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Theres a few clips on YouTube. The show was known as "TechnoVoyager" in Japan, its only thanks to a bit of an alphabet mix-up that "TB" appeared on the sides of the vehicles...!

Was it all the result of 'Engrish'? In that case, was the opening credits re-done for the English version with revised footage? Since it spells out 'Thunderbird' 1/2/3 etc at the opening credits.

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I only saw a couple of satuday morning episodes of this anime and it looked pretty good, but I never found out what the story was about.

**edited because I skimmed this thread too quickly, whoops!**

I'll do a google search to find out more

Edited by boinger
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  • 2 weeks later...

I used to love this show as well, and I particularly liked Kentaro Haneda's elegant score for the series. In fact, quite a few people who worked on Macross, aside from the great Haneda also worked on various episodes of this series, including Noboru Ishiguro and Haruhiko Mikimoto. I've made it a point to find out as much as I can about the series, since to this day it remains something of a rarity.

For a start, the actual intended name of the original Japanese version wasn't TechnoVoyager, but rather TechnoBoyger (yes, missing an 'a'!), an apparent portmanteau of Technology, Boys and Voyager, three things that essentially encapsulated the series for its intended audience. So the 'TB' thing on the vehicles was meant to be there from the beginning!

There were only 18 episodes of TechnoBoyger in Japan, but actually 24 episodes of Thunderbirds 2086. When TB2086 was made, they didn't just dub the existing 18 episodes. Instead, some of the existing animation was replaced by new animation between the two versions, and of course 6 whole new episodes that had been in various stages of development in Japan were finally completed.

Even though there's two versions of this show, episodes are surprisingly rare to locate. Until early 2006, no episodes of TechnoBoyger had ever been repeated or released on home video. Thankfully, they were eventually re-broadcast on an anime channel in Japan. A total of 17 episodes of Thunderbirds 2086 made it to home video in the UK, and Japan also got some TB2086 episodes on tape in English with Japanese subtitles, making a grand total of 19 episodes that were released in one format or another. I've never seen anyone who had even close to this number of episodes to trade.

In fact, several years ago, I put out a plea for any and all TB2086/TechnoBoyger episodes and got one response from a guy in Australia who apparently ran his own TV archive. He said he had amassed 11 episodes of the Japanese original (prior to the 2006 repeat), and would be perfectly willing to trade any of those impossible-to-find-at-the-time episodes for any other similarly-impossible-to-find TechnoBoyger episodes he didn't already have locked away in his basement. Considering he was merely an obsessive collector of Television rather than specifically a TB2086 fan, I understandably found his offer pretty selfish and rude!

Ah, the perils of actually trying to enjoy this show! Hopefully ITC Japan may put out a hybrid collection of both versions of the series at some point.

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I have nothing but love for this show. It was one of the first satruday morning cartoons that I can recall knowing was japanese (before I had even heard the terms anime or even japanimation). Every year or so I make a trip to all the torrent sites I have bookmarked in hopes that somebody had uploaded an episode or two, but there's never any. However, somebody has uploaded several episodes onto YouTube since the last time I looked. They're fairly decent quality too.

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  • 5 years later...

Rise, RISE thread! I say, RIIISE!

I have an old video tape of the first two (?) episodes squirreled away with some others.

Went looking for it on DVD, thinking "oh, I'll have NO problem finding this" and was surprised to discover the opposite.

If I had known, I would have ripped it to DVD years ago when I had the equipment....

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I can only find 17 of 24 Thunderbirds 2086 episodes on youtube. Those youtube episodes

are the same ones that were on torrent sites. So, 7 episodes are still

unavailable. I guess that is as good as it gets for now.

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