Ninja the Wonder Boy was a formative introduction to anime for me. I saw Astro Boy first, but this film, edited down from 24 episodes of Manga Sarutobi Sasuke, was one I watched countless times. Every scene is permanently etched in my memory.
This is a lovingly remastered version of that film, recreating the editing but using higher quality video than has been available before now. It was a nostalgic delight to watch this again.
Ninja the Wonder Boy was probably my favorite movie as a little kid, and I’ve always been miffed that the only version of it I can find nowadays are VHS rips of varying quality or old VHS tapes in terribly worn condition (not that I even OWN a VCR anymore anyway…).
So, I decided to import a DVD boxset of “Manga Sarutobi Sasuke” (the original TV anime that the movie was stitched together from) and essentially remaster it from higher quality DVD footage.
Unfortunately my efforts were hamstrung by two minor sticking points: lack of a glitchless full stereo soundtrack and the DVD footage of episode 1 being fairly overexposed. So there are few spots where the audio may drop to mono as a result of me trying to patch together a full soundtrack from various sources (I’d say it is 95% stereo sound however), and some of the scenes may appear a bit bright/white (I tried to fix this where I could, but short of redrawing the frames there wasn’t much I could do with the overexposure), but overall I’m pretty pleased with the outcome. It’s certainly an improvement over VHS quality in any case.
Ninja the Wonder Boy Remastered
