**UPDATE** - I have recently gotten in touch with MaruChanSubs and have offered to help him time the old subtitles to the new Blu-Ray footage for him to release properly. Of course, he wants to also redo some of his old translations, so it will be a while until he can upload anything. This post can be a nice stop-gap until then, but once the properly retimed eps are put out, I will be hiding this release.  This is, as of April 2022, the best possible collection of Chibi Maruko-chan episodes with English subtitles. It is a repack/remux from several different sources, covering episodes 1-80, 873, and three movies. Chibi Maruko-chan is something of a cultural institution in Japan, not unlike Charlie Brown. The animated series is one of the longest continuously running cartoons of all time, up there with the Simpsons. Chances are, if you ever get a chance to speak to a normal Japanese adult (as in someone with a job and relationships and stuff, not some weird otaku), this will be one of the few anime they will actually know anything about, and will probably have some nostalgic memories watching it as a kid with their family. I'd recommend this show to anybody currently learning Japanese, or anybody who is interested in learning more about modern Japanese culture in terms of what normal people enjoy watching. Unfortunately, given how long the series is, combined with the fact that the west already has a plethora of television shows that already fill the need of this series, it has never really gotten any sort of release in English. There is some Indian TV station that has produced a locally made dub in an English pidgin, and that has been uploaded to YouTube as the official "English" version, but it's so terrible that I can't recommend anybody watch it. However, despite this challenge, somebody going under the name "MaruChanSubs" decided to take it upon themselves and produce a fansub for this series. Starting a few years ago, they were making some great progress, completing at least 81 episodes and two movies. Unfortunately, this was not to last.  Despite the modern day internet being rife with intrusive copyright enforcement, complete with automatic AI detection of offending content, MaruChanSubs thought it would be a good idea to mainly upload their work to YouTube. This was around 2017-2020, which is quick remarkable, given how fansubs have moved on from YouTube almost over a decade ago. After uploading around 80 episodes, the copyright bots took notice, and NipponAnimation had all of the episodes removed. After this happened, MaruChanSubs seems to have become incredibly discouraged, and has not posted many updates to their twitter account since. Luckily, all was not lost. Somebody managed to download the entire output of the YouTube channel before it was taken down, and... uploaded it to archive.org. Of course, it didn't take long for this to be taken down as well, but in this time someone else managed to again download everything once more. This was then uploaded to mega, which was then finally uploaded to nyaa, where it now resides without fear of being DMCA'd. However, given that these videos were from YouTube, this meant that they were both hardsubbed and heavily compressed. Not helping matters is the fact that subs were first implanted on the DVD release of the film, which overall resulted in incredibly low quality. Thankfully, MaruChanSubs uploaded episodes 1-30 and 60-65 in batches on Nyaa, all softsubbed. These videos still used the DVD and are fairly low quality, but since they were softsubs, it was possible to transplant them into a remux of the Blu-Ray release, which looks much better. That covers about half of MaruChanSubs's output, leaving the other half in highly compressed SD quality. The difference between the Blu-Ray remux vs. the heavily compressed SD YouTube DL is night and day.  This brings us to this release. As mentioned before, the video and audio for about half of the episodes comes from a Blu-Ray remux, while the other half are low quality YouTube DLs. (Note: Episode 8 was not included on the Blu-Ray due to some copyright shenanigans. It is still soft-subbed here, but it just uses the DVD footage instead.) Since there is a major difference in quality, the two types of episodes are split into two different folders. The YouTube DLs look pretty terrible, but given the circumstances this had to be done to preserve as much of MaruChanSubs's work as possible. It may be be technically possible to use OCR to grab the subtitles from the DLs, but this is a lot of effort and beyond my skills. Complicated matters is the fact that some of the hardsubbed episodes have the intros removed. I think it would be more reasonable to wait if MaruChanSubs would ever release the rest of the episodes as softsubs for remuxing. Given what materials are available, what is included in this release is currently the best possible English version of this series. Also, given that the Blu-Ray and DVDs may have slightly different timing, the subtitles may be slightly desynced in places. I have checked most episodes and they seem fine in what I've seen, but I have not done a 100% sweep of every remuxed episode. If there are any timing issues, I apologize. Also included are the textless opening and endings from the Blu-Ray, along with three movies. My Favorite Song and The Boy From Italy are both softsubs from MaruChanSubs. There may be a higher quality raw version of My Favorite Song floating around out there without the Animax logo, but I couldn't find it. Also included is one simply titled Chibi Maruko-chan (1990). This one seems to be a much older fansub by a group called Seichi, possibly sourced from a vhs capture of a laserdisc. Of course, this is also hardsubbed, so I can't transplant the subs onto a higher quality version of the movie either. The description from whoever uploaded it on nyaa said they found it on some "internet cafe file server", so it is definitely very old. Given the use of comic sans in the subtitle text, translation issues in the literal opening song, and the fact it's encoded in xvid, needless to say it's the lowest quality thing in this pack. However, given that it is the only English version of this movie I could find, it is included here. Anyway, here are all the sources: https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1357638 - Blu-Ray Remux by "anonymous" :^) https://nyaa.iss.one/user/MaruChanSubs - Softsub releases by MaruChanSubs https://nyaa.iss.one/view/1387836 - YouTube DL of hardsub releases by rheph Thanks to everyone who uploaded anything, seeded, or even just cares about Chibi Maruko-chan outside of Japan. This wouldn't have been possible without your effort. While this may be the best possible English release of this show right now, it doesn't have to be in the future! Anybody who has better quality video sources, subtitles, or anything that would be useful to an update to this release, please get in touch. I am Mr. Manager in both the FemboyFilms and hydes discord servers. Anyway, remember to dance the pompokolin, whatever that means.  See you next time.