Japanese Sonic Fans trying to get Sonic X 53 - 78 in Japan.

A little bit over a month ago, I was looking over the Japanese wikipedia of Sonic X for something, and to my surprise there was information surrounding 53+ that was not there originally. Then I find out why there was a whole slew of information on the wiki through one of the links.

Over at X-Square, there is a compaign going on that apparently the Japanese Fans are trying to get the rest of Sonic X over in Japan, whether it be in Original Video Animation format (video release only) or an actual TV broadcast. They are also trying to get awareness that these episodes do also exist, since the typical japanese fan might have not known about the rest of the episodes. Apparently this started back in September of this year, but doesn't seem like much progress is made.

I'm unsure if there'll be any real progress made in the future, but honestly, I'm wishing them luck at this. You guys can check out the site here. But it's useless unless any of you can read Japanese. Why am I posting this here? Because there are Japanese fans that care enough to see the rest of the series released in Japan.

 

I'm going to clear this up. The Japanese audio actually came from a legit release that was sold in China, as hard as that is to believe. Sonic X was officially released on VCD for the entire series, rather than DVD. As a result, because of the limitations of the VCD format, they were hardsubbed and the audio tracks were restricted to left and right channels, creating both audio tracks mono. To my knowledge, no official licensed DVD exists in China.

However, there was actually a question about the legallity with the release coming form the Japanese companies. Someone from Studio MAO mentioned that apparently they may have not been authorized to include the Japanese audio track for those episodes in particular. I might be remembering this wrong, however, since it's been ages since this was asked on their forums. A direct answer from TMS Entertainment would be better off, since Studio MAO is just a studio that handeled the backgrounds.

Anyways, there were complications with Sonic X 53+ that originally led to them not airing right away, and then to cancelling plans to broadcast them. What happened was TV Tokyo pulled out from Production of the series, which made it difficult to air the series. Then, at some point Sonic X 53+ was scheduled to air in Japan Summer 2005 (around same time Kids Station would finish broadcasting the first series), but this never happened. In fact, Kids Station pulled the Sonic X mini-site some point after broadcast.

There were questions about the possibility with going with a video release for the remaining episodes when Mana talked with someone from Sega, and apparently without a TV broadcast, it would not financially worth it to do so. There was also another thing that you guys may find interesting is that TMS Entertainment did at some point plan on producing more episodes for 2007 according to their financial report, but this did not happen. In fact, no one's quite sure at this point what is going on with the series, since it seems to be more stalled than finished at this point in time.

Still, we're now in 2008, there has been no release in Japan, but TMS Entertainment and Sega should have made more than enough money off the international distrobution for the series. It's not going to hurt them much if they produce a limit run of the latter episodes in boxset form or try and get a web distrubtion for said episodes. But yet, they aren't doing anything.

Also, I would like to say that the latter episodes of Sonic X are actually decent and well done. Alot of people wouldn't touch them because of the quality of the first 52 episodes, but the overall general census for these episodes is they are much better. The story is a bit too over the top at times, but I felt it was a nice change for the series and we got action on action almost every episode. It was also nice to see a dark story for the series rather than how the first series was very light hearted for the most part.

One last thing is, Sonic X 53+ did get heavily edited when it broadcasted in the United States. Infact, the last episode almost 6 minutes of the episode was cut out, the entire episode was rearranged, and a 2 minute recap was added. They also danced around that Cosmo died and they pretty much made her live in the end, rather than Dark Oak still being alive. Most of the deathes in the series were cut out, with an exception of the Resistance Group's death (which... remained unedited complete with disturbing sounds, although 4Kids latter cuts a flashback scene for it). 4Kids also had trouble dealing with Shadow in Episode 73 trying to kill Cosmo as they tried to dance around that fact.

There were also some cuts for violence in that episode too... I could go on and on, but Rattleman's Edit List has more details on the whole thing.