I was going to write about...

Recently, I got ahold of a couple of tapes of the old Candy Candy anime.
Yesterday at work, I thought about doing a write up for a friend's
website about Candy Candy.

Then I looked up info on Candy Candy and its authors, and the material
I've gotten.

Now, I knew of the legal disputes over ownership of copyrights, the 2
authors, Mizuki-sensei who created the story, and the original manga
artist, Igarashi. It's likely the original 9 book series of the manga
will never be re-published because of the legal disputes, nor is it
likely the original 117 episode anime will be re-released on DVD.
Original laserdiscs might probably be had used.

Igarashi is seen by many Japanese fans as an evil person who broke
contracts with Mizuki-sensei and Toei Animation, and had companies
create "illegal" Candy Candy merchandise that omits Mizuki's name on the
items because she had them produced without Mizuki-sensei's permission.
The 2 authors had signed a 20 year agreement on the rights. It looks
like even before or maybe just after that agreement expired, Igarashi,
even though she lost the final legal battle over who owns the rights,
still claims she solely and outright owns the rights to Candy Candy. She
also screwed over the writer for another manga series called "Georgie."
I think the fans are the real victims here.

(One webpage went overboard on some issues that I won't go on about
here, mainly because those issues aren't the main issue of what I was
looking up, and I also happen to disagree with them.)

Mizuki-sensei has begun to write new Candy Candy novels, and it might be
that there could be a new manga series, and maybe Toei will get involved
in new anime. That's still to be seen though. Mizuki-sensei can continue
to write non-manga novels for Candy Candy and Igarashi can't do anything
about it. ^_^

Anywho, the upshot of this is that I've been able to get ahold of some
Candy Candy footage. Get this:

The first 2 episodes of the original TV series dubbed in English,
subtitled in I think Dutch. The source on the video was produced in the
Netherlands. That's followed by a bunch of Candy Candy footage dubbed in
French, but the person who made that copy didn't adjust the tracking.

The other tape I've finally identified.

OVA 1 - haru no yobigoe - The Call of Spring

OVA 2 - Candy Candy no natsuyasumi - Candy's summer Vacation

There's a 3rd OVA that I already have. Most of the info was on pages in
Spanish that I had Google translate.

Fansubs of the TV series are somewhat hard to find. It ran for 117
episodes in Japanese, and because Toei won't deal with material whose
authors break contracts and have a general level of hatred from fans as
well as refusing to deal with those properties that have those problems,
they've not rebroadcast it and it doesn't look like it'll get a DVD
release. Some fan groups are using alternate language dubs for their
subbing, such as one group using Spanish source material, which is an
exception since getting the original Japanese source is proving to be
almost impossible.

I thought just within the past 2 years or so that the issue of who owns
the copyrights to Candy Candy was decided by the Japan Supreme Court,
and that Mizuki and Igarashi were to own it 50-50. One page said it was
all decided in Mizuki's favor. I don't know which report is correct, but
settling the copyright dispute should conceivably pave the way for the
original material to be republished, shouldn't it?