utterly awesome.
Yasuhiro Imagawa, of G Gundam and Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still fame, is the director of this show, which the staff has insisted is not a remake (I believe you now.) Like his Giant Robo OVA, this series seems to be throwing together all sorts of characters and iterations from the various works of the original author (Go Nagai in this instance), and diving in in medias res with little to no regard for comprehension. He is not a haphazard man though, so this will not remain incomprehensible for long, and even the events here will eventually tie in beautifully. Imagawa is not Anno. Fortunately, what this episode lacks in sense, it makes up in giant robot action, and giant robots being utterly awesome. If you watched GaoGaiGar, Gurren Lagann, Gunbuster, or either of the other Imagawa works (this blog post brought to you by the letter: G), do yourself a favor and download this when we release. Do not worry that you do not understand what is going on; nobody understands what is going on.
Episode 1 Status:
- As of about 21:40 today, the parts of the script I translated and the parts translated by another member of the team have been assembled and we're waiting for the main TL to go over it, and likely call me an idiot a lot.
- 00:25 - Whoops, seems like the encode is taking long enough that it won't be ready until the encoder is asleep and can't hand it off. Script is corrected but not properly GARed up, working on that in #gattai now.
- And, without further ado: [Gattai]_Shin_Mazinger_Shougeki!_Z-Hen_01_[23941873].mkv
My part in this was, well, a goddamn mess. Fortunately, we had a better translator to fix my crap, and a heavy dose of editing to the whole thing. The title of this episode is Finale, so please, don't freak out when it makes no sense.
One Final Update:
Zorak pooched the release so it has no fonts, but because I love you so much, I made an xdelta patch with application batch file to fix that. There's no changes to the script or anything, but it's a much narrower and less Arial font.