YMMV / The Fuma Conspiracy

• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Even in its initial Western release, it didn't get as much bile outside Japan. In America, it's actually one of the more highly regarded entries in the franchise. Helps that unlike the Japanese, the English side never had a consistent voice cast, making different voice actors easier to take.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The mass replacement of the cast may have been contested, to say the least, but over time, replacing them again became a necessity. Kiyoshi Kobayashi was the last member of the original cast still with the franchise before he retired from the role of Jigen, meaning as of 2021, the characters once again have none of their original voice actors...and unlike when this film was made, it's permanent, many of them having retired prior to their passing, and even the lone survivor, Eiko Masuyama, having already handed the role to Miyuki Sawashiro back in 2012.
• Mis-blamed: The replacement voice cast. They were just actors doing a gig (most of them had actually played incidental parts in "Pink Jacket", so they already knew the series), but to hear fans of the time react, they may as well have firebombed Tokyo. Toshio Furukawa in particular apparently received a lot of hate mail for playing Lupin. Translated shots of the Fuma program booklet show that at least some of the actors anticipated this; many of them praise the original actors to the hilt and seem downright apologetic to be playing their characters.
  • Monkey Punch by Yasuo Yamada, as mentioned on the front page. A very tragic example since Yamada went to his grave never quite forgiving Monkey Punch for what happened during Fuma's production.
• So Bad, It's Good: The English dub by AnimEigo. Jigen's voice in particular sounds less like a legitimate voice and more like something you would expect out of an Abridged Series dub.
• Vindicated by History: Fans seem to have slowly warmed up to the replacement cast of the Japanese dub, as Toshio Furukawa sometimes does Lupin lines at cons. The fact that nearly thirty years have passed and two of the replacements are dead may have helped. Also probably helping is TMS's mass-replacement of the core cast in 2011, which proved to fans once and for all that the franchise could continue without them.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Say what you will about TMS's decision to recast the characters for budgetary reasons, but there's no denying that it resulted in some of the best animation in the franchise, second only to The Castle of Cagliostro.
• What Could Have Been: Had there not been such an extreme backlash against this movie on the part of Lupin fans, these five actors could have become the new permanent cast, and the franchise itself may have gone in a very different, more experimental, direction – hell, the anime industry itself might have changed, as acceptance of replacements here could easily have led to more long-running anime franchises switching their actors out more often when they got too expensive. Instead, Lupin reverted back to form two years later and remained in something of a stasis for the next two decades.

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