Trivia / Lupin III: Part III

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• Cut Short: Luckily, only slightly. 52 episodes were planned but only 50 were made.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The second opening that was used from Episode 27 to Episode 50 does not have a clean opening on any release or the upload from TMS to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the anime. The clean opening is considered lost.
• Later-Installment Weirdness: The later episodes are notoriously Off-Model.
• Macekre: When the series was originally dubbed into Italian it underwent some heavy censorship, with some episodes edited to the point of not making sense. This was due to Mediaset having the rights to the series, and following pretty strict rules when it came to the localization of animation: much of the content deemed not suitable for children, such as nudity and heavy violence, was edited out pretty roughly, and in some cases even scenes that affected the plot but with barely any objectionable content were dropped for no apparent given reason. And sadly it wasn't just a case of the episodes being dubbed and drastically edited down for tv broadcasting, like it had happened for the other two previous series - some episodes have entire minutes of footage that wasn't dubbed at all, and on the official DVDs the audio track abruptly switches to Japanese during these cut scenes. This dub also suffered from PAL Speedup resorting to higher pitched and sped up music with Sexy Adventure being the most obvious. On the bright side, on April 2, 2021 Yamato Video had announced a new uncut Italian dub for the Blu-ray release, with previews of Episode 14 and Episode 18, so this might be finally averted.
• Role Reprise: The Lupin III (Red Jacket) cast: Yasuo Yamada (Lupin), Gorō Naya (Zenigata), Kiyoshi Kobayashi (Jigen), Makio Inoue (Goemon) & Eiko Masuyama (Fujiko) all return to voice their characters. Sadly, this is the last television series to feature this cast.
• Schedule Slip: The airing in Japan was constantly delayed due to baseball and the original broadcast ended up being extended to one and half years. One example being Showtime Smells Of Death where it was finished in June however got aired in November. Due to this 52 episodes were originally planned however only 50 got produced.
• Sleeper Hit: A common misconception was that the series was very unpopular however it was more popular than expected. TMS originally only planned 2 cours (26 episodes) for the series however it gained popularity and another 2 cours was commissioned.
• What Could Have Been: Had Geneon not been hit with their financial problems, then the series would have been dubbed for the first time in English alongside a dub of Part 1 and the rest of Part 2.