Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin (銀牙～流れ星銀～?, literally - "Silver Fang: Shooting Star Gin") is an adventure manga by Yoshihiro Takahashi. It was published by Shueisha in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1983 to 1987, and collected in 18 bound volumes. It received the 1987 Shogakukan Manga Award for best shōnen series.
The series tells the story of an Akita Inu pup called Gin (Japanese for "silver") who leaves his master, a young boy named Daisuke, to join a pack of wild dogs. The pack is gathering strong dogs from all over Japan to fight a deranged bear named Akakabuto and his minions. The story begins from the point of view of the humans, but swings to the dogs with episode seven of the anime. It is in that episode that the audience hears the dogs communicating with each other through speech, though it continues to be barks and whines to human ears. Takahashi was reportedly inspired by a news article about hunting dogs that had been abandoned by their masters and had begun living as wild animals.
Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin was adapted as a 21-episode anime television series by Toei Animation. In western countries the anime was released as a set of four VHS tapes, and censored for violent images. This led to the removal of several plot-critical scenes, including all footage from the episodes preceding the series finale as well as the deaths of certain characters. Due to limitations of sound-editing at the time this resulted in the background music of certain scenes to be lost.
Atypically, the anime has become extremely popular in the Nordic countries (particularly Finland, Denmark and Sweden). The anime has been dubbed in Korean, Finnish, Hungarian, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The Finnish dub, Hopeanuoli, was created by Golden Voice OY and became wildly popular. In 2003 the uncensored and non-dubbed version of the cartoon was released in Finland and Sweden as a 5 DVD box set. A corresponding DVD set was released in Denmark and Norway October 3, 2006.
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