Discotek Media Does Classic Anime Reissues Casshan Samurai Pizza Cats

The small but diverse video label Discotek Media has picked up a number of old-school anime titles that should turn more than a few heads: Casshan: Robot Hunter and Samurai Pizza Cats. According to posts on the company's official Facebook wall, DVD editions of both Casshan and Cats are headed our way later this year.

Samurai Pizza Cats, originally produced in 1991, showed up in English around the same time and garnered a strong cult following that's persisted to this day. Originally named Cat Ninja Legend Teyandee in Japan, it centered around four cyborg cat martial artists who protect the city of Little Tokyo (or "Edoropolis", as it was originally called) from danger from within and without. The show's set to be released in a dual-language Japanese-audio/English-dubbed edition, with the English audio taken from the U.S. broadcast TV edition of the show.

Cats was never issued on DVD in the U.S. before, and only turned up via the occasional rerun after its original showing. (A VHS compilation of three episodes, misleadingly titled Samurai Pizza Cats: The Movie, did show up at one point, but it's now long out of print.)

Casshan: Robot Hunter is another old-school title that hails from the days when anime appeared on TV without it being specifically called "anime." After robots have destroyed most of the human race, a cyborg named Casshan and his robot dog Friender emerge from the ashes to fight back. The original 1973 version of the TV series never showed up officially in English, but the 1993 OVA version of the story was issued by ADV back in 2003. This new printing also sports the English audio tracks commissioned by Harmony Gold (those who brought Macross into English as Robotech).

Casshan has been remade repeatedly in vastly different forms. It was reworked into a live-action adaptation by director Kazuaki Kiriya (Goemon) back in 2004, and revisited as anime yet again in 2008 as the immensely bleak if also highly stylized and gorgeous-looking Casshern Sins.

Discotek's picked up plenty of other old-school anime of note that make good additions to any collection: the Galaxy Express 999 feature film, the Fist of the North Star TV series, Lupin III: The Fuma Conspiracy, and Animal Treasure Island, a feature film distinguished for having none other than Hayao Miyazaki on the production staff.

Images: Samurai Pizza Cats; Casshan: Robot Hunter; Casshern. Images courtesy Pricegrabber.