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Photo courtesy of @ashuraoh on Twitter. Eleven Arts is in charge of distributing Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro to US theaters in September, and they gave these away at their Anime Expo panel this weekend. Still no specifics on which dub or subtitles, but we expect at least one screening dubbed and one subtitled, as that is the norm with these anime theatrical events as of late. They also announced there will be “never before seen special footage with creator comments” during the presentation. I assume it’s just new interview footage with people like Yasuo Ohtsuka (animation director) or Kazuhide Tomonaga (key animator and chief director of Lupin Part IV), but we’ll know more soon enough!

Be sure to follow Eleven Arts on Facebook for future updates on this special screening event! And of course, don’t forget to pick up Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro on Blu-ray Disc or DVD from Discotek Media! We hope you see it as the definitive release of the film, as we strove to make it so.

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Long time since our last post. This fall, if you live in the United States, you’ll be able to catch one (or more?) theatrical screening(s) of Miyazaki’s feature-film directorial debut, Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro! This is done to celebrate Lupin’s debut as a manga character in August 1967, or 50 years ago. Keep an eye out for details as the autumn approaches. 

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Hey, I recognize this movie!

Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro (1979), Dir. Hayao Miyazaki, available on Blu-Ray by Discotek Media.

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Much ♥ from the Castle of Cagliostro BD team.

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How about another new feature announcement for The Castle of Cagliostro on Blu-ray Disc?

Art galleries! There are three unique galleries on the disc. Much like slideshows, they will cycle through the images while playing music from the movie. We spent months painstakingly sourcing, rescanning, and restoring each and every piece of art that was cleared to be included on this release. 

Compare this raw cover scan with this restored cover, for example:

Anyway, to start off, we have a "promotional artwork" gallery. This features two types of artwork. First are primarily theatrical posters and flyers, the kind of stuff you usually see on DVD and videotape covers and such.

Second, there are high-quality visuals of the movie's "stills." Stills are promotional images (in this case, painted on cels) crafted early in production and displayed in theaters to get people excited for the movie. Sometimes these are directly based on finished footage and other times they are original drawings inspired by the concept art.

(Zenigata’s task force is nowhere near this multicultural in the actual film.)

Like some of the other stills you’ll see in this gallery, you may recognize some of these from the various cases and inserts on previous Cagliostro releases.

Next up is a collection of model sheets. These show the characters in detail for consistent drawing by the animators.

Each character is featured in these. They were drawn by Animation Director Yasuo Ohtsuka.

And last, but most definitely not least...

This is the largest collection of imageboards from the film you will find anywhere, and presented in the highest available quality! But what are these “imageboards”?

Effectively the primordial soup of the film, these pencil-and-watercolor illustrations were all drawn up by director Hayao Miyazaki himself in May 1979 while determining how to make the Lupin concept “work” for him again. Included are early renditions of the Count, Clarisse, and Jodot, as well as unused scene ideas.

And of course, those interested in the artistry of the film will be pleased to note that the storyboard viewing mode for the film is returning with this release. With it, you can easily compare the final film footage with Miyazaki’s storyboard art in real time!

This Blu-ray Disc easily contains the most comprehensive collection of Cagliostro production artwork ever gathered together in one commercial product. And there’s still more to announce!

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Hello again everyone! Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro on Blu-ray is being pressed and should be making its way to those of you with Discotek Media Store pre-orders very soon, and widely available (for those who ordered elsewhere) sometime around June 23rd. In the meantime, we have some more extras to reveal! Today let’s talk about interviews. 

Unfortunately, we could not secure the lengthy interview with animation director Yasuo Ohtsuka from the 2006 Special Edition DVD Manga Entertainment released, so if you must have that interview (and it’s good!), definitely hold onto your copies. However, we DID clear a shorter-but-denser interview with him, previously seen only on certain French releases! And it’s not just him.

We also secured similar interviews with key animator Kazuhide Tomonaga (who, coincidentally, is now supervising the upcoming Lupin TV series!)...

...and Monkey Punch, Lupin the Third’s creator!

This is the first time any of these interviews have been seen with an English translation! 

“But what about the English voices?” You might ask. Well, as you probably guessed...

We had a wonderful audio interview with Bob Bergen, who voiced Lupin for Carl Macek’s 1992 dub of the film. He told us about how he got hired for the part and gave us some behind-the-scenes insights. It runs just over 15 minutes long!

And we have one more interviewee to formally announce:

It’s no surprise to many of you, but it’s David Hayter, Lupin’s voice from the 2000 English dub! The interview is over a half-hour long and both interesting and entertaining! Mr. Hayter was also kind enough to record a brief introduction for the film, which is what you see above. In his interview, David tells us his thoughts on why the film is such a pleasure, what he loved about playing the character, and lots of other neat stuff!

Naturally, we adapted the questions you folks submitted for both of these interviews, so hopefully you learn something you wanted to know!

Oh, and after Bob’s and David’s interviews, don’t cut back to the menu too early. ;)

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Hey, fans! We want your opinion! For the Blu-ray packaging of Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro, would you rather have a reversible cover sleeve that matches the explosive new cardboard slipcover, or a rare piece of old-school poster art on the inside of the keepcase? Cast your vote here today!

Note: Final choice is both up to our discretion and pending licensor approval. All comps are rough drafts. We reserve the right to change the details at any time.

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Hey Lupin fans!

Good news! We can finally announce that Bob Bergen, the English voice for Lupin in the 1992 version of The Castle of Cagliostro has graciously agreed to do an interview for Discotek’s upcoming Blu-ray release! Bob is a legend in the voice-over world -- best known as Porky Pig -- but early on in his career he voiced Lupin the Wolf in Streamline Pictures' english versions of Lupin the Third as well as a bunch of other characters in anime. We're so glad to be interviewing him, and we're also glad to announce that you can submit your questions as well! Please try to keep your questions related to Lupin, Streamline Pictures, and Bob Bergen's early career in anime. Try to think outside the box as well; we'll ask anything we think is particularly cool or clever! Submit your questions through our ask.fm page, here: http://ask.fm/CastleofCagliostro We look forward to reading your questions!  Thanks!

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Happy holidays everyone! We're a few days late compared to Discotek Media's Facebook page, but here's a look at the final packaging for the Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro DVD release, that your votes helped us decide! The upcoming Blu-ray box will likely be very similar, but that preview will have to wait for another day.

Some of you might be disappointed that we didn't use the golden "hanging Lupin silhouette" from the previous poll. Unfortunately, not everyone involved approved of it so we had to scrap it. We did, however, sneak it onto the DVD menu, and we think it looks pretty classy. How about you?

In sadder news, due to ill-timed production delays, the DVD's official release date has slipped to January 6th, 2015. However, if you order it directly from Discotek Media's website, it's shipping right now! The patient among you can still get it from other online retailers like Amazon or RightStuf, but it might take a tad longer to ship.

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First things first: we want to thank you for all your feedback on the packaging for the Cagliostro DVD! We'll be announcing more about the final product soon. Also, the release date for Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro on DVD is now set for December 23rd of 2014, 8 days after the 35th anniversary of the movie's Japanese theatrical debut! It's up for preorder on DiscotekMedia.com and RightStuf.com.

Tonight, we're going to talk a little about subtitles! You'll notice the first image above looks pretty fuzzy. This is actually a screen capture from a VHS conversion of the very first officially English-translated version of The Castle of Cagliostro, or should I say Cagliostro Castle? This script was printed in either late 1979 or early 1980 and brought to the United States during 1980 for screening. According to anime historian Fred Patten (who was there for all this), TMS' idea was to authorize screenings for the film and gauge interest in a North American anime market. Reportedly, the turnout in 1980 was poor, but just like in Japan, the film grew more famous as the years went on.  This translation was a rather quirky one... dialogue was extremely simplified, even omitting translation for some lines, such as character names. On the big screen, it was almost as hard to read as the VHS still you see above. The subtitles flickered constantly and didn't seem to have a good border. They were often left-aligned, no longer a common subtitling practice. And the characters were renamed: Jigen to "Dan Dunn," Fujiko to "Rosarie", Goemon to simply "Samurai", and Chief Inspector Zenigata became "Detective Ed Cott." (Note: The name changes weren't totally new. Similar ones were used for the English dub of the previous Lupin movie, The Mystery of Mamo.)

As time wore on, people picked up newer releases (Streamline's dub in 1992, Manga Video's dub in 2000 and 2006) and disposed of the memory of this old version of the film. So, imagine our surprise when with the first wave of materials from TMS came the entire English script for this 1980 subtitle track! 

We were absolutely tickled that we had access to something so rare and obscure! Of course, we combed over it. We had managed to secure a VHS reference copy of the old theatrical print thanks to the help of Mr. Carl Horn, and set about recreating the original subtitles for the DVD, as you can see at the top!

It's not 1:1, sadly. The left-alignment isn't present and the font was hard to simulate (not that we wanted it to be difficult to read). However, the script is a match with the original print, and both translation errors and transcription goofs have been left intact...

Wait, SHUN Miyazaki? I thought this was a Hayao— oh wait, that's right, nobody really knew him yet in 1980.

I'd be up for a rousing game of lart, how about you? This is a special example: the actual script spells it correctly as "last," but the theatrical print said "lart." We wanted to retain the viewing experience of watching the 1980 subs as much as possible (without making it difficult to read, of course), so we retained the error.

Just one more oddity with these subs before I sign out. The Streamline Pictures dub was based on Fred Patten's and Robin Leyden's fleshing-out of these subtitles written during Fred's time on Carl Macek's payroll. As such, there are more than a few lines that strongly resemble the Streamline dub's take on them. Here's one that comes readily to mind:

A line with pretty vague meaning, not unusual for this script, actually. It becomes this line in the Streamline Pictures dub:

Perhaps by no small coincidence a closer translation to the original line's meaning (basically, they really isolated her). This screencap actually comes from yet another subtitle track on the disc: a transcription of the Streamline dub's dialogue. And to prove it, here's one more sample:

That's it for this time, folks. We'll talk about the proper subtitles for the film and some of the other special features as we go along!

Okay, okay, one more thing: the 1980 script came with English subtitles for the original theatrical trailer. And now those are optional subtitles for the trailer on the DVD!

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Hey Cagliostro fans! Thanks for voting on the disc label! We think we know which one we're going for and we appreciate all your feedback. Now we're working on finalizing the coversheet and the slipcover for the DVD Release of Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro and we want your help! Yes, we're going to have a slipcover! And the plans also call for the coversheet to be reversible, so we'll be picking the 2 options we like the most! And you get two votes! One for the DVD cover, and one for the slipcover! For the DVD Coversheet, vote here: http://strawpoll.me/2762877 For the Slipcover, vote here: http://strawpoll.me/2762880 Please feel free to tweet at me (@Ashuraou) if you want to let us know if you like a certain front or a certain back more, or just just have any feedback in general. Thank you! Note: Final choices are up to our discretion, and pending licensor approval. All comps are rough drafts. We reserve any right to change the details at any moment. 

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Hi Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro fans. Want to help us choose the disc designs for the DVD + Blu-Ray? We're working on the Cagliostro packaging, and we're running a poll to see which disc designs you like better. We've got a few different options which all use the rings from Castle of Cagliostro as their basis. The only thing we know for sure about the color ones is that the blue one has to be the Blu-Ray, d'uh. But we want to know your opinion on which ones you like better! Please take a moment and vote here: http://strawpoll.me/2738281

Thanks!

Note: Final choices are up to our discretion, pending licensor approval.

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While editing the English subtitles to render a deaf- and hard-of-hearing-friendly track for the "Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro" DVD and Blu-ray, this fun little line came to be.

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Vintage 1983 Cliff Hanger promotional flyer. Cliff Hanger was a game created by Stern electronics in the vein of Dragon's Lair that utilized footage from The Castle of Cagliostro and The Mystery of Mamo. This was the original artwork they created for this release! An interesting bit of Cagliostro history...

For those who want 600dpi archival scans, download them here!

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In case you're curious how the Castle of Cagliostro cover restoration is going, here's some progress images! This restoration was done by the super talented Shihfu and the less talented myself. I'm still going over some of the lines on my end so it's not quite done yet, but it's close!

Please note this is a work in progress and the final version may change significantly! Thanks.

-- Brady

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David Hayter, the English voice for Lupin the Third in the 2000 version of The Castle of Cagliostro has graciously agreed to participate in... something for Discotek’s upcoming Blu-ray! For right now, it’s a mystery! But we want YOU to submit your questions for him! Mr. Hayter recently wrote and directed the feature film Wolves, but he is also famous for voicing Snake in the Metal Gear game series, and for penning the script for the popular X-Men feature film. He also co-wrote X2: X-Men United and Watchmen.

  We have just a couple of ground rules:

1. This is not a Metal Gear / X-Men / Watchmen / Guyver 2: Dark Hero / Wolves interview. If you do ask a question relating to his other projects, please try to make sure it’s tied to Cagliostro somehow.

2. Please try to think outside the box a little with your questions. What we mean by that is, try to ask things someone else might not have thought to ask already.

  Submit your questions through our ask.fm page:

http://ask.fm/CastleofCagliostro

  Thank you so much for your feedback. We look forward to reading your questions!

—R&B

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Work in progress of the Castle of Cagliostro cover restoration, courtesy of Shihfu!