Category: Starzinger

Appearance! The Demon King of the Universe

King Gyuma, ruler of the Gilara star system, plans to use Princess Aurora’s galaxy energy to dominate the galaxy. Gyuma orders Captain Galia to capture the Cosmos and lure Kugo and his crew to the planet Scorpio by raining meteorites down on them. Hakka, who has fond memories of his homeland from the sights of the planet Scorpio, angrily sets out on his own when the Scorpio starts rampaging. Kugo tries to stop him, but he loses his sight due to Scorpio’s poison!

You can download the torrent file from Anidex or Anirena, or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

This episode was so exhausting! It had so much dialogue! I felt like it had as many words as two episodes joined together. This is the first episode of the King Gyuma – Queen Lassetz arc, which continues until episode 51.

I’m assuming that by now you’re not surprised that the planet where King Gyuma lives is called Planet Gyuma, and the planet where Queen Lassetz lives is Planet Lassetz, and the planet where the Scorpios live is Planet Scorpio. It’s been a trend in the whole series; almost all planets are named by their inhabitants. Funny, isn’t it? Remember, this is a show for kids and you watched it when you were one!

In this episode, Kugo uses one of his favorite slangs: ひで hide. You won’t find that in a Japanese dictionary. It’s his way of saying 酷い hidoi which I know you have heard many times in anime, and it means “cruel” or “terrible”. I always say that Kugo is very hard to translate because he speaks like the most relaxed version of Japanese you could ever imagine. It’s full of slang and words pronounced incorrectly or not necessarily incorrectly but differently. ひどい hidoi vs. ひで hide is a good example of how he pronounces some words.

I remember Stratolily asking me what ひで hide meant once.

An example would be the line he says at 12:33:

泥んこだらけのひで星
doronko darake no hide hoshi
It’s a terrible planet, full of mud.

He’s so rude with Hakka it’s disgusting.

Speaking about being rude, Jogo says at 13:26 an interesting line:

何もお前? ハッカの目の前でそんなに当てつけがましいということはないんだよ
Nani mo omae? HAKKA no me no mae de sonna ni atetsukegamashii to iu koto wa nai nda yo
What’s the matter with you? You don’t have to be so rude to Hakka!

The key word here is 当て付けがましい atetsukegamashii, which means kind of “sounds like you’re insinuating (something)”. The verb, 当て付ける atetsukeru, means “to insinuate”, and the がましい gamashii suffix is kind of “sounds like”. A direct translation would be “There’s no such thing as sounding like you’re insinuating that in front of Hakka’s eyes”, but that makes little to no sense at all in English. So basically, you could translate that to “There’s no such thing as being so impolite in front of Hakka” and eventually I ended up with “You don’t have to be so rude to Hakka”.

Here’s another line that I really don’t know how to translate properly. At 20:14 Jugo says:

早くしろだって誰が巻いた誰だよ全く
Hayakushiro datte dare ga maita dare da yo mattaku

The most direct translation I could think of would be something like “You’re telling me now to hurry, but who the hell rolled this up anyway? Seriously!”.

This is kind of an expression. The point here is that Jogo is out there because Hakka got suddenly mad and wanted to attack the Scorpio, who wasn’t even attacking the Cosmos. Eventually, Kugo asks him to go back to the ship, and Jogo complains that Hakka is the reason they left the Cosmos in the first place. Using an expression that is pretty similar would be “who the hell is sowing these seeds, anyway?” or something like that.

I wanted to be clear about what Jogo was trying to say, so I had to change it almost completely. This is just an example of the compromise we have to make so the translation makes more sense.

Another little compromise that all the translators have made in this series in the past is that the Great Planet is called 大王星 daiou sei, which actually means “Great King Planet”. It’s only 3 characters in Japanese but 17 characters in English, so everybody just abbreviates it to “Great Planet”, even in dubs.

My Children! The Monster’s Love

A giant moth monster, Dokunga, attacked the Cosmos. After laying eggs in the main booster, Dokunga runs out of strength and collapses, but the hatched larvae continue to grow in secret. Dragged by an invisible force, the Cosmos crash-landed on a small planet and was attacked by a male Dokunga. Kugo and his friends are saved by Dodge’s little brother, Hepburn, who had gone missing for ten years while he was on a space expedition. Hepburn, who hates Dokunga, is trying to kill all the larvae by luring them out with ultrasonic waves.

You can download the torrent file in Anidex or Anirena, or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

You’re all going to cry with this one!

The moth monster in this episode is called ドクンガ Dokunga, which is an interesting name because it sounds like 毒蛾 dokuga which means “poisonous moth”.

I know calling Hepburn ヘボン Hebon a moron was a stretch, but I didn’t want to include notes in the episode and distract the viewers from reading more things than they are supposed to.

The joke here is that Kugo always calls Assistant Professor Dodge ドジ doji, which means “clumsy”. In this episode Kugo meets Dodge’s little brother, Hepburn, who in Japanese sounds like へぼ hebo which is another word for “clumsy” as well. He couldn’t believe the coincidence. It’s very funny.

Hepburn is an entomologist, which is a scientist that focuses on the study of insects. The word for entomologist in Japanese is 昆虫学者 konchu gakusha (literally “insect scholar”). You can tell at 19:17 that Kugo calls Hepburn 昆虫学者の先生 konchu gakusha no sensei, which means “entomologist doctor”.

So since the first time I had to translate the word ドジ doji I’ve been using “dork” since it kind of sounds like “Dodge”, and the joke was sort of kept instead of lost in the translation. But since I watched the whole show way before starting to translate it, I knew that this day was going to come when I had to somehow keep the joke with Hepburn. I’ve spent days thinking of a word that sounded similar to Hepburn in English and meant something like stupid or idiot, and I couldn’t find any that really worked.

Anyway whenever your read “dork” in this episode is when Kugo says ドジ doji , and whenever you read “moron” is when Kugo says へぼ hebo. I’m sure you’ll get all the jokes and intended puns from Kugo with those two names.

Rebellion at the Planet Lenfa Base!

Kugo finally gets to the planet Lenfa, Kinkinman’s home planet, but is intercepted by the Horus Attack Force, which renders all the cyborgs’ energy useless. Kinkinman takes advantage of this opportunity to attack the Cosmos and capture Princess Aurora. Kinkinman forces the princess to swear obedience. The princess adamantly refuses, saying that she must not use her galaxy energy for his own desires. Angered, Kinkinman orders Jogo, who has lost his memories and been enslaved, to hit Princess Aurora with a plasma whip!

You can download the torrent file in Anidex or Anirena, or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

This is the final episode of the Kinkinman – Ginginman arc. It consisted of a total of 7 episodes, from Episode 25 to this one.

Jokes are always very hard to translate between different languages, and even between different cultures using the same language. Translating jokes is always very hard for everybody. I’ve noticed by watching the Spanish dub of this show that when things get tough to translate, they just remove the whole scene! There are a lot of scenes missing in the Spanish dub! Don’t worry, I won’t do that.

What follows is an example from this episode. Hakka saves Kugo by digging under the ground to escape the attack from Horus. Starting from 12:30, this is what I believe they’re saying:

Hakka:
クゴたん,もう俺のこと泥なんとかなんて言えねぇな
Kugo-tan, mou ore no koto doro nantoka nante ie nee na
Kugo-tan, you can’t call me a mud-something anymore.

Kugo:
えなんて言えないって
e.. nante ienai tte?
Huh? What is it I can’t say?

Kugo always calls Hakka a mud pig (泥豚 dorobuta) and Hakka doesn’t want to say “pig” at first. Kugo is playing the fool here, obviously. That’s why in the next line, Hakka calls him “slow”:

Hakka:
鈍いんだよ全く.俺のこともう泥豚なんて言えないって言ったんだよ
Nibuinda yo mattaku. Ore no koto mou doro buta nante ienai tte itta nda yo
You’re so slow! I said you can’t call me a mud pig anymore.

Kugo:
あーそうかそうかおまえのこと泥豚って
泥豚って言っちゃそりゃ行けないんだよな.
泥豚なんてとんでもないやこりゃ
Aa sou ka sou ka omae no koto doro buta tte
doro buta tte itcha sorya ikenai nda yo na
Doro buta nante tondemonaiya korya
Ah I see, I see. I’ve called you mud pig (before) [Direct translation: oh I see, you’re a mud pig].
I can’t really say it was even mud pig (what I’ve said to you before).
Mud pigs are terrible things.

That’s not really a direct translation because direct translation doesn’t work even remotely here. The joke is that he calls Hakka “mud pig” three times in the same sentence, but in English you would just say he’s talking about mud pigs and not actually calling Hakka one. So I changed it up a little bit to try to make it funnier than the direct translation would’ve been. I probably failed at it. What can you do? I always struggle to translate Kugo and Hakka when they are like this.

Dodge Jokes

I feel like I need a whole section to explain all the kinds of jokes that happen with Assistant Professor Dodge. You might already know that ドッジ Docchi (Dodge) sounds similar to どじ doji (clumsy), and it’s a recurrent joke throughout the whole series. Even Professor Kitty called himどじ doji in this episode.

But ドッジ Dojji (Dodge) also sounds almost identically to どっち docchi (which one). So when Assistant Professor Dodge gets confused about his own name he says, at 15:24:

どっちがどっちかな
docchi ga docchi ka na
I wonder which is which.

It can also mean “I wonder if it’s Dodge”, or “I wonder which one is Dodge”, or things like that depending if you replace the first どっち docchi, or the second one, or both. In Japanese, it is very funny, but unfortunately it is untranslatable to English.

And this is going to get worse in the next episode, where we will meet Dodge’s brother: ヘボン Hebon, that obviously sounds like へぼ hebo that also means clumsy! I don’t even know how I am going to translate all the jokes that those two names cause in Episode 32.

Is it Professor Kitty or Doctor Kitty?

I guess I also need to explain this. Kitty is a 博士 hakase, which is a word in Japanese that can only be used to address people with a Ph.D. For a Doctor of Medicine there’s a different word: 医者 isha.

The decision to use Professor Kitty instead of Doctor Kitty was made by the original ILA translator, gxseries. I would assume he made the distinction so people wouldn’t think that Kitty is a medical doctor. Since TSHS also used Professor Kitty, I used the same translation as well. Dodge is a 助教授 Jokyouju, an Assistant or Associate Professor. I have to admit that when I first watched this show as a kid I actually thought Kitty was a physician, and Dodge was the actual scientist.

Escape the Hell Planet!

Princess Aurora finally decides to fight. The cunning Ginginman takes the life of the father of the Three Poise Brothers and sends them into the battlefield in his place. The three brothers are convinced that their father’s death was the work of Kugo and his friends. The three brothers come at the Cosmos with a vengeance, and Kugo and the others are forced to fight an uphill battle. The three brothers, however, happen to learn everything from a microcassette left behind by their father and realize that they have been deceived. Kinkinman, realizing the failure of his plan, sends out Kinginder again!

You can download the torrent file in Anidex or Anirena, or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

The title of this episode is: 地獄星を脱出せよ！– Jigoku hoshi o dasshutsuse yo!

地獄 jigoku means hell. But the planet our friends end up is Planet Magnet. They clearly say at 6:34:

敵を油断させてあのマグネト惑星の地獄谷へ突き落としてやるんだ
Teki o yudan sasete ano MAGUNETO wakusei no jigokudani e tsukiotoshite yaru nda
We’re going to catch our enemies off guard and push them down into the Hell Valley of Planet Magnet

マグネト惑星 MAGUNETO wakusei means “Planet Magnet”, or maybe “magnet planet”.

I wonder why they didn’t name this episode “Escape from Planet Magnet!”?

We got a new song for the opening! This will be the opening up to the last episode of Starzinger I, which is episode 64.

The song is called 宇宙の戦士スタージンガー Uchuu no senshi SUTAAJINGAA – Space Warrior Starzinger, and these are the lyrics:

君の汗が星になる
Kimi no ase ga hoshi ni naru
Your sweat becomes stars

君の涙が風になる
Kimi no namida ga kaze ni naru
Your tears become wind

闇と嵐をこえるとき
Yami to arashi o koeru toki
Through the darkness and the storm

遠い光が見えてくる
Toui hikari ga miete kuru
You see light in the distance

急げ 戦う男たち
Isoge tatakau otoko-tachi
Hurry up, fighting men!

夜明けが 君を待っている
Yoake ga kimi o matte iru
The dawn is waiting for you

スタージンガー スタージンガー
SUTAAJINGAA SUTAJINGAA
Starzinger Starzinger

力の限りを敵にぶっつけて
Chikara no kagiri o teki ni buttsukete
Strike the enemy with all your strength

胸に描くは はるか大王星
Mune ni egaku wa haruka daiou sei
The distant Great Planet is drawn on my chest

Great Explosion! Goldstar

Kinkinman was plotting to use Princess Aurora’s galaxy energy to conquer the galaxy. He gave the order to eliminate Kugo and his friends to Solda, the Attack Commander. Solda, who has no home of his own, uses Petrus to attack Kugo and the cyborgs, believing that he will be able to create an ideal planet. In the midst of a fierce battle, Petrus suddenly explodes. Ginginman had rigged the Petrus with self-destruct devices, regardless of Solda being his ally!

You can download the torrent file in Anidex or Anirena, or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

Hakka enjoys speaking about him in the third person. Since he’s the obvious comic relief of the show, it’s always funny when he does it. At 7:06 he says:

このハッカさんはクゴより力があるんだぜ
kono HAKKA-san wa KUGO yori chikara ga aru nda ze

A direct translation would be “This Hakka-san is more powerful than Kugo”. The funny thing is, he always refers to himself as Hakka-sama and this is the first time he says Hakka-san. That was a humbling gesture from his side!

Hakka made me laugh when Kugo and Jugo ran away and he called them cowards (at 14:08 he says 意気地のない奴らだ – ikiji no nai yatsura da – “What a bunch of cowards”), but a second later he was running scared. He’s funny like that.

Rush! The Queen Cosmos

Kinkinman and Ginginman attack the Cosmos by launching their combined robot, Kinginder. Kugo’s arm is injured by Kinginder’s special attack, Storm Plasma, and he is unable to use his Astro Pole. Kugo and the others are backed into a corner, and they let Princess Aurora escape without regard for themselves. There is no time to hesitate to fulfill the mission. Princess Aurora once chose to go to the Great Planet, but she cannot abandon her friends who have traveled with her, and makes a U-turn of the Cosmos toward the battlefield!

You can download the torrent file or get direct links from AnimeTosho

Translation Thoughts

I always struggle with names. Always. In this episode, Solda goes out with an army of bugs that look a little bit like ladybugs if you ask me. The name I hear is エドバー edobaa but it can be anything.

At 6:17 Kinkinman says: 万一の場合を考えエドバー星人を一緒に連れて行け Man’ichi no baai o kangae EDOBAA seiji o issho ni tsurete yuke (“Take the EDOBAA aliens with you just in case”) and this is the first time I hear the name. Solda says the name again at 13:32. What do you think he says?

At 12:53 Solda says まずはお前から血祭りにあげてやるぜ mazu wa omae kara chi matsuri ni agete yaru ze, which can be directly translated to “First of all, I’m gonna give you the bloodbath!”. Don’t you agree that it doesn’t sound like a kid show anymore? I’m not sure. I changed that to “I’m going to make a bloodbath out of you first” because it’s easier to understand. Both are totally valid translations.

Charge! The Kinkinman’s Army

Kugo defeated Drango with a desperate attack. At the same time, the Cosmos was under attack by a monster army unleashed by Kinkinman. The Cosmos escapes to a light-absorbing planet, and manages to survive the monsters, but it loses contact with Kugo. Meanwhile, Kinkinman, having caught a rescue signal from Ginginman, personally commanded the Satellite Fortress Goldstar and launched an attack. Ginginman, who desperately wants to defeat Kugo with his own hands, knows this and plays his last trump card!

You can download the torrent file or get direct links from AnimeTosho

Translation Thoughts

In this episode the writers really abuse the phrase しっかりして shikkari shite, which in my opinion is one of those phrases that you know what it means, but it can’t really be translated. It can mean “wake up”, “snap out of it”, “calm down”, “hang in there”, “hold on”, “get your act together”, it’s crazy. It’s said 11 times in this episode!

Sometimes it bothers me a little that it seems there’s air everywhere, even in space! I mean, you can assume the cyborgs are not human anymore and they don’t need air in space, but Princess Aurora also doesn’t need a helmet or even a suit to come out from the Cosmos to help Jogo. Wouldn’t it be extremely cold? Or extremely hot if they are near a star to go out in a skirt? And when the cyborgs are fighting, sometimes they fall off their ships, as if there were gravity all over the place! Well, it’s a show for kids.

I think these episodes are getting harder and harder to translate. I kind of struggled with this one, and I’m not sure if the translation of some of the lines is actually accurate. I’m not sure if they are trying to separate from the children’s audience or include more of a teenager audience now. People can be killed now, something that didn’t happen in the first episodes, as Princess Aurora always reminded the cyborgs to not kill anybody. The language is becoming more mature as well, making it harder to translate. It’s always easier to translate a children’s show than an adult one.

A Great Battle! The Hateful Enemy

Ginginman has escaped from the black hole with the help of Kinkinman. Princess Aurora, who hates conflict, is unable to forgive Ginginman for wreaking havoc in the universe, and pursues his whereabouts in order to keep him locked up until peace returns. In front of everyone’s eyes, Ginginman cruelly wipes out the people of the planet Colon just to satisfy his own desires. The enraged Kugo stands up to Ginginman and his most powerful monster, Drango!

You can download the torrent file or get direct links from AnimeTosho

Translations Thoughts

The colonials say at 06:55 and at 07:33 見逃して下さい minogashite kudasai and that’s one of those Japanese expressions that I find hard to translate and usually change it completely to something else that better fits the context in english.

見逃して下さい minogashite kudasai means something like “Please overlook this”, “Please don’t take this into account”, “Pretend you didn’t see this”, “Please let it go this time”, or something along those lines. As you can see those are expressions that are intrinsically linked to Japanese culture. In the Western culture in my opinion those kind of phrases don’t really work. So you’ll see that I translated them to “Please, let us go”.

The Resurrected Ginginman

Hakka found a planet where roses bloomed and, enchanted by its beauty, secretly landed there. However, it is a planet ruled by Ginginman. Balaran, the guardian of Ginginman’s treasure, disguises herself as a beautiful woman and approaches Hakka. Hakka becomes infatuated with Balaran and, unaware that he is being tricked, promises to free herself from the sealing chains that keep her prisoner and gets off the Cosmos, forgetting his mission. At the same time, the black hole that swallowed Ginginman emits a suspicious light.

You can download the torrent file or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

The rose monster in this episode is called バララン bararan. Rose in Japanese is 薔薇 bara, so I guess a professional translator would have probably called her something like Roselyn. Since I like the names to be as close to their original Japanese names as possible, I used Balaran. She’s a monster anyway, so calling her Roselyn would have made her appear more human than she really is.

I happened to come across an early episode of this show dubbed in Spanish and I realized they translated パライザー・ビーム paraizaa biimu as “Rayos Paralizantes”, which actually means “Paralyzer Beam” in English. You might recall in a previous post that I had my doubts that they tried to say paralyzed, but I wasn’t completely sure. From this episode on, I decided to use Paralyzer Beam as the translation of the attack because even if the attack doesn’t paralyze anybody, at least the word makes some sense.

Which One of the Aliens is a Liar?

Kugo and the others find Pompo, a boy who needs help, estranged on a small planet. When the cyborgs try to pick him up, Pompo hijacks the Cosmos, taking the princess hostage, and tell her to take him to another planet. Kugo seizes him using his clone skill. Thinking that he is just a runaway boy, he tries to hand him over to his mother, who comes to pick him up, but Pompo tells them that she is a monster and fiercely resists. The group is not convinced that he was lying about his mother, and the Cosmos heads for the planet Dandan, a planet famous for being the planet of love and peace.

You can download the torrent file or get direct links from AnimeTosho.

Translation Thoughts

This is a great episode and, in my opinion, a very funny one. The episode is centered on the game called 輪投げ (wanage), which is ring toss or quiots. The 狸 (tanuki) are Japanese raccoon dogs, and in this episode they toss rings from their tails using their magical attack called 輪投げカッター (wanage kattaa), or “Ring Toss Cutter” (that’s the best made-up translation I could come up with, sorry about that).

The belief that these raccoon dogs are shape-shifters and can take the form of a human and are living among us is part of Japanese culture. Many anime shows are based on this, most recently 有頂天家族 (Uchouten Kazoku) “The Eccentric Family”, which is a very good show.

The Japanese love their onomatopoeias, and it seems they have an onomatopoeia for everything. In this episode, Kugo says ぱくぱく (pakupaku), which is the sound when you eat with your mouth open, and むらむら (muramura), which means either being disgusted or angry about something, or having a stomachache. Kugo is fed up with Hakka eating all the time and the sound he makes while eating, and tells him that’s distracting him from the game. The joke is that Hakka offers him medicine for his stomach, because he thought Kugo had an upset stomach.

Also, a nice thing to note is that since this was a show for kids, when a difficult word comes up, like hijack, they try to explain it to the viewers. In this case, it’s Hakka, who hasn’t heard the word before and asked what it means.