The 1981 Anime and the Oshii Years

Kitty Films produced the series for Fuji TV from October 14, 1981 to March 19, 1986. Early episodes each packaged two fifteen-minute stories, which is why the count resolves two ways: 194 half-hour episodes containing 213 stories. Mamoru Oshii directed the first 106 episodes; Kazuo Yamazaki directed the rest, and the second half of the run sits closer to the manga.

Oshii’s tenure is why the series matters beyond comedy. The TV run and his two features, Only You and Beautiful Dreamer, are where the future director of Ghost in the Shell learned to bend a licensed property toward his own obsessions. The adaptation also invented faces: Megane, Perm, Kakugari and Chibi, Lum’s self-styled stormtroopers, are major presences here but nameless walk-ons in the manga, while manga regular Kosuke Shirai never appears in this series at all.

In North America the series became a founding text: AnimEigo’s subtitled VHS release, begun in 1992, was among the first subtitled anime releases on the continent. Its DVDs (ten box sets and fifty individual volumes, 2001–06) carried liner notes unpacking the puns; a fan group, Lum’s Stormtroopers, persuaded California station KTEH to broadcast it in 1998. The license later lapsed and the series went out of print in 2011, until Discotek Media’s Blu-ray rescue, announced at Otakon 2022.