Premiere!

I woke up early to – gasp – turn on the TV this morning, because Ōban Star-Racers was premiering on Jetix (Toon Disney, ABC Family.)
Despite what Matt says about the series, I found it pretty charming and quite well-produced. The character designs especially stood out to me, and they all seemed very likeable. Yes, the voice acting could be better and the plot is very run-of-the-mill, but I just might continue watching it since I’ve become somewhat of a fan over the years.
For anyone else who’s interested, I believe it plays on Saturday at 10:30AM and Monday at 8:00AM/PM on ABC Family.

8 comments

  1. Oh man I’ve heard of this *years* ago when it was first starting to come into development. This is the first time I’ve heard of it since then and it looks awsome! This is the first time I have ever heard of French/Japanese animated show. I thought it was going to be French-only but that’s cool that they collaborated. I guess I’ll sometime have to download the Japanese version. What channel does it play on here? I mean the exact channel, because channel 7(ABC) doesn’t have it listed as playing tonight or Saturday morning : (.

    1. Why would you get the Japanese version? It was originally released in French less than two months ago – I don’t think there currently is a Japanese version and dates for Japanese broadcast have not been announced.
      Unless you’d like to watch French in subtitles (not a big priority for any fansub group), I’d suggest just catching it on ABC Family.

      1. Yeah, I was wondering about that. I wasn’t sure if it was voiced in French or Japanese. When I saw a trailer of it years ago, the animation looked very “not-anime” and now it looks significantly anime so now I’m suddenly thinking of it as an anime :p. I’m used to the idea of most popular anime shows being subbed within 24 hours of their original broadcast on Japanese TV so I thought the same would be with Molly Star Racer, but yeah hearing the original voices seems very implausible. I checked the listings and it doesn’t look like it’s playing tonight so I’m going to set the TV up to record it for Saturday : ).

        1. Well, it is a France-Japan co-production because almost all of the animation was done in a Japanese studio.
          The original French studio, Sav! The World Productions, which was originally going to do the entire show, instead just created the world/characters/story, wrote the scripts, did the storyboarding (I think), and rendered the 3D backgrounds and ships.
          You can see the original trailer here – this was completely French-made, and you can tell they’re obviously trying a bit too hard to make it Japanese-style (generic eurobeat and all). Although it would have been nice to see the entire show done in 3D, I think they chose a good studio for the transition.

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