GeGeGe no Kitaro (1985) [NGN] (VHS rip) episodes 01-18

So, somewhere around 2010 or so I was uploading a lot of GeGeGe no Kitaro episodes from different seasons to YouTube. This included episodes I was subtitling myself, as well as episodes of the 1985 series that aired with English subtitles on Nippon Golden Network (a Hawaiian pay-cable channel) in the early 1990s. There was another user named dougo13 who was also uploading subtitled Kitaro episodes from NGN to YouTube, and when we exchanged some PMs I discovered that he was a mutual friend of some other people that I used to trade tapes with back in the day. Then Toei shut down both of our YT channels, and with that private message channel cut off, I had no way of contacting him for several years.

Anyway, thanks to some helpful friends, I’m finally back in contact with dougo13, and holy crap does he have a lot of rare tapes that he’s eager to share with the anime fan community! So here’s the first of many batches of the 1985 edition of GeGeGe no Kitaro. Nippon Golden Network was infamous for their rudimentary and sloppy subtitles, even by the very low standards of subtitled anime shown in a few American television markets (see Let’s Anime article here.) But their subtitles for Kitaro are actually pretty decent, not as good as a fan-subtitle but quite watchable. They refer to Yokai as “Goblins,” but that makes sense if you’re showing it to a 1992 American audience not as familiar with Japanese folklore as we are in the days of teh interwebs.

A lot of the episodes have little snippets of news, commercials, promos, and station IDs at the beginning or end. I decided to leave these little clips in to add more nostalgic flavor in the vein of watching old VHS tapes. Apologies if anyone finds these extra bits annoying. The quality varies from episode to episode due to reception quality, the Hawaiian cable company that carried NGN used that old fashioned sine-wave scrambling system for their pay channels. Episodes 1-5 and 18 are from VHS dubs that I got in a tape trade with Laurine some 20-odd years ago. Episodes 6-17 are from dougo13’s master VHS recordings, so they are somewhat better quality.