Why is City Hunter called Nicky Larson in France?

France met City Hunter on television, after school, and under another name. The anime premiered on October 29, 1990, in Club Dorothée, TF1’s flagship children’s block, retitled for its hero: Nicky Larson. The adult manga’s anime had been cut and rewritten for a children’s slot: scenes deleted, dialogue reinvented, Ryo’s appetites written around entirely. What survived the censor was the charm, the cases, Kazue Ikura’s and Akira Kamiya’s work redubbed into French, and a shout-along theme by Jean-Paul Césari that a generation can still sing.

The strange part is that the bowdlerised version became the beloved one. The French names stuck so firmly that they are still the names used in France today: the French subtitles of the 2024 Netflix film call him Nicky Larson, not Ryo Saeba. The French manga, by contrast, was published straight, under the original title City Hunter, so France grew up with two versions of the same man and loves both.

The debt was repaid in 2019. Director Philippe Lacheau, a fan raised on the Club Dorothée dub, wrote, directed and starred in Nicky Larson et le Parfum de Cupidon (February 6, 2019), an explicit tribute stuffed with cameos, Dorothée herself and Césari among them; Coamix timed a whole 29-volume Zenon Selection edition of the manga to its release. Japan noticed long ago: Hojo was guest of honour at Japan Expo in 2010 and its Manga Guest of Honor in 2023.