The Animage Furoku That Captured Sherlock Hound in 1984

Sherlock Hound Postcard from the 1984 Animage Furoku

A Magazine Supplement from Showa-Era Japan

This postcard was never sold on its own — it came as a furoku, the bonus items that Japanese anime magazines enclosed with each issue as a reader benefit. Animage, published monthly by Tokuma Shoten since 1978, made furoku a consistent feature: postcards, stickers, mini posters, and small calendars accompanied issues throughout the magazine’s peak decades. Because furoku were distributed with the magazine rather than sold separately, only readers who deliberately set them aside preserved them — which shapes how frequently well-kept examples from that era appear today. The artwork on this postcard is rendered in a watercolor-adjacent style across four panels, depicting Sherlock Hound’s anthropomorphized cast against Victorian London settings including period interiors, cobblestone streets, and flying machines. Its Animage issue date is confirmed as 1984; the specific monthly number is not determinable from the available listing information.

The Series: A Japan-Italy Anime Set in Victorian England

Sherlock Hound — known in Japan as Meitantei Holmes — was produced jointly by Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS Entertainment) and RAI, Italy’s public broadcaster, and premiered on Fuji TV in October 1984 for a run of 26 episodes. European co-productions were rare in Japanese television animation at the time, and the RAI partnership gave the series immediate reach abroad. Italian audiences in particular encountered the show through RAI broadcasts, giving it recognition among viewers with no specific background in Japanese animation.

The premise recasts Conan Doyle’s Victorian detective world with an all-animal cast: Holmes is a deerstalker-capped dog, Dr. Watson a bowler-hatted companion, and Professor Moriarty a large, striped-suited cat whose villainy is frequently played for comic effect alongside the menace. The tone moves between mystery plotting and slapstick adventure, set against detailed period backdrops.

Hayao Miyazaki directed and storyboarded the first six episodes, placing Sherlock Hound within his documented body of work from the period before Studio Ghibli was formally established. The path to broadcast was not straightforward — copyright negotiations with the Conan Doyle estate introduced complications, though the precise sequence of events is recounted differently across sources — before the series ultimately reached screens in October 1984.

Where Several Collector Interests Meet

Sherlock Hound occupies the overlap of several distinct fan communities. Anime enthusiasts who follow Miyazaki’s career note this series as a significant pre-Ghibli entry. European collectors, Italian audiences especially, often have independent familiarity with the show through childhood viewing, separate from any interest in Japanese animation generally. The Victorian setting and anthropomorphized characters also draw attention from Holmes adaptation readers and fans of steampunk and Edwardian-era aesthetics in animation. As a furoku item produced in Showa 59 (1984) and enclosed in a magazine issue rather than sold for display or archiving, this postcard carries the visual identity of the series at its debut year — the kind of official, contemporary artwork that defines the Showa furoku as a distinct area of collector focus.