Black Jack/YMMV


 * Adaptation Displacement: The 90's theatrical movie and first 6 OAVs (or some form of them, anyway) were released in the US in 1996...three years BEFORE the manga got an English translation.
 * Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Black Jack always dresses like he just walked out of Victorian England.
 * Funny Aneurysm Moment: Almost every one of Pinoko's "comic relief" traits is the direct result of her ultra-creepy/tragic past.
 * Harsher in Hindsight: One chapter had the author of an extremely popular serial novel close to dying just as he's about to write the last chapter of the story. . Now go to Osamu Tezuka's page and look under 'Famous Last Words'.
 * And then there's Tenacity. Made all the more heartrending by the fact that Tezuka's Author Avatar is a major character.
 * Macekre: The dub scripts for the first six OAVs and the movie are sometimes dramatically different from the subtitles. This mostly manifests as an inexplicable rearrangement, alteration or deletion of several key lines, which can sometimes make the dialogue rather clunky. This is particularly evident in the fourth OAV, in which the entire point of the episode is subverted, and in the movie, wherein one character goes from being tragically misguided to downright Satanic, as well as rendering the movie's Green Aesop anvilicious. OAVs 7-10 are mostly exempt from this, fortunately.
 * Half Truth: Most of Black Jack's diagnosis as told to his patients and their families, to protect them or because he's certain they couldn't handle their therapy otherwise:
 * For example, in one of the earliest stories a mafioso has a good kid framed for a crime he didn't commit, to use him as "spare parts" for his own spoiled rotten son. Black Jack.
 * Black Jack tells one of his patients the story of a young paraplegic who regained full mobility by exercising strenuosly, then downtoning the story as a fib. As the patient starts a long marathon, as in the story he was just told about, Black Jack quietly follows him, interested. It's revealed that.
 * Black Jack fits a former kid athlete with a crude, low-tech prostetic arm, claiming it's "Special". It's later discovered that.
 * Black Jack has surgery on a young singer, telling her that if she doesn't observe a short vocal rest she'll go mute. The singer disobeys, screwing over her voice. Black Jack then puts her on an unusual three months long total voice rest, claiming that, if she obeys, he'll install a costly artificial voice box in her throat..
 * Black Jack claims he had surgery on a girl to let her take the place of her dead brother as the heir of an important firm..
 * Unfortunate Implications: The entire thing smacks of "If you can't give birth, you're not a proper woman"...
 * Nasty, but there may be some justification in that BJ had to remove all the relevant plumbing, including the stuff that releases hormones. The woman in question can't even be sexually stimulated anymore. BJ considers the whole thing to be one of His Greatest Failures - he wanted to marry the girl, and he basically had to castrate her to save her life! Makes his occasional Rage Against the Heavens even more poignant, eh?
 * Actually, given the clitoris isn't attached to the bits that make children, that makes it worse.
 * What Do You Mean It's for Kids?: Periphery Demographic aside, the manga was in a shonen magazine and the TV anime's in a family timeslot. The 90's movie and OAV series, on the other hand...
 * The Woobie: You WILL want to smother Pinoko with hugs and puppies at some point or another. Black Jack himself is something of a Stoic Woobie.