Cyborg Kuro-chan was an anime series, lasting from October 2nd, 1999, to January 6th, 2001, on TV Tokyo in Japan. It was about a housecat named Kuro, who was kidnapped and turned into a cyborg by an evil scientist, named Dr. Go, for his plans of world domination. An English dub of the series was made in Hong Kong, but only episodes 1-14 are currently available to watch online.[1]
The dub originally aired on Animax Asia in the early 2000s and all 65 episodes were rumored to have been dubbed and aired on the channel in the past. The dub itself is highly rare, and the credits sequence is still in its unaltered, all Japanese language form. This dub was produced by Omni Productions in Hong Kong. It is known that the episodes were sold on VCD format on various websites in the early to late 2000s.
The user who uploaded it, Multi3463, says in the description to episode 3 that the episodes came from a website by the name of "Speedy Video Malaysia", which no longer carries the series in any form what so ever.
Another site, ZoomMovie, used to sell the English language VCDs. Their collection, which includes the first 14 episodes on 7 discs, was listed on September 5th, 2002, thus confirming that episodes 1, 2, 13, and 14 were released on VCD.
As of 2024, All episodes released on VCD have been uploaded to the Internet Archive with episode 11 being incomplete. No footage of episodes 15+ has surfaced yet
The cast was identified thanks to Shawn Pleavin (voice of Kuro) and more information regarding the sub was provided thanks to Colin Shevloff (voice of Dr. Go).
The directors of this dub were Colin Shevloff and Ina Chow
This dub, like many Animax Asia dubs of the time, had some accent changes to the voices or impressions. For example, Mi has a southern accent from Michael Quinn in order to differentiate it from his role as the narrator which comes close to sounding like his natural voice. Dr. Go's voice was based off Dr. Evil from Austin Powers. While no footage of Matatabi is found yet, Shawn confirms Matatabi has an Australian accent not only because the character has a boomerang for a weapon, but his actor, Scott Evans, was originally born in Australia.
According to Colin Shevloff, this dub was originally based upon the Cantonese TV dub of the show. However when they got the scripts, the translations were so bad that they decided to rewrite the script to have it based on the visuals.
The Vietnamese dub of the show is based off this dub since some of the characters sound similar to the English dub and they reuse audio clips from the English dub (i.e. Kuro's Meows when saving Pooly in Episode 1, The Pig's Oinks in Episode 12, and the Second commercial eyecatch after the commercial break)
Name Changes[]
- Mi- Mi-Kun (mistakenly spelled Micoon on the VCD cover)
- Nyan Nyan Army- Kitty Litter
- Pooly- Puhrry
- Dunk- Dork
Cast[]
- Shawn Pleavin- Kuro
- Michael Quinn- Mi; Narrator; Kitty Litter #4
- Colin Shevloff- Dr. Go
- Rik Thomas- Grandpa
- Andrea Kwan- Grandma; Kotaro; Nana; Kitty Litter #3
- Scott Evans- Romeo; Matatabi; Suzuki (Ep. 3); Devil; Security Guard; Dunk
- Henry Coombs- Home Guard Leader; Suzuki (Ep. 7+)