Trivia / Captain Tsubasa

• Bootstrapped Theme: The French and Spanish versions of the original series's opening songs were actually reprises of the Italian opening theme for the original Lupin III animated adaptation, due to the airing rights of both animes being owned by the same company at the time of their original airing in Italy and France.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Tsubasa is often voiced by female voice actresses... one of them being Yōko Ogai, Youichi Takahashi's ex-wife. Avoided in the latter half of both J and Road to 2002, in J, Ogai reprises her role as Tsubasa as a child while his adult self is voiced by Nozomu Sasaki and in Road to 2002 his child self is (shockingly enough) voiced by Kikuko Inoue and his adult one by Tomokazu Seki.
  • Like Tsubasa, Taro Misaki is almost always voiced by women except for the second half of Road to 2002, where Kosuke Toriumi takes over Satsuki Yukino's work.
  • Tsubasa's Arabic voice actress is a woman and he's her most famous role.
  • Ryo until Road to 2002.
  • The Tachibana twins.
  • Mostly averted in the French dubs. Unexpectedly, given that he's usually voiced by male actors regardless of his age, Kojiro Hyuga of all characters plays this straight for both the French dub of the original series and the early sections of the Japanese version of Road to 2002.
• Executive Meddling: Takahashi has had to deal more than once with this. I.e., at least two matches from World Youth Cup were totally skipped.
• Cross-Regional Voice Acting: The Latin American Spanish dub of the 2018 series is a quite interesting case: Unlike what happened with the previous series, when the Argentinian characters were dubbed by Mexicans, the dub of the Junior Youth Arc series features those characters dubbed by Argentinian voice actors, complete with their local accents.
• Fan Translation: The series is graced with an extremely devoted Scanlation scene. A person who goes by the name Shinji has translated every single printed piece for Captain Tsubasa up to date, all by himself! (THANK YOU KID!) Some related merchandise like video games was also translated by Shinji.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For Latin American fans, the 80's anime, Road to 2002 and the 2018 anime are still legally available on the region thanks to ocasional re-runs and streaming. However, the 90's anime (Captain Tsubasa J) hasn't been re-run on any channel in the region since 2004 due to the distrubutor of the series Cloverway going bankrupt and various legal troubles preventing another distrubutor like Rose Entertainment (owners of the original anime and Road to 2002) or Televix (owners of the 2018) to pick up the license again. All dubbed episodes have been preserved online thanks to fans but there's no legal alternative for the series coming anytime soon.
• Life Imitates Art: The Captain Tsubasa wiki literally has a Players influenced by Captain Tsubasa section.
• Long-Runners: Has run from 1980 onwards... almost uninterrupted.
• No Export for You:
  • Almost all the games were released only in Japan, but Konami released an European version of the Captain Tsubasa game for Nintendo DS. On the other hand, this is finally averted with both the Tatakae Dream Team smartphone game and with the Rise of New Champions game, being the latter the first Captain Tsubasa console game being released worldwide, and in the same time with Japan, no less
  • Regarding the Latin American edition, the opening was changed into a brand-new one, instead of just simply translate the lyrics. Oddly enough, the Japanese versions can be still heard if you use SAP instead.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: There is a popular and persistent rumor about the finale that stated that the whole series is All Just a Dream, ending with Tsubasa waking up in a hospital, where it's shown that he was run over by a truck during the first episode and that his legs were amputated since the accident. While many people have stated that they "saw" the episode, this is in fact, false since there is nothing to prove it as real (besides a poorly photoshopped picture of Tsubasa in a hospital bed): there are three anime adaptations of the manga (the last one being Road to 2002), the scene with the truck is exclusive to the first series, and the creator has been working in several sequels and spin-offs with the latest anime Reboot in 2018
• Playing Against Type: Kikuko Inoue is famous for voicing older sisters, mothers and the occasional sexy villainess, in Road to 2002 she voices Tsubasa (as a child), who is as far away from her usual typecast as you can get.
• Role Reprise:
  • In the Japanese version of the 2018 version, Kenichi Suzumura reprise his role as Genzo Wakabayashi from the 2002 anime.
  • Interestingly enough, Ryōtarō Okiayu reprise his role as the announcer from the 2002 anime in the Rise of New Champions game. This is especially relevant here, since the game is based in the 2018 version, but the announcer in that version was voiced by Nobuo Tobita instead.
  • In a very surprising move, the Latin American Spanish dub of the 2018 anime has Jorge Roig Jr., Ricardo Tejedo and María Fernanda Morales reprising their roles as Kojiro Hyuga, Roberto Hongo and Kaori Matsumoto respectively from the very first anime adaptation.
  • Ditto for the French dub of the 2018 anime: Mathias Kozlowski (Tsubasa), Barbara Tissier (Sanae), Fabrice Josso (Wakabayashi) and Vincent Ropion (Roberto) all reprised their roles from the dub of the 1983 series (albeit with their original Japanese names this time like the above-mentioned Spanish dub).
  • While quite a few characters were darrin'd, the 2017 mobile game, Captain Tsubasa: Dream Team got as much of the surviving original cast from the 80's series as they could to reprise their roles, including the aforementioned Yoko Ogai as Tsubasa.
  • In two-way example, the entire Japanese cast of the 2018 anime reprises their respective roles for the Captain Tsubasa: Rise of New Champions videogame. In turn, the voice actors for the foreign players featured in the game also reprise their respective roles for the 2023 season, which follows up where the previous one left off.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Road to 2002 was going to feature the real life teams showcased in the manga, but negotiations between FIFA and Shueisha were dire, so they were replaced by a Suspiciously Similar Substitute each (FC Barcelona became "FC Catalunya", Juventus FC became "Piamonte FC" and so on). This is speculated to be also the reason why the Road manga was not published outside Asia.

---