Here’s episode 76 of the Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo anime!

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MERRY 2282-HIT COMBO!
And here’s my gift to you all: The finale of one of our longest-running anime projects, at long last! Enjoy the ending that’s totally satisfying in every way and wraps up all the loose ends!

Man, where to begin with this one? This is a series that’s had a particularly special meaning to me for the last ten years. I stumbled upon it about a year after I’d started watching anime, and by that point most of the stuff I’d watched was garbage-tier shonen. Back then, I was used to seeing everything I wanted to watch available on fansubs, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any English fansubs that went beyond seven episodes. So I decided to bite the bullet and watch it with some Chinese fansubs (the closest to raws that I could readily get) that I had to download using Emule (the worst p2p program I’ve had the mispleasure of using). But oh man, was it worth it. Here I was seeing a show that masterfully poked fun at the tired-out shonen tropes I’d started getting sick of at that point, while itself being a great shonen anime, and with a style of humor so out of left field that you could rarely predict what was coming next. It was also while watching this series that I first learned about Fist of the North Star, one of the main series it parodies, and the rest, of course, is history.

Now, naturally, because I enjoyed it so much, I wanted to share it with my friends who also watched anime, but there was one problem: They didn’t know Japanese as well as I did, if at all. And since it didn’t seem like there were any other fansubs stepping up, and the official releases were all of the annoying dub, there was only one thing left to do: Subtitle it myself! This was actually my first venture into subtitling, and boy was it a gongshow. I was working with a clunky version of Subtitle Workshop, with incredibly poor timing, one blocky, ugly font, and my translation back then was… Well, not so good is putting it charitably. Plus, the only source I had was the Chinese fansub, so I ended up encoding the subtitles on top of that. Eventually, I managed to get through 50 episodes of the series on my free time.

Then I joined Hokuto no Gun. As many of you all know, the reason I joined was to help out with Souten no Ken and other Hokuto-related projects, and for the first year or so that’s mostly what I focused on. Then another translator decided he’d pick up Kinnikuman, and that inspired me to follow suit, and achieve the dream I’d had for a few years back then, of fansubbing Bo-bobo. I landed the source files from the first three DVDs and got to work putting together a team. Since I already had a big chunk of the translation down, I figured it’d go pretty quickly. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

As you have probably heard me complain about time and time again, it was really hard finding a skilled, dedicated typesetter who was able to handle the metric fuckton of on-screen text that this series has. Our initial typesetter quit after a few episodes, and the next one kept using the little time they had on Kinnikuman, because it was easier. To make matters worse, our source for the DVDs ran out and we couldn’t get our hands on any more episodes without purchasing the DVDs.

And that’s where you fine people come in. Our Bo-bobo donation drive was probably one of the biggest amounts of money we’ve ever asked for, mainly because we had to order all the episodes as individual DVDs rather than as a box set. But you fine people graciously opened your wallets to fund this project, meaning we now had a responsibility to finish the series. Sadly, that didn’t help move the project along any faster. Staff came and went, we stopped and started again, and eventually I became somewhat apathetic to the project, figuring that the end would never come, and started directing my attention to other projects.

That brings us to earlier this year. We had gone nearly two years without a release, we were short a translation checker to help fix up my old, horrible translations, and the typesetter had far too much on his plate to deal with the monster that was Bo-bobo. But the project had gone on long enough. I decided that we needed to get Bo-bobo over with. I took over translation checking my own work, since I’d massively improved my translation since then and could manage to check it far better than the previous checker, and I’d figured out enough of Aegisub to get it to do what I wanted in terms of typesetting. So I pushed myself and got a few others to join me in the push, and together we did what I had thought was impossible: After seven long years, we had finally finished the Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo anime.

Now I’ve done what I set out to do, and I’ve shared one of my favorite anime series with the entire English-speaking world. It’s an enormous weight off my shoulders, and now I can go back to looking back on Bo-bobo with fondness and not despair, like I should for all my favorite series. While this has been a seven-year project here on HnG, it’s been in my life for at least ten years now. Perhaps it’d be an exaggeration to say that a whole chapter of my life is closing, but it sure feels that way.

With that, I’d like to thank my fellow staff who’ve indulged me with this project and helped me bring it to fruition, starting with the ones who’ve been there the whole nine yards, SweetDevilStitch and SpiritofHokuto20XX, followed by all the other people who’ve only had an involvement for part of the project but still played a substantial role in making it happen (sorry if I forget anybody): Walker Prescott, Bleeds_Tricolore, Denshousha, GonbeFAN, Ninjacloud, AngelofChaotix, Kazuhiko1412, VigorousJammer, and Drax! I couldn’t have done this without you guys, and I can’t thank you enough.

And I think now I’ve said everything that has to be said but this:

It’s been a good ten years, Bo-bobo. I’ll see you around.
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