Samurai Pizza Cats: the anime, the dub, and the game

Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast from the Past! is a new video game about the robotic cats from a 1990 television comedy. Blast Zero, a studio in the Netherlands, is developing it. Red Dunes Games, in Abu Dhabi, is publishing it. On Steam the release line still reads "To be announced," and the store page says the game is not available yet. A Red Dunes note carried by Games Press, datelined 3 September 2026, gives the window as 2027 on all major platforms. No day and no month appear in that note. A full release date is unannounced.

The demo people could actually play was a floor build at Tokyo Game Show 2026. Tatsunoko Production, the studio that animated the original series, said on 10 September 2026 that the trial would be shown only at Makuhari Messe, from 17 to 21 September 2026. Games Press put the booth at Hall 7, number N03. That week is over. This page was checked on 23 October 2026, and Steam was not offering the demo as a download.

Under the game sits the TV series. In Japan the title is Kyatto Ninden Teyandee, written キャッ党忍伝てやんでえ. Wikipedia glosses that as "Cat-Party Ninja Legend What the Heck?" Tatsunoko's press note calls it a science-fiction period comedy: animal robots in a city named Edoropolis, a secret ninja team called the Nyankee, and an enemy ninja group, the Karakara clan. It aired from February 1990 to February 1991, 54 episodes, about 30 minutes each. Wikipedia gives the TV Tokyo span as 1 February 1990 to 12 February 1991. Saban Entertainment picked up the North American rights in 1991 and produced a 52-episode English version titled Samurai Pizza Cats. The dub's first broadcast on record is ITV in Britain on 31 August 1991. YTV in Canada followed in 1992. US syndication came in 1996. The cats deliver pizza in Little Tokyo, the English name for Edoropolis, and they fight in bright costumes. Treat the whole thing as a comedy about robotic cats. Battlefield history lives somewhere else.

The series and the game, side by side

Beginners usually meet one of two titles and assume the other is the same object with a fresh coat of paint. It helps to split them before the jokes start. The television show is finished. The game is still in production. One you watch. The other you are meant to play, once a store actually sells it.

Steam's own description puts the Big Cheese back on a scheme to take Little Tokyo, and it tells the player to switch cats, explore, level up, and equip special cards. That matches the fuller game Games Press described on 10 September 2026: a new adventure, with role-playing customization on top of the platforming. The booth build was the narrow slice. Tatsunoko said the demo skipped the wide field and the role-playing layer so the lines at the show would keep moving. If someone tells you they "beat the demo," they played a sample, or they are remembering a trailer.

There is an older game too, and it is easy to mix up with this one. Wikipedia records a Tecmo title for the Famicom, released in Japan on 19 July 1991. It never had an official Western release. Blast from the Past is the 2020s project. Different decade, different developer, different publisher.

What the floor demo contained

Tatsunoko and Games Press described the same booth from two desks. Read them together and the shape of the sample is clear. You did not need a review score to see what was on the machine. Neither source published one, and this page will not invent one.

• Place and time: Makuhari Messe, Hall 7, booth N03, 17 to 21 September 2026. Tatsunoko said the trial stayed on the show floor.
• Three playable cats. Games Press mapped them to the old names: Speedy (Yattaro) in close combat, Guido (Sukashii) on aerial platforming, Polly (Pururun) with projectiles. Tatsunoko used the Japanese names and said you could switch among them.
• The slice on the machine was action and platforming in Edoropolis, against familiar enemies, plus new animated scenes made inside Blast Zero. Tatsunoko was plain that those scenes are new drawings that imitate the 1990s look.
• Left for the full game: the wide field, exploration, character leveling, and the card upgrades. Games Press also said the plot is a new story, not a replay of old episodes. Japanese and English scripts are being written as separate versions, according to Sultan Darmaki of Red Dunes on that 10 September note.

The Japanese demo script is by Satoru Akahori, who structured and wrote for the original series. Tatsunoko's cast list for the new recordings names Kappei Yamaguchi as Yattaro, Seiichiro Yamashita as Sukashii, and Ai Orikasa as Pururun. Yamashita replaces Jurota Kosugi, the original voice of Sukashii. Koichi Yamadera plays Karamaru, Satomi Koorogi plays Otama, and Kenyu Horiuchi narrates. The 3 September Games Press note says the game will use actors from the original television series. It does not print a full English cast list, so this page will not invent one.

On the Japanese release the game's full title is キャッ党忍伝てやんでえ ～復活のニャンキー！ やっぱり明日は日本晴れ！ Tatsunoko labels Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast from the Past! as the original title. If a shop listing drops the exclamation mark or shortens the Japanese line, you are still looking at this project, as long as Blast Zero and Red Dunes Games are the names on the page.

Joke gear and real samurai gear

The costumes borrow words a history reader already knows: samurai, ninja, sword, armor. The pictures do something else with them. Edoropolis is a portmanteau of Edo and metropolis, a robot city dressed up in period shapes. Little Tokyo is the English label for that same gag. Neither name is a map you can walk with a 17th-century gazetteer.

Britannica's samurai article is the clean outside check. Samurai were members of Japan's warrior class. The class rose in the 12th century and dominated government until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. In the early Tokugawa years they were made a closed caste, under 10 percent of the population, and the two swords stayed the public mark of that rank. A long peace pushed many of them into office work. That is a social history. It does not look like a cat in a cape delivering a pie between explosions.

Other fiction on this site borrows the same vocabulary and bends it for a story. Samurai Champloo mixes period scenery with modern music. Rurouni Kenshin sets a made-up swordsman against the Meiji years. Pizza Cats is further from the archive than either of those, because the heroes are machines and the plot is a string of gags. If a joke and a museum label use one word, myth and reality is the page that keeps the two apart.

How the English dub renamed the show

Saban did not ship a careful subtitle track. Wikipedia's account of the English version is specific, and it is the reason the names feel like a different series. When Saban licensed the show in 1991, Tatsunoko had not kept a clean set of production papers. The translations that arrived were bad, incomplete, or absent. The English writers built new dialogue on top of the Japanese pictures. Michael McConnohie, a writer and voice actor on the dub, later told fans there were "no chains upon us." The theme song even jokes about it, in the line "As soon as someone finds the script, we might begin the show."

The episode count is the simplest trace of that edit. Japan aired 54 episodes. Saban released 52. The two left out were clip shows, which Wikipedia says did little for an ongoing plot and were never given English soundtracks. If a guide online lists a plot you cannot find in the Japanese episode, you may be reading a Saban invention. This page does not print an episode list, because the titles diverge and a partial list would pretend to be complete.

The rename was systematic, and it is worth learning the pairs before you search. Yattaro is Speedy Cerviche. Pururun is Polly Esther. Sukashii is Guido Anchovy. The three of them, plus their operator Otama (Francine in English), work out of a pizza shop for Inuyama Wanko-no-Kami, who became Big Al Dente. Their team name, Nyankee, puns on a cat's meow and on "Yankee." Saban dropped the pun and called them the Samurai Pizza Cats. The city stopped being Edoropolis and became Little Tokyo.

Villains moved even further. Kitsunezuka Ko'on-no-Kami is a fox in the Japanese version, a scheming minister. In English he is Seymour "The Big" Cheese, and he reads as a rat. His crow adviser, Karasu Gennari-sai, became Jerry Atric. The crow ninja captain Karamaru became Bad Bird. The figurehead ruler, Iei-Iei Tokugawa, became Emperor Fred. You can watch either language and follow the same chase. You cannot quote an English speech and call it what the Japanese character said.

The English path to the screen, in the order Wikipedia records it, runs like this.

1. Saban takes the North American rights in 1991 and commissions new scripts because the Japanese paperwork will not support a straight translation.
2. The new dialogue leans on puns, pop-culture asides, and jokes aimed at the viewer. The pictures stay the Tatsunoko footage.
3. Fifty-two episodes are finished. The two Japanese clip shows stay undubbed, which is why the counts never match.
4. Britain hears it first, on ITV, on 31 August 1991. Canada's YTV airs it in 1992. US syndication waits until 1996. A 1990 American broadcast is not in the record.

Home video came much later. Wikipedia notes that Discotek Media released the uncut Japanese set on DVD in North America on 30 April 2013, and the Saban English set on 30 July 2013. Streaming deals have moved since then. Check a current store if you want to watch tonight. The comedy will still be a comedy on whichever edition you find.

The new game is inheriting that split on purpose. Darmaki's comment on the 10 September Games Press release says the Japanese and English versions are being written as distinct works, so each region keeps the humor it already knows. Akahori's name on the Japanese demo script ties one side to the 1990 writers' room. The English side has a different set of proper names, and it has had that set since 1991. A player who grew up on Speedy will not be "wrong" about the dub. They will be wrong only if they treat Speedy's dialogue as a translation, or as a lesson in swordsmanship.

A citation you can actually check

If you need one line for a school note, use the title and the date you opened, and say which version you mean. The Japanese series is Kyatto Ninden Teyandee, February 1990 to February 1991, Tatsunoko Production. The English dub is Samurai Pizza Cats, a Saban adaptation from 1991. The game on Steam is Samurai Pizza Cats: Blast from the Past!, developer Blast Zero, publisher Red Dunes Games, release to be announced, with a publisher ETA of 2027 and a floor demo that ran 17 to 21 September 2026.

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