LUPIN LOST MEDIA ~ The Debunked and the Yet to be Found

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Yeah I can easily emulate Master File if needed for people, gimme like a day to get home to my PC to do so. I don't think theres anything HD on youtube as far as I know
That would be awesome if you did that! :kar_lup: I checked all the gameplay footage I could find online, and while I didn't find anything that matched the Fujiko cel I found, I did find the credits for both Chronicles and The Master File! (NicoNico video) Which is cool that we have some more proof on who worked on these games. I mentioned this the other thread, but the Chronicles op is a reanimated version of a part 1 Op, and the credits recreate the part 1 ending
 
There are a few videos of it online but they are rather short and don't showcase the entire game

There's also another game called "Lupin III Chronicles" that is very similar to the Master File but idk if Chronicles has any noteworthy content besides aparently having some exclusive arrangements of Part 1 songs.
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YuStarDino

Anime Protagonist of Norn Iron
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as a test I did see if I can run it on my potato laptop... its lagging, this laptop is for school not emulating. So yeah, wait until I get onto my PC to do this stuff.
but a good thing to note, the aspect ratio is much better than on the youtube vids and its a little crispier but has that good old PS1/Saturn quality on it.

Again lag could potentially be me using RetroArch through Steam and not the app itself but I doubt it.
 

WateredWillow

some animator lady
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as a test I did see if I can run it on my potato laptop... its lagging, this laptop is for school not emulating. So yeah, wait until I get onto my PC to do this stuff.
but a good thing to note, the aspect ratio is much better than on the youtube vids and its a little crispier but has that good old PS1/Saturn quality on it.
Yeah, Saturn is one of the harder-to-emulate systems, it really needs a better PC to run it properly.


I wish I could record it on my Saturn, I have RGB cables that would make the video quality look great, but I don't have a good solution to play Japanese games nor to record my systems. Eventually I would like to record all the Lupin games running on native hardware but I doubt I'd be able to do that anytime soon
 

YuStarDino

Anime Protagonist of Norn Iron
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He/Him

Lol some Master Files stuff recorded, least the intro. in lovely 720p60 for you all. (Yeah nice for YT to not upload this in HD *screams*)

Also I'll like record more of the game tomorrow when I worked out some kinks with RetroArch which is not being very nice to me today.
 
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Another thing i wish would be found is all of the original colored pages of the manga. Originally some pages were in color, but in later reprints they were replaced by black and white.
Such a shame too because the colors were great and honestly the new ones ruined some scenes, like this one where now you can barely see Goemon and the background
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So I've looked a bit more into this, just cause I wanted to see when they switched to the whole black and white style. The thing I'm wondering about is that the conversion doesn't seem consistent? Like the original has color in two ways, one with full color like you shown and the other one being a sorta monochrome style using red, black and white
EzCD0e6VIAECLYS

Then in later editions (like this tokyo pop page) they just made it greyscale.
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So I'm wondering why the two different pages converted differently? Why was the fully colored illustration not converted in the same way? But then there's this full color one from the Chapter DEAD HEAT which makes that decision very strange
Ee05WxmU8AATOaN

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Now it isn't converted like the page Giovanni showed. It's still kinda murky, but it's not nearly as bad as that other page. I know people have praised the Greatest Heist release since that came out a while back, but I haven't heard if the picture quality is good. Greatest Heights has the DEAD HEAT chapter, so I'd love to know if the picture quality is the same in that one or not, because if the quality is higher, maybe the publisher has the og color pages?
 
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Man i wish the Greatest Heists version kept the colored pages, here's a comparison between the original page (unfortunaly in low quality), tokyopop and Greastest Heists (Chapter 1):
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Okay, interesting, so that at least clears up information about this process. It would seem that the publishers have access to the colored pages if they are able to get this level of detail, and I'm guessing Tokyo Pop in their process did their own conversation to black and white, which didn't turn out so well
It seems to be a common problem with Tokyo Pop as this was also a problem in the Tokyo Pop Version of Tokyo Mew Mew, that when converting the colored pages, they would turn them too dark. The Kodansha release still have the black and white, but the contrast was better and you could see all the details.
 
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I personally love the idea of looking for and finding lost media, and Lupin being such a long-running series is bound to have some lost media, and as far as I'm aware there are three major items of note: something probably completely lost, something that we might be able to find, and something that probably never existed.

Debunked Lost Media
First up there's the Geneon dubbed episodes 80 - 100 of Part II. These are probably long gone, and even if they aren't, they are probably in some company's archive, what company, I dunno, Geneon went out of business almost 20 years ago so these voice lines are either completely lost to time or in so much legal red tape that they might as well be lost to time.
EDIT: Apparently, like in the Goemon Cagliostro rumour, this supposed lost dub came from a clerical error in Richard Epcar's resume. The original dub producer, Ken Duer, has confirmed they only 79 episodes were ever produced.

Then there's "The Viper" a supposed dub of Part I from 1972. This was some random claim on the lostmediawiki forums, the OP only gave two pieces of evidence to back up their claim, and both turned out to be dead-ends. So I think this isn't really lost media I think this is a myth.
Here's a video by LSuperSonicQ about this supposed dub

Yet to be Found Lost Media
And here's the real reason I wanted to make this post, the one piece of Lupin media I'm sure exists in some capacity as we have multiple references to its existence. I'm sure many of you are aware of the Lupin Takarazuka musical, but what I know a lot of you don't know is that there is another Lupin musical that predates it by 17 years. The 30th Anniversary Musical I'm Lupin! アイムル ルパン三世 also known as Anime Musical: Love Dream Lupin ア二メカル 愛・夢・ルパン. Notably, Dragon Ball Z theme singer Hironobu Kageyama played Goemon Ishikawa in this musical. The musical was performed by Troupe Something on November 4th, 1998 through November 8th, 1998 at the Sunshine Theatre in the Sunshine City building in East Ikebukuro in the Toshima ward in Tokyo. The soundtrack to the musical was released on CD on November 21st, 1998.
At some point in time, a recording of one of the performances aired on the Japanese Children's TV Station, Kids Station キッズステーション. So there is the slight possibility that a recording of it still is floating around somewhere, whether that be somewhere randomly on the internet or on some random Japanese VHS recording, who knows? But it is the one confirmed piece of Lupin media that we know exists that has not had an official release in almost 25 years.
So this is a call to action to see if anyone can help me find a recording of this musical, even just a snippet of a recording would be helpful as it would give definitive proof it exists.

https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/ルパン三世_I'm_LUPIN
https://lupin.fandom.com/wiki/I'm_Lupin


And if there's anything I missed, please tell me and I'll add it to this post. [I'll get to this in a minute to add the other things mentioned below]
I haven't found footage of the musical, but I have found a press photo of the actors in their outfits, at least if this Italian fansite is to be believed. I'll just post it here since idk if it's common knowledge elsewhere, but when I did a reverse image search, only a handful of sites came up.
index.php
 

WateredWillow

some animator lady
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I haven't found footage of the musical, but I have found a press photo of the actors in their outfits, at least if this Italian fansite is to be believed. I'll just post it here since idk if it's common knowledge elsewhere, but when I did a reverse image search, only a handful of sites came up.
index.php
That's definitely the confirmed cast, Lou Oshiba is a very easy-to-spot in-a-crowd kind of guy lol.
Hey, any lead on the musical is good news to me, thank you so much for finding that press photo that's super cool. :kar_lup:
 
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Found an ebay listing for some character design sheets from a unknown production sporting some part 1/2 designs, can anyone recognize these ?
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Original listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/364115811198
I don't know where exactly this is from, but I'm guessing is that at least some of these are from one of the Lupin Pachinko machines. The last one with Zenigata is very similar to the pose in this video (I've marked with time stamps).

Now as for the part 1 art style, I have no idea. Maybe it's from another machine, but I haven't heard of it. It's kind of hard to research Lupin related Pachinko since there have been so many releases over the years. But that's where I'd start looking.
 

ucnetwork

JackIII creator, Ferewell to Nostradamus-fave 1
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I don't know where exactly this is from, but I'm guessing is that at least some of these are from one of the Lupin Pachinko machines. The last one with Zenigata is very similar to the pose in this video (I've marked with time stamps).

Now as for the part 1 art style, I have no idea. Maybe it's from another machine, but I haven't heard of it. It's kind of hard to research Lupin related Pachinko since there have been so many releases over the years. But that's where I'd start looking.
the fugiko woh's with Lupin is like her design from Farewell to Nostradamus.
 
Some more lost media stuff i found:
In 2014 the spanish publisher DKO announced that they were going to publish Shin Lupin III in it's entirety, specifically mentioning that some colored pages would be included. It's been 8 years and they never published it.
https://www.deculture.es/2014/11/manga-lupin-iii-espana-dko/?amp=1
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Lost Portugal Portuguese dub of Part 2:
Between 2001-2002, Part 2 aired on the now defunct channel called RTP/RTP2, dubbed by the studio "Somnorte" and renamed to "As Aventuras de Lupin"/"The Adventures Of Lupin".
According to some forum posts, around 60 or so episodes were dubbed and it appears that none of them were archived, the only information that remains about the dub is the description on the channels archive.
https://www.rtp.pt/programa/tv/p8876
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Man i wish the Greatest Heists version kept the colored pages, here's a comparison between the original page (unfortunaly in low quality), tokyopop and Greastest Heists (Chapter 1):
View attachment 1719
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Update:
I've found a high quality version of this colored page from the first chapter!
The full image and loads of other colored pages/Monkey Punch artworks can be found in this archive:
image.png
 
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I've recently been looking into music albums related to Lupin and while some of the more obscure can be found online (thanks to people like Wallside Fly uploading albums and John Doe for uploading induvial tracks), one album seems to be pretty rare is the Dance & Drive Remix album released in 2009.
[This is the most well known song from the album.]
There are some tracks online, but it's pretty scattered around various sites and from what I can see, no one has uploaded the full hour long album (best one we have is a half hour NicoNico upload.).
I'm gonna try to personally collect all the mp3 files to share on Google drive later since I don't think there is a compilation anywhere else. Just doing a quick googling search, the only ones I haven't been able to find so far is World Sketch - "Love Squall feat. DOUBLE (World Sketch "Ocean" Remix) . So for now, it's lost.
Update: I found Love Squall! So I'll be uploading the whole album soon.
 
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aisterion

read mort the dead teenager
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Another thing i wish would be found is all of the original colored pages of the manga. Originally some pages were in color, but in later reprints they were replaced by black and white.
Such a shame too because the colors were great and honestly the new ones ruined some scenes, like this one where now you can barely see Goemon and the background
View attachment 1597
024.jpg
going throught this thread after a LONG while when i really should have sooner and i'm just gonna say it: the choices the publishers made to do black and white photocopies of the color pages either because it was cheaper or because it would be more consistent is sad. at least they could have balanced the black point, that's one of the easiest things to do when transferring to b/w
 
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she/her
I've recently been looking into music albums related to Lupin and while some of the more obscure can be found online (thanks to people like Wallside Fly uploading albums and John Doe for uploading induvial tracks), one album seems to be pretty rare is the Dance & Drive Remix album released in 2009.
[This is the most well known song from the album.]
There are some tracks online, but it's pretty scattered around various sites and from what I can see, no one has uploaded the full hour long album (best one we have is a half hour NicoNico upload.).
I'm gonna try to personally collect all the mp3 files to share on Google drive later since I don't think there is a compilation anywhere else. Just doing a quick googling search, the only ones I haven't been able to find so far is World Sketch - "Love Squall feat. DOUBLE (World Sketch "Ocean" Remix) . So for now, it's lost.
Update: I found Love Squall! So I'll be uploading the whole album soon.
 
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