Indeed, as I have cause to mention in the commentary track. :) AnimEigo used the alternate English rendering "Rupan."

(That alternate English rendering makes it a little more understandable why there's an album of romantic Lupin III music called "Isn't it Lupintic". In Japanese, the pronunciation of "Lupintic" is similar enough to "Romantic" to make it work as a pun.)

After a few years, when more of the Arsène Lupin works had entered the public domain, the renaming wasn't seen as necessary and subsequent releases went back to his original name.

Sounds like a pretty cool idea. I do hope you'll check out my own commentary track, too. :)

I think he was complaining that I was called Slashdot reader #14,247 rather than Slashdot member or participant #14,247.

(And now I find myself wanting to sing, "...I'm Jean Valjean!" :) )

It might make a little more sense distilled into this article, which I wrote for another blog afterward to discuss the matter.

Effectively, the original Maurice Leblanc Arsène Lupin stories borrowed Sherlock Holmes, much to Conan Doyle's annoyance. Subsequently, manga writer Monkey Punch based Lupin III on the Leblanc stories without permission, much to the Leblanc estate's later annoyance. (He was able to get away with it because Japan didn't honor trade copyrights at the time, and the Leblanc estate didn't even find out until years later.) Castle of Cagliostro drew on the Leblanc stories and the Lupin III franchise, and a number of other works, and inspired countless other works that borrowed from it in return.

And it never would have happened if the rights holders had been able to shut Leblanc and Monkey Punch down.

Cory Doctorow wears the habitual rose-colored glasses of the impassioned activist, so I tend to take what he says with more than a few grains of salt. Nonetheless, it's nice to hear a little optimism even if it may be largely unfounded. We'll just have to wait and see what comes of it.

Lots of people from the original are involved. It's just that they're mostly involved as writers, rather than in-front-of-the-camera personalities (barring a few amusing cameos).

I never was a huge fan of it, myself. When the episodes were good, it was pretty awesome. But most of them just seemed kind of boring.

Nonetheless, a lot of my friends were into it. And in kind of a meta sense, it's a lot more fun to watch this kind of show together with other people.

This is also why you don't tend to see a lot of Baen ebooks being pirated. Creator requests do carry weight with something this much-loved.

I don't get the sense that there's any animosity between them. In fact, Rifftrax has done a lot to help boost the new season of the show, including giving away Rifftrax videos to backers of the Kickstarter, and of course hosting a MST3K reunion show gathering together as many of the alumni who are still interested in doing riffs as they could get their hands on. I imagine that Rifftrax is enough of a full time job that they don't really have time to spare for the other stuff.

I've also noticed that Rifftraxers Bill Corbett and Mary Jo Pehl are both on writing staff for some of the episodes, too.

Actually, you can earn multiples of 10 pokecoins per day. Every 21 hours, you can get 10 coins for every gym you control at the end of the 21-hour countdown timer. I've never managed to have more than 2 or 3 at a time when that happened, but I expect when I get some more powerful critters I'll be able to do better.