Just discovered that Karyuudo Fansubs, responsible for the excellent work subtitling both of the Japanese Beast Wars filler shows*, Transformers: Car Robots**, and Transformers Micron Legend (aka the original Japanese version of Transformers Armada)*** have recently completed a project in which they created visualizations and subtitles/translations for the entirety of the Transformers: Kiss Players subline from Japan.
If you didn't know, Kiss Players is basically the running joke/horror of Transformers fandom and a prime example of "what the hell is wrong with you, Japan?" as a story that is, no joke, about various Transformers being able to receive power-ups by being kissed by a number of allegedly teenaged but visually
extremely young looking girls (including their take on G1 season 3 recurring character Marissa Faireborn who gets reimagined as all Americans do in manga/anime, as a flirty, aggressive, blonde-haired blue-eyed girl wearing some shameless clothing in the form of a shirt that slips half off one of her shoulders) while also having some disturbingly sexual/phallic imagery with Decepticons (including Megatron) who have creepy prehensile tongues that spurt out a thick, viscous, white-in-the-uncolored-manga-pages liquid.
Rumor has it that eventually the crawly bits were phased out and the story became a bit more tolerable if not any less silly.
So go ahead and open that forbidden door if you dare.
*In Japan they didn't want to dub just the 13 episode Beast Wars 2nd season, so to kill time until the 3rd season finished and they could fuse the two together into a single 26 episode run pseudo-sequel-series, Takara commissioned a pair of 30-something-episode anime shows to serve as filler. They take place waaaaaayyy in the future of the BW stories to the point that Optimus Primal is basically treated as a legendary hero like King Arthur. The two series are: Beast Wars II (the "II" is literally pronounced "second" and not "two") which is mostly kind of a crap show outside of 1 main Maximal (Scuba, who is basically "the super-competent one" on his team and turns into a giant squid) and 1 subset of Predacons who show up for a small handful of episodes (repurposes of the Seacons combiner team from g1 as a set of freelance space pirates called, fittingly, the Space Pirate Seacons. They're mostly a comedy relief squad, but still fun). And Beast Wars Neo, a direct sequel to II that follows up on its ending with a new crew that is far more interesting and tolerable and makes for a show that is overall quite enjoyable until it fumbles its ending badly. But it also gives us DNAVI, the Predacons' ship AI housed in a little dragonfly like robot body who is absolutely hilarious as she snarks and backtalks almost all the Predacons for being a bunch of idiots.
**Better known here as Transformers: Robots in Disguise from 2001. Aka the one that never ever gets brought up or distributed anymore because Hasbro basically didn't want anything to do with it at the beginning and only licensed it as a stall tactic until Armada was ready for air. It's also famous for being heavily edited to remove a lot of city destruction and explosions since it began airing in September of 2001 and, well, you know what happened around that time...
***If you've never watched Micron Legend you can at least use their release to enjoy a better version of Armada as they synced the english audio over the Japanese-release DVD video which uses a lot more finished and corrected animation that wasn't present in Armada's initial run.
If you want Kiss Players their blog post is here:
Hi Karyuudo fans, We've got a new translation project which may bring shock or freak the hell out of the Transformers fandom... yes, it's th...
karyuudofansubs.blogspot.com
On their site you can also find links to the other series they've done. Each one offers the option of torrents with full downloads of the complete series' audio/video files and gobs of extras including a translation guide, companion art books and comics, and other stuff. They also have playlists of the series on Youtube, though the Kiss Players stuff is tagged 18+ because of its controversial nature and the Micron Legend release does not feature the Armada audio option in that instance.
news.tfw2005.com
