Clips from Cinar’s forgotten Doraemon dub, Albert and Sidney, surface
Since its debut in 1970, Fujiko Fujio’s Doraemon has become one of the most enduring pieces of Japanese pop culture. You can find the titular gadget cat on just about any piece of merchandise you can think of, buoyed by a seemingly endless supply of anime episodes and theatrical features. He even served as an ambassador for Tokyo’s Olympic bid. This success, however, has not translated to the English world. Even amongst anime fans, the character might be recognizable, but few could tell you his story.
Multiple attempts have been made to try and introduce the character to English audiences in the western world. The biggest push to date occurred within the last decade, when the Japanese rights holders commissioned a dub of the ongoing 2005 anime series to air on Disney XD in the United States. With a localization (that at times was overzealous) produced by Bang Zoom, the anime finally debuted on July 7, 2014. A year later, a more faithful Hong Kong-based production began airing on Boomerang in the United Kingdom. However, neither attracted an audience large enough for the franchise to thrive. After a second season on Disney XD, Doraemon was done in the United States. The British run failed to make it that long.
If Doraemon’s from the future, how come he didn’t know this would end poorly?
One of, if not the, earliest attempts at bringing Doraemon over occurred decades prior. In 1985, Turner Broadcasting System (TBS) acquired 50 episodes of the 1979 series with the intention of airing it in the United States. However, this never came to pass. That move wasn’t out of place for the company at the time. It had commissioned Cinar to produce an English dub of Tsuburaya’s live-action Ultra Seven, that it then shelved for years. It was similarly reluctant to air G-Force, the second adaptation of Tatsunoko’s Gatchaman anime. Turner also played some role in the English production of Nippon Animation’s The Bush Baby, despite there being no documentation of it ever running on any of their channels. They had a habit of picking up shows and then changing their minds.
This Doraemon incarnation did make it to television … in Barbados. For years, locals have been reminiscing on forums and comment sections about Albert and Sidney, an English version of Doraemon that aired in the late 1980s to early 1990s on public broadcaster CBC TV 8 (no relation to the Canadian company). With little to substantiate either’s existence, there wasn’t much thought given to the possibility of Albert and Sidney being the Turner project.
The pieces began falling into place within the last year. An offhand comment suggesting the Barbados mystery dub might’ve been Canadian led to an important discovery. The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission registered The Adventures of Albert and Sidney as Canadian content on June 6th, 1986 in its dubbing category. That encouraged further digging, which revealed that Montreal’s Cinar Films was distributing the series as 150 ten-minute episodes (which, if aired in threes, would get you 50 half hours). That led to Jérôme Langlois, an American-born musician based in Quebec who listed Albert & Sidney on his site as a project he composed music for on behalf of Cinar and Turner.
After some exchanges back and forth between fans, Langlois confirmed that he had a tape of the show in his possession. It included the theme song, as well as an edited montage of some of his compositions from the series. Earlier this week, he shared footage of it, the first Albert and Sidney clips to ever make it onto the internet:
With only short, out of context clips, it’s difficult to discern how Cinar handled the show. Replacement music and name changes are all we can really glean right now. The keen ears of Behind the Voice Actors’ AVHodgson has pinned A.J. Henderson as Albert (Doraemon), a preteen Steven Bednarski as Sidney (Nobita) and Michael Rudder as his father. There isn’t enough to go off of to make good guesses at the rest of the cast.
Langlois revealed that he worked on the show during the summer of 1985 and received no author rights to the music he created. The original version of the theme song was performed by the children’s choir of Montreal’s F.A.C.E. Turner requested that be replaced with the adult singers you hear in the video. Langlois claimed that Cinar co-founder Ron Weinberg tweaked one or two of the words in the song, so that he could claim ownership of the lyrics, which were written by a local poet. The musician was surprised to hear Albert and Sidney was not released domestically, as he recalled seeing the blue cat on fire hydrants in Quebec.
The whereabouts of full Albert and Sidney episodes remains a mystery. Did it really only air in Barbados? Do the Japanese rights holders have a copy of it? The fact that the series never ran in Canada, even when Cinar owned a stake in Teletoon, suggests their license wasn’t for long. After a series of scandals torpedoed investor interest and landed management criminal convictions, the company’s assets were acquired by Cookie Jar Group in 2003. In 2012, DHX Media (now WildBrain) purchased the latter. Albert and Sidney is unlikely to still be in their archives.
What is for certain is that while Doraemon has yet to become the hit in the English world that its owners would like, it certainly did leave a mark on those that saw it. One of the earliest mentions of Albert and Sidney online is from 2004. The topic creator had memorized show’s lyrics, despite them likely having last seen the show a decade earlier.
Thanks go to the contributors of the Lost Media Wiki, Jérôme Langlois, AVHodgson and the Albert and Sidney fans who wouldn’t let it be forgotten.
I Miss Bionix 
An interesting story!
Thats Lit Dogg