SFX is subbing...

As someone who knows Chinese, I decided to sub some of my fav Chinese kids shows (开心超人, 叶罗丽, etc.) My Captionfy: Subbed Episodes Here See pinned post for current schedule and updates. Note: I'm credited as @Sparkfox- in my work.

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Currently Subbing:

Currently subbing: Happy Heroes: S17 Episodes (14/26 done)

Updates on hiatus: Happy Heroes: City of Mystery (10/26 done)

Updates on hiatus: Happy Heroes S1 Episodes (16/52 done)

Subbed episodes will be posted on my Captionfy.

Hello! I went offline for a few months, guess that's what happens when final exams chain into the annual family vacation to China. Yeah, sorry about that.

Anyways, between unpacking and catching up with all the emails I missed over the past month, I'll be pretty busy for now. Rest assured though, subtitling is one of my top priorities once I get through all the other real-life stuff that piled up while I was gone (^-^;)

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*The official channel currently uploads a new episode every week, after which I begin work on subtitling it. I aim to have the subtitled episode up within the week the original was uploaded.

**After, I use my spare time until the next official upload to subtitle existing episodes. This is a secondary project, so if a season is being currently uploaded it is prioritised over this one.

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Finished Subtitles:

Happy Heroes Magic Laboratory Episodes

Happy Heroes S16 Episodes

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Source: Happy Heroes S17 EP14

The Grumpy Cat meme is fitting in more ways than one.

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Looking through the all the posts under #subtitling tag and for every genuinely interesting post about fellow subbers and their experiences there's like 10 ads for translation services.

Like please. Why.

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Source: Happy Heroes S17 EP8

And with that, the duology of Ke Jia and Leng Yue has been completely English subbed. Have fun :D

ENG SUB S17 Episodes can be found here in this playlist!

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开心超人 Happy Heroes Translation Notes Pt. 1.5 (Planet Qiyuan, Power Stones)

Source: Happy Heroes S17 EP5

Okay this isn't a full sequel to my first translation notes post. It's still here to clarify an important thing though.

The five protagonist robot supermen are formed from a set of five mechanical stones. These five mechanical stones came originally from the five Power Stones (能量石) found on Planet Qiyuan (启原星), which is lore revealed in the second Happy Heroes movie.

Btw, that movie is available to watch for free in full on the official Happy Heroes channel, just to link my source of info.

能量石 = Neng Liang Shi = Power Stones.

Self explanatory, the characters 能量 means "power", 石 means "stone(s)".

启原星 = Qi Yuan Xing = Planet Origin.

Let me explain. The character 启 means "start, open", while the character can mean "original" as an adjective, and "cause" as a noun. Putting the two characters together, you get something that can be roughly translated to "original start", which can be simplified to "origin".

Hence, Planet Qiyuan, can be translated as Planet Origin.

In my subtitles, I'm going to go with...Planet Qiyuan. My rules for translation are normally to fully translate planet names into English when possible. But my other rule is that official translations should take precedence over fan re-translation, since it'd be like overriding the canon word of the original creators. In the second movie, they refer to the planet as Planet Qiyuan in the official English subtitles, so I'll be going with that name instead of Planet Origin, the translated name I came up with.

PS: There's one exception I've got to that rule...it's for the translation of 花心超人 into Playful Superman. The creators' official English for him is Smart Superman, which doesn't take into account the meaning of the phrase 花心, which is a descriptor used to refer to a frivolous, lighthearted playboy - hence my use of "Playful Superman" instead. I'm aware this is kind of hypocritical...but since they already changed his name randomly for the third Happy Heroes movie to be Super Idol Superman, before going back to Smart Superman, I'm just going to assume they're a little indecisive about their original translation decision all those years ago.

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Hehe. Yonoa sub sandwich...

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Source: Happy Heroes S17 EP1

Put together a little something for you all to enjoy for the holidays. Made a ENG subbed version of the Season 17 OP, because that song's pretty good.

See you later for the ENG subtitle uploads in January once I get back!

Link to Season 17 ENG Sub Playlist

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LMAO THE EPISODE WAS RESTRICTED IN ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT THE VATICAN CITY

And by episode I mean the ENG SUB version of Happy Heroes Season 1 Episode 2 I put up to replace the original/official one that was blocked on copyright

I was expecting restrictions (or straight up blocked) but I didn't think they'd still "technically" let it through, the audio is fine (just can't monetize but I don't care about that), but the video footage was what resulted in the ultimate blocking lmao

I'm taking it down obviously. I don't think any of you all are watching from Vatican City haha.

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POLL AT BOTTOM PLEASE VOTE

Source: Happy Heroes Mystery City EP1

Hey what do you guys think of these subtitles? How's the readability?

White Verdana font, pt. 24, some transparent black box behind them so you can read them better.

Would solid black box work better? Looks like this:

Source: Happy Heroes Mystery City EP1

Subtitle Box Transparency

Full Black-out

Partially Transparent

Voting ended onOct 9, 2025

Notes: I'd release burned-in versions of episodes with subs, if it didn't exist in such a legal gray area. Subs of this kind don't count as transformative works (and besides, it's a Chinese cartoon. Chinese law doesn't really have that, at least not in the same way), unfortunately.

Guess I can just keep trying to send in subs through their Weibo, not like I have any better options (that gmail account has the year they signed up in it. They probably just made it to verify the channel).

UPDATE: Partially due to my own stupidity and the fact that I can't verify my account properly due to being outside of China, I lost Weibo access....well, they didn't reply despite numerous messages. I think I'll have to stick to just subbing over here (they probably wouldn't be interested anyways, Western fandom usually isn't paid attention to at all for a lot of Eastern works).

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Source: No Way! I've Become a Superman!? EP 2 (aka the Happy Heroes live-action TV show)

I love stupid wordplay jokes.

Btw, this show has some great humor, the writing reminds me of the earlier slice-of-life seasons' type of humor. Definitely been an entertaining watch so far.

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Source: Happy Heroes: Mystery City EP6

Dammit, I'm having another translation crisis with transliteration.

Yeah, 欧文 (Ou Wen) = Owen. The same way 丽莎 (Li Sha) = Lisa.

Theoretically, there shouldn't be a problem with this, because this is how the characters' pinyin are literally spelled out.

But from an English-speaker's standpoint I just look picky, don't I? Because it's clearly 'Owen', they'll say, and then I'll get compared to those overly picky fansubbers who kept the foreign words untranslated just cause they could! /hj

Principle requires I subtitle it as Ou Wen. Because why should there be an exception to all the other names I've already subtitled as transliterations? (Most notably the whole Jia Luo/Kalo thing)...

Arghhhh, the English-speaker in me finds it kind of awkward, but consistency is a very important thing in subtitling and translation...guess I'll have to live with it.

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Happy Heroes Magic Laboratory English Subtitles Are Complete!

Check out the complete subtitled playlist here!

As of this posting, all episodes of 开心超人联盟 Happy Heroes Magic Laboratory are available with English subtitles!

Take this as a chance to (re)watch the series with more details, if you needed the support!

Looking for more subtitled works? Take a look at what else is subtitled on my Captionfy!

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Translator's Note:

Thank you to everyone who's using these subtitles. My work isn't based on viewership, but it's nice to know if I've helped anyone!

I apologize for the heavy schedule slip (I'm aware I'm even a few episodes behind on subbing the series being uploaded now, City of Mystery), sickness and exams hit me hard. It took me a while to clear out all the real-life priorities first.

This is basically how I've felt the entire time I've been subbing this. I'm even learning more than what's just in the show, because in order to accurately subtitle the science jargon Doctor Zhai uses in his explanations, I have to do research on the terms and make sure they match up with the English versions.

Like noted above, I'm very aware of the hypocrisy of my complaint.

Also, repetitive episode format gets tiring to subtitle. I'm looking forward to never subbing another edutainment series ever again.

Next series to be subtitled is City of Mystery! We've all been waiting forever for easily-accessible HD uploads of this series overseas, so it's great that they (the official creators) are doing this! I'm looking forward to my freedom from edutainment, and return to regular cartoons.

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Source: Happy Heroes: Mystery City (this text appears at the title card of every episode)

Hey, it'd be super helpful if anyone here could decipher this text /j

I still can't read Chinese handwriting...or handwriting style font...

Like the top character is obviously 神。So it must be simplified Chinese. But then it just gets increasingly squiggly as we go downwards?? That last three part character combination doesn't exist I think-

also have this incredibly blurry Careful Superman pic for no reason (he appeared for one frame here)

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Source: Happy Heroes: Magic Laboratory EP23

I'm pretty sure it's just a running gag at this point to have Careful eating steak every time the others try to get out of eating Sweet's food. (It wasn't even actually her food this time; it was the Doctor's! They didn't know that though)

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I love wordplay-

Source: Happy Heroes: Magic Laboratory EP11

Click below for joke explanation.

A common thing Chinese media does is censor the identity of people who were involved in natural disasters. So here, Big M. expects the staff to censor his identity - by pixelization over his and Little M.'s faces.

However, here, the words he was told were 打马赛克. While 马赛克 is a loanword translating literally to mosaic, it also refers to mosaic processing/pixelization. And the character 打 can mean "to put up". So he expects the staff to put up pixelization over their faces - except the staff instead put up the actual word of 马赛克 in the background.

Those were their exact words, after all... >:D

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Source: Happy Superman Alliance: Magic Laboratory EP8

My style of translating is to preserve as much authenticity from the original culture as possible, but honestly, even if it wasn't for that...I have no idea how I'd explain zongzi (粽子) to someone who hasn't encountered this thing.

For those of you who might recognize what food I'm referring to:

Zongzi (粽子) are a traditional Chinese rice dish, it's basically sweet rice with fillings, wrapped up in bamboo leaves and then steamed. You eat this stuff during Dragon Boat Festival (Duan Wu Jie) (端午节). Rice is pretty tasty, I personally have never been one for the fillings, ahaha.... (Sorry mom)

Anyways, I keep running into this problem, like how do you describe traditional chinese foods to people in the Western world, when all they have for translation is "dumplings" and "steamed buns"? There's like so much nuance and types, it is so frustrating sometimes-

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Translation: Discerning Eyes (lit. fiery eyes and golden pupils) (火眼金睛) of the Security Equipment

Source: Happy Heroes: Magic Laboratory EP5

Fun fact!

火眼金睛 (Huǒ yǎn jīn jīng) is a idiom which translates, literally to "fiery eyes and golden pupils". However, a few of you may recognize this phrase from something else - this phrase is used to describe the magical eyes of Monkey King Sun Wukong!

Wukong's eyes are described as having the ability to "discern supernatural beings", which we see utilized to a great extent in Journey to the West.

Nowadays, the phrase can be used to refer to a person's sharp vision, sharp enough to recognize truths and falsehoods/deceptions, like the eyes of the Monkey King. Here, Happy Heroes is using it to refer to the vision of the security equipment featured in the episode, the X-ray machine! (And if you watch the episode, you'll see another funny way this idiom can be applied too)

Watch the subtitled episode here!