Black Hat wrote:Now this is just hearsay, but I've heard Greejeeber was originally supposed to have been called "Greenjeeper" but fansubbers got it (understandably) mixed up and dubbed him Greejeeber, and when a new mold of GrimminyJeepers came out with a Romanji translation, Takara assumed the fandom's mistranslation was the "correct" way of spelling it in English...except they then mistranslated it again resulting in "Gregevor".
Barring that "Gregevor" mis-romanization bit at the end (which is true), the rest of that is indeed 100% hearsay.
The words "green" and "jeep" are written in Katakana as グリーン ("gurīn") and ジープ ("jīpu"). But to approximate the "per" in "jeeper" in Katakana, the プ ("pu") on the end of ジープ must be replaced with a パ ("pa") extended to パー ("pā") to get ジーパー ("jīpā"). With all this in mind, the Katakana rendering for "Greenjeeper" would be グリーンジーパー ("gurīnjīpā").
Now that we have the Katakana for "Greenjeeper", let's turn our attention to the original Car Robots toy.
The original Car Robots toy is named グリジバー in at least three places on its packaging:
When transliterated into Latin script, グリジバー is rendered as "Gurijibā".
Upon closer inspection, グリジバー ("Gurijibā") is different from グリーンジーパー ("gurīnjīpā"), as its リ ("ri") is not extended as リー (rī), there is no ン ("n"), and it uses バー (bā) instead of パー ("pā").
However, given that the character in question is a green jeep, there is evidently a connection between the actual name and the English words "green" and "jeeper". Taking the Katakana form of both words, we can modify them to equate to グリジバー ("Gurijibā") and then work backwards to find the proper Romanization of the name in English.
For "green" グリーン, the ン and the extension of リ are dropped to leave us with just グリ ("guri"). As the "u" vowel sound of グ is accentuated, and the "i" vowel sound of リ sounds like the English "ee" sound, the proper Romanization of グリ ("guri") would be "gree".
For "jeeper" ジーパー, the extension of ジ is dropped, and the extended パー is converted into an extended バー, to leave us with ジバー ("jibā"). As the vowel sound of ジ sounds like the English "ee" sound, and the extended バー originally being an extended パー that was used to approximate the "per" part of "jeeper" having had its consonant "p" sound changed to a "b" sound, the proper Romanization of ジバー ("jibā") would be "jeeber".
Combining these two would give us the English Romanization of グリジバー ("Gurijibā") as "Greejeeber".
As for the fansub misnaming theory, there weren't any fansubs for the full Car Robots series until Karyuudo Fansubs released theirs in 2014. Before them, there were some subs for the show done by TV-Nohn, but they never got far enough into the series to reach the episodes that Greejeeber appeared in, and didn't start their subs until 2008.
Hope that helps.
)
). It's unlikely though, and the anime colours are still cool.
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