Joseph Luster
February 8, 2022 
February 1 saw the launch of a Kickstarter campaign that aims to fund a 15th anniversary Blu-ray release of Oban Star-Racers, a Franco-Japanese collaboration featuring songs by Yoko Kanno and music by Taku Iwasaki. 15 years after its airing on NHK-BS in Japan and Toon Disney and ABC Family in the US, among other stations, the series is looking to return on home video, and the campaign managed to get completely funded within about an hour of launching.
At the time of this writing, the 15th anniversary project has fulfilled a bunch of stretch goals—the most recent of which is for a featurette on early images and concepts—and is hovering around 600 percent of its initial $34,316 goal.
One of the many benefits of the campaign is that it will encourage the creative team—including creator/writer/director Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, artistic director/head character designer/co-director Thomas Romain, and background/mecha designer Stanislas Brunet—to continue developing future Oban-related projects.
Check out the pitch for the Kickstarter:
More on the thought that went into it:
Since no distributor ever bothered to do so, the indie studio behind the series has decided to take the matter into its own hands. To celebrate that 15th Anniversary, and after several years of difficult and costly negotiations to secure all the rights it needed, and then restore the original HD masters and re-synchronize the existing dubs together, Sav! The World is finally ready to launch the series’ Blu-ray Kickstarter campaign. It will begin on Tuesday February 1st 2022. That release will allow fans, as well as animation enthusiasts, to discover the series, for the very first time, the way it was always meant to be seen but was never made accessible until now: in 1080p, 24 frames per second, 4/3 format.
