Japanese dub leaked 2 days before scheduled worldwide premiere

The first episode of Space Dandy , the upcoming science-fiction comedy series from director Shinichiro Watanabe (Macross Plus, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Kids on the Slope) and studio BONES, was leaked on Friday, before its worldwide premiere. The leak was for the Japanese dub. The poster of the BitTorrent link for the leaked video wrote, "That was hard to seed :s Work done. Madman, better fix your leaks *again*."

Oceania anime distributor Madman Entertainment previously stopped streaming the Kill la Kill anime series, after the anime was accessed from its servers prior to the Japanese television broadcast and illegally distributed via the Internet. Madman is scheduled to simulcast Space Dandy for Australia and New Zealand.

The anime was scheduled to launch at Otakon Vegas on Saturday, followed by its English dub broadcast on Adult Swim's Toonami block in the United States that night.

The series will then premiere in Japan on January 5 at 11:00 p.m. Animax Asia will also premiere the series in Southeast Asia on that day. Animax Korea is showing the anime in South Korea, Anime Limited licensed the anime for English and French-speaking countries and regions in Europe, while AV Visionen will stream the series with German subtitles. Funimation will also stream the series online with Japanese audio, and the company also has home video rights for the series.

The story revolves around Dandy (Junichi Suwabe/Ian Sinclair), an alien-hunter. His job is to seek out new aliens never seen before, and receives a reward whenever he finds a new species. His mission is to find those new species faster than anyone else as he travels the galaxy. Together with the bucket-of-bolts robot QT (Uki Satake (9nine)/Alison Viktorin) and the dimwit alien Meow (Hiroyuki Yoshino/Joel McDonald) he picked up along the way, he comes into contact with new planets and their inhabitants.

The second episode of Oreimo was leaked from Anime News Network in 2010 and subsequently pulled before resuming a month later. Funimation's One Piece and Phantom~ Requiem for the Phantom streams were compromised and leaked in 2009. Part of a Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion R2 episode leaked from Bandai Channel five days before its official airing in 2008.

Thanks to A for the news tip