Albator and Goldorak could return to French Canadian TV

Good news for French Canadian Anime fans! We could be seeing the return of some of our favourite old school Anime shows.

Le journal de Montréal has this article discussing plans for 2 new Canadian TV stations “Teletoon Retro” to debut in English in Spring 2007 and “Télétoon Rétro”, the French equivalent, in French in Fall 2007.

The channel will be featuring animation dating from 10 years back and older. It’s mentioned that they are attempting to secure the rights to old classic Anime such as Albator and Goldorak.

Albator is the French dub of Leiji Matsumoto’s Captain Harlock (or Herlock as the Japanese insist on calling him). It came in 2 series. Albator 78 is a 42 episode series translated from the 1978 series “Space Pirate Captain Harlock”. “Albator 84” is a 22 episode series translated from “Endless Orbit SSX” from 1983. The numbers denote the year of their French dub rather than their Japanese release.

Goldorak is the French version of Grandizer (Grendizer to the Japanese) and aired starting in 1975.

Both shows were wildly popular among French Canadians in the late 70s and early 80s.

It needs to be mentioned that Teletoon in both it’s English and French incarnations is notorious for horrible programming due mainly to the fact that they’re incapable of affording to pay for anything the least bit desireable. They generally get the scraps that better channels like Comedy and YTV don’t want. Whether or not this goes through really depends on the financial feasability of securing the rights to these shows.

Anime News Network mentioned this story on Friday but claimed the rights to the series had already been optained. This confusion was probably just lost in translation.

Thanks to Powet antagonist Dave aka Soundowaivu for finding this article.