Dragon Half

Dragon Half

ドラゴンハーフ
1993 Production I.G OVA 2 episodes Completed
Comedy Fantasy Parody Adventure
Details & Synopsis
Mink is half human, half dragon, ridiculously strong, equipped with horns, a tail and wings, and desperately in love with the famous dragon-slaying singer Dick Saucer. This is inconvenient for several reasons, beginning with the fact that Dick makes a living killing the half of Mink's family tree she inherited most visibly.

Dragon Half takes the usual fantasy-adventure ingredients and immediately throws dignity out the window. Mink wants a magical potion that could make her completely human and, hopefully, worthy of Dick. Instead she gets dragged through monsters, rival princesses, incompetent villains, absurd tournaments and escalating slapstick where being the heroine mostly means surviving everybody else's terrible decisions.

Released as two OVA episodes in 1993, Dragon Half is one of those compact early-90s anime objects that feels almost engineered for tape trading and convention-room recommendations. The animation snaps between ordinary fantasy designs and deliberately deformed comedy at a moment's notice, while Kotono Mitsuishi plays Mink with exactly the amount of energy the material requires: too much.

It is short. It is loud. It never became the four-episode adaptation originally envisioned, so the story simply stops while the manga keeps going. Somehow that makes the anime feel even more like an artifact of the OVA era.

And yes, the ending theme is called "My Omelette" and is sung over Beethoven. Some things belong in an archive because history would sound made up without the evidence.
Alt Title ドラゴンハーフ
Studio Production I.G
Network OVA
Aired 1993
Episodes 2
Genre Comedy, Fantasy, Parody, Adventure
Status Completed
← All lore

Fansub & Scanlation History

Before the OVA: English Manga Scripts

The Manga Came First

1988 · Ryusuke Mita · Seven Japanese volumes

Ryusuke Mita's Dragon Half began as a fantasy-comedy manga in 1988, five years before Mink reached Japanese video shelves. The seven-volume story was largely out of reach for English-speaking readers for decades, but fans began translating pieces of it surprisingly early.

English Dragon Half Scripts Were Indexed in 1992

November 9, 1992 · University FTP distribution

On November 9, 1992, Ken Arromdee's Usenet index listed English scripts for Dragon Half magazine installments 45 and 49–52. The index pointed readers to a university FTP archive and a mirror in Germany. These were dialogue translations meant to accompany Japanese pages, not relettered scans. Their authors aren't identified in the index. The scripts were circulating more than four months before the anime debuted.

SOURCE: November 9, 1992 Usenet translation index.

1993–1996: The Two-Episode Fansub Mystery

A Two-Episode Comedy Reaches Anime Clubs

March–May 1993 · December 3, 1994 screening

Japan received Dragon Half's two OVA episodes in March and May 1993. On December 3, 1994, MIT Anime Club screened both episodes, listing them as Dragon 1/2 in its program. The schedule confirms that the show was reaching American anime clubs, but doesn't say whether the screening used Japanese tapes or English-subtitled copies.

SOURCE: https://anime.mit.edu/showings/history

A Collector Calls Both Episodes Fansubs

September 6, 1995 · French Usenet collection

In September 1995, Frédéric Manisse included both Dragon Half OVAs in a list of tapes he described as fansubs. His post is a rare glimpse of the show moving through collectors' hands. He didn't name the subtitlers or specify the language, however, so the tapes can't confidently be identified as English-language fansubs.

The Unknown Fansub Scriptwriter and ADV

February 16, 1996 · Attribution unresolved

A February 1996 Usenet discussion contains an intriguing comment from Jeff Williamson, known as Angst-sensei: ADV had worked with a Dragon Half fansub scriptwriter. He didn't name the writer or explain the arrangement. The comment suggests a connection between amateur and commercial subtitling, but it doesn't tell us whether ADV used that person's earlier dialogue or whether a finished independent tape ever circulated.

SOURCE: February 16, 1996 Usenet discussion.

The William Chow Poster Is a Research Lead

Arctic Animation connection not established

A Dragon Half poster appears in a YouTube video featuring William Chow of Arctic Animation. It's a fun glimpse of a title circulating in the same fan world, but no surviving Arctic release listing we've found credits the group with subtitling Dragon Half. For now, the poster remains a clue rather than a tape credit.

ADV and the Commercial VHS Era

ADV Releases the Subtitled OVA on VHS

June 27, 1995 · Official English edition

ADV Films released both episodes on subtitled VHS on June 27, 1995, under catalog number VHSDH/001S. The commercial subtitles credit Greg Gaddis and Ichiro Arakaki for translation and Neal Barnes for timing. ADV's release arrived just over two years after the Japanese OVA, leaving a relatively short window for any earlier English fansub to circulate.

Dubbed VHS and Bilingual DVD

April 25, 2000 · 2002

An English-dubbed VHS followed in April 2000, and ADV issued a bilingual DVD in 2002. Those discs later became a convenient source for digital releases. Many fans encountered Dragon Half through these newer encodes long after the original tape-trading years.

Early Web Manga Translation

Chris Rijk Documents a Dragon Half Translation

Early-web directory · Date unresolved

An early anime and manga translation directory links to Chris Rijk's English Dragon Half translation. Rijk was also known for his Wot-Club work on titles including InuYasha. The surviving listing confirms his involvement but gives neither a firm starting date nor a complete chapter count. The material is described as a text translation rather than a relettered manga edition.
[Wot-Club-Chris Rijk] [Wot-Club] [Chris Rijk]

Zahara Medina Had a Separate English Translation

Early web · swb.de personal site

That same directory points to a separate Dragon Half translation by Zahara Medina, hosted on her personal swb.de web space. The old listing preserves her name even though the original pages are now difficult to retrieve. Its circa-2000 copyright notice doesn't establish when Medina first posted the translations, and there's no basis to fold her work into Rijk's.
[Zahara Medina]

The Manga Scanlation Years

Ahojed’s Dragon Half Scanlation Project

Documented by 2012 · Original launch unknown

By July 2012, readers were sharing a Batoto link to volume 1, chapter 1 from Ahojed's Dragon Half Scanlation Project. A 2014 reader account also credits Ahojed with helping them read the complete manga. The name sometimes appears as Ajoed, apparently referring to the same project. The original launch date and detailed chapter-by-chapter release history remain unclear.
[Ahojed]

A Translation Another Group Never Finished

Mid-2000s · Enchanting Media retrospective

Enchanting Media's operator later recalled that Dragon Half's first two volumes had already been scanlated when they considered taking on the remaining five. Before they could proceed, another project finished the job while they were busy moving house around 2005. Their account offers a glimpse of an overlapping fan effort, but Enchanting Media didn't claim to have completed its planned continuation. The group that finished it has not been conclusively identified.

What Counts as Scanlation Here

Text scripts are not lettered pages

Dragon Half's English manga history spans two very different methods. In 1992, readers followed Japanese magazine pages using separate text scripts. Later translators such as Chris Rijk and Zahara Medina continued the text-translation tradition online. Projects such as Ahojed's circulated edited manga pages instead. Those changes in format tell their own story about how English-speaking fans read manga before licensed editions arrived.

The DVD-Era Modernizers

The Groups That Kept the OVA Circulating

The official VHS and DVD editions were only part of Dragon Half's afterlife. Fans also repackaged the two episodes for newer players, connections and file formats, helping the OVA reach another generation of viewers.

A-G and Psychlo-Anime: The Early Digital Record

2002–2003 · Two episodes each · DVD source

AniDB lists a complete, English-inclusive DVD-sourced release by A-G, last updated November 17, 2002. Psychlo-Anime appears with another complete two-episode release, last updated October 18, 2003. These catalog dates show when the records were updated, not necessarily when the files first appeared. Both groups belong to Dragon Half's early digital circulation, although their subtitle sources aren't identified.
[P-A-A-G] [P-A] [A-G]

The 2004 Wave of Complete Digital Editions

D-A · AUnion · BNL · AniWorld

The early digital trail also includes D-A, AnimeUnion, BNL and AniWorld, each credited in AniDB with both episodes and English among the available languages. D-A's listing was updated in October 2003; the other three were updated in April 2004. Several complete editions were circulating in a short span, giving viewers more choices in encoding and packaging even when the English dialogue may have come from an existing source.
[aW-D-A-AUnion-BNL] [aW] [D-A] [AUnion] [BNL]

Anime-Supreme and anime-takeover

2004 · Complete DVD-sourced releases

Anime-Supreme's two-episode DVD-sourced entry was last updated in July 2004, followed by anime-takeover's in December. Both listings include English. Neither identifies where its subtitles originated, but both helped carry a short, already-licensed OVA into the file-sharing era.
[A-S-anime-takeover] [A-S] [anime-takeover]

Later Encodes Were Preservation Work Too

2005–2025 · AniDB catalog continues

Dragon Half continued to turn up in new encodes well beyond the first DVD releases. Different formats, video sources and language tracks gave the same two episodes fresh lives on newer equipment. Some packages used existing English subtitles instead of translating the show again. They still mattered to fans trying to find and watch a 1993 OVA years later.

The Official English Revival

Discotek Gives the OVA Another Home

March 25, 2014 · DVD

Discotek Media brought Dragon Half back to DVD in March 2014, retaining the earlier ADV English adaptation alongside Japanese audio and English subtitles. In November 2015, Crunchyroll announced both episodes for viewers in the United States and Canada, available dubbed and subtitled. The official editions gave the show another life after its VHS and early DVD years.

Seven Seas Finally Publishes the Manga

2017 license · Three omnibus books in 2018

Seven Seas licensed Dragon Half's seven-volume manga, along with Dragon Half Z, in January 2017. Three English omnibus books arrived in 2018, on March 20, September 25 and December 24. By then, English-speaking anime fans had been able to buy the OVA for more than twenty years. Readers who wanted Mink's original, much longer manga had waited considerably longer, with fan translations helping bridge the gap.

What the Record Can and Cannot Prove

A Proven Translation Trail, an Unnamed VHS Author

What remains unresolved

The oldest firm English translation evidence for Dragon Half isn't an anime tape at all. It's the 1992 manga-script index. The later story includes named web translators, a scanlation project, MIT's 1994 screening and a 1996 remark about ADV working with a fansub scriptwriter. What it still lacks is a reliable credit for the original English VHS subtitler. Neither the French collector's tape list nor the poster in William Chow's video settles that mystery.

Why the Modernizers Belong in the History

Fansub-era circulation beyond original translation

Dragon Half made the journey from traded tapes to DVD encodes, updated digital releases and official reissues. The people who translated its dialogue and those who kept playable copies circulating did different jobs, often years apart. Both helped this little two-episode comedy stay within reach of English-speaking fans.