Doraemon ran on TV Asahi for 26 years, from April 2, 1979, to June 24, 2005. That run produced over 1,787 episodes and 30 specials, making it the longest of the three animated shows built from Fujiko F. Fujio’s manga. It is the successor to the original 1973 anime, and the far more successful one.
The first attempt did not last. The 1979 series did, and the reason is not the robot. It is the boy.
A Cat Robot and a Ten-Year-Old
The premise is simple enough to fit in a sentence. A cat-like robot from the 22nd century travels to the present day to help Nobita Nobi, a 10-year-old elementary school boy the show calls uneducated, naïve and clumsy, and to guide him toward a better future.
Nobita’s friends are Shizuka Minamoto, his closest friend and love interest, and Takeshi “Gian” Gōda and Suneo Honekawa. The last two are sometimes kind. Mostly they bully him.
That is the engine. A typical episode has Nobita asking Doraemon for a gadget, usually to finish a personal task or to get even with Gian and Suneo. The gadget causes chaos for Nobita and everyone near him. Every week. For 26 years.
Nobuyo Ōyama Is the Show
The cast is the argument for the series lasting as long as it did, and one name sits above the rest.
Nobuyo Ōyama voices Doraemon. The series is sometimes called the Ōyama Edition in Asia, after her. That is not a marketing label. It is how a region distinguishes this Doraemon from the others, and it tells you what her performance became.
Around her, the ensemble is stable and specific:
- Noriko Ohara as Nobita Nobi
- Sachiko Chijimatsu as Tamako Nobi
- Kaneta Kimotsuki as Suneo Honekawa
- Michiko Nomura as Shizuka Minamoto
- Keiko Yokozawa as Dorami
- Kazuya Tatekabe as Takeshi Gouda
- Rei Sakuma as mini-Dora
- Sumiko Shirakawa as Hidetoshi Dekisugi
Eight supporting voices, one lead, two and a half decades.
Three Doraemons, Three Fates
The dubbing history is where the series gets strange, and it is worth setting the versions side by side.
| Version | Producer / Broadcaster | Where and when it aired |
|---|---|---|
| The Adventures of Albert and Sidney | CINAR, Canada | Barbados, CBC TV 8, late 1980s–early 1990s |
| Singapore dub | Made in Singapore | Channel i and Kids Central, Singapore, 2002–2003 |
| Speedy Video dub | Speedy Video, unofficial | Malaysia, on video CD |
The United States never got a version at all. The series was planned for Superstation WTBS, now TBS, and never premiered. The source gives no reason.
That gap matters more than it looks. Doraemon has been dubbed for broadcast in 60 countries. One of them is not the country that would have put it on a superstation in the 1980s. The show became a global property without the American market.
The unofficial dub is the tell. A series big enough that Malaysia gets an unauthorized English version is a series with reach the official releases did not cover.
What 26 Years Actually Costs
Here is the case against Doraemon, and it is the same case as the case for it.
The structure does not develop. Episode one and the last episode run on the same loop: Nobita wants something, Doraemon provides it, the gadget backfires. Gian and Suneo stay bullies. Nobita stays clumsy. Shizuka stays the love interest. The show is a machine that produces variations, not a story that goes anywhere.
For a viewer who wants an arc, that is a wall. For a viewer who wants a reliable half hour, it is the whole point. The series was built to be watched out of order, in any order, by children who would age out and be replaced by other children.
What holds up is the sadness underneath the loop. Nobita is not a hero. He is a boy who needs a robot from the 22nd century to survive the fourth grade, and the robot keeps handing him tools that make things worse. The show never treats that as tragedy. It treats it as Tuesday.
That is a harder trick than it sounds, and it is why this version outlasted the one before it.
The American non-premiere is the one loose thread. A series with over 1,787 episodes, 30 specials and a 60-country reach should have a clear answer for why it skipped the largest English-language market. The source does not provide one, and that absence is a real hole in the record.
The formula is not inventive, and it never tries to be. It is durable, specific and carried by a lead performance that named an era. TMDB’s audience score sits at 7.7 out of 10 across 618 votes, and that is the right number: high enough to credit the craft, short of the top tier because the loop never once breaks itself.
7.7 of 10.
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