Trivia / The Fuma Conspiracy

• Acclaimed Flop: When Fuma came out in 1987, it received quite a lot of praise from critics for its smooth, movie-quality animation – and its animation is pretty fantastic. Regular fans, however, HATED it due to its lacking the original voice actors and composer Yuji Ohno. The backlash spooked TMS into rehiring the old cast two years later and not replacing them again (except for the necessary recasting of Lupin after Yasuo Yamada's death) until 2011.^note  By the time of 2010's The Last Job, the final special to feature all of the surviving original cast, some fans had begun calling for the longtime voices to be retired – at that point, 23 years after Fuma, all of the original actors were at least in their 70's (Gorō Naya was in his 80's) and they sounded like it.
  • To this day, you're not likely to find many Lupin fans on either side of the Pacific willing to praise this OAV, a legacy of the 1987 reactions continuing to percolate through subsequent generations of fans. That said, the whole Keep Circulating the Tapes situation below, worse than most other parts of the franchise, certainly can't be helping one bit.
• Completely Different Title: AnimEigo released this OAV under the name "Rupan III" (a literal romanization of the katakana that make up Lupin's name). This was because, although the original Arsène Lupin stories had fallen into the Public Domain in the USA shortly before AnimEigo acquired the Fuma licence, the general agreement TMS offered them had been written up in the 80's, when Arsène Lupin was still under copyright and TMS was under constant threat of lawsuit by Maurice Leblanc's estate. The change also extended to the dub and subtitles (Discotek Media's re-release several years later corrected the subtitles, as well as the title itself, leaving the English dub as the only artifact of this situation).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: AnimEigo had licensed it (as Rupan III, due to contracts) first on LaserDisc in 1995 and then on DVD in 2003, but their release went out of print. Discotek Media had rescued it and rereleased it on DVD in 2007, but their release also went out of print, putting it right back into this realm. Not helping matters is the fact that at the moment, neither release is exactly cheap, with Discotek's release being particularly expensive.
• Money, Dear Boy: Or rather, lack of money. A tight budget meant TMS had to choose between the extraordinarily expensive voice actors or smooth animation; they could not have both. TMS chose to spend the budget on animation. Many fans of the time believed TMS chose wrong.
• The Other Darrin: Given that there were budgetary limitations, TMS had to replace the regular voice actors with a less-expensive cast from Aoni Production. The list includes Toshio Furukawa as Lupin, Banjo Ginga as Jigen, Kaneto Shiozawa as Goemon, Mami Koyama as Fujiko and Seizō Katō as Zenigata.
  • Even on the English side, infamous for its multiple Lupin casts, this applies. Fuma is the only Lupin dub to use the North Carolina acting pool (nearly everything else Lupin has come out of LA, Texas, or in two instances, the UK).

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