One OVA to celebrate fifty years of Lupin III. With two resurrected villain who drop Lupin into his own past only to learn what makes Lupin and his friends so special. This is a very specific kind of anniversary special.
Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Lupin the Third: Is Lupin Still Burning?, the 2018 OVA made to mark fifty years of the franchise, directed by Jun Kawagoe with Monkey Punch himself serving as general director. (Oddly, this is the only Lupin movie to end up on Toonami or Adult Swim, no idea why).
The setup is a direct callback to the very first episode of the original 1971 Green Jacket series: Lupin is participating in a car race at the Hida Speedway, hosted by the supposedly dead Mr. X, while Zenigata is also in the race and Fujiko is attempting to steal from a vault on the premises. Mr. X turns out to be very much alive, and is in business with the time-manipulating villain Kyosuke Mamo, who displaces Lupin from the present timeline and sends him ricocheting through pivotal moments in his own history.
The OVA's conceit is that Lupin, bumbling through his own timeline, is accidentally unwriting the relationships that define his entire life, and has to find a way to correct them without Mamo noticing. Zenigata follows him through all of it, apparently completely unaware that the timeline is shifting, because Zenigata is simply built differently. The ending leans hard into the idea that the Lupin gang is essentially cosmically inevitable, that no amount of interference can actually keep them apart, which is exactly what a fiftieth anniversary special should be doing.
We discuss where the OVA sits in the wider Lupin III catalogue and how it works both as a standalone entry and as a dense bundle of franchise references.
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