Childhood Cartoons - Plawres Sanshiro

Sanshiro - JumaruIt might not be an exaggeration to say that almost everybody who was a little kid in the 80’s Middle East will remember this cartoon.

سانشيرو بطل مغوار… أحبّوه كباراً و صغار

Every once in a while my nostalgia for these childhood cartoons kicks in and I go on a web hunting escapade to find as much information about them as I can. I remember about 6 months ago, I had found a vintage actual plastic model of Jumaru on Ebay for about a hundred dollars. I didn’t like the blue color that was used on it because it was more like a light blue instead of the dark blue that you can see in the picture, so I didn’t buy it. Now I wonder if I should have.

I never knew how old this cartoon was. It was released in 1983 in Japan, and I read somewhere that it was made by the same guy who ended up making Pokemon. I also think that this cartoon received its most number of fans in the Middle East. I don’t think it’s as popular in other places like Europe or the US, although it was available, but even there, it is still considered a classic. I also found out from reading that only part of the show was ever translated to Arabic, a few episodes including the end were not translated. Weird!

I found this clip on YouTube. It’s an episode from the Arabic version. The show’s song brings so many memories back of me sitting on the couch in anticipation for the heroes’ next adventure. The days when me and my brother were just silly little kids.

Well, last night, I finally managed to get my hands on the first 27 episodes of the original series. You can download them from here. They are in Japanese with English subtitles. They’re .mkv files, which is the file extension for the Matroska container. To play them you need to download the Haali Matroska Splitter which should enable you to play them in Windows Media Player. Some of the episodes were encoded in H264 codec, so you need to make sure you can handle that. I had to download FFDShow in order to do that.

All the web sites that have information about this anime refer to 37 episodes. I’m hoping that that’s a propagated typo and that there’s only 27 because that’s all I could find :(

Anyway, on to watching the episodes, and then after that, my next escapade is going to be about this other sensational childhood cartoon. Can you tell who this is? :D

Can you guess who this is?

UPDATE: Vists The Max Toons site for info on all (well, most) Cartoons shown in the Middle East. Excellent Site! Max Toons

About this entry

You’re currently reading “Childhood Cartoons - Plawres Sanshiro,” an entry on The Scatter Load

Published:
10.02.06 / 9am
Category:
Childhood, Cool, Life