It's particularly odd since until now it's almost always been the entirely correct
Lupin III or
Lupin the 3rd, because as a name it would be pronounced exactly the same. The odd combination of the two sort of short circuits my brain a bit and makes me imagine they're capital "I"s rather than numerals and it should be pronounced
Lupin the EEEEEErd. I guess he does have ears.
I mean Japan does do all sorts of slightly wacky things with their own interpretations of English and most of the time it's quite endearing - Things like Natsumi Tsujimoto from
You're Under Arrest having "Natumi" on the side of her scooter and Masamune Shirow spelling the name of the main character of
Appleseed as "Dunan Nut".
My favourite attempted use of English though is of course the name of
Gundam ZZ character Elpeo Ple, a reference to a magazine referred to as "
L-People" and was meant to be pronounced the same... However not only does Japanese not have an "L" sound (nor as far as I'm aware can a word end with a consonant sound other than "n") but it's far from obvious to anyone whose first language is English that the written text "ple" when separated out on its own should be pronounced like the second syllable of the word "people" - Like "pull" with a near-silent "u" rather than what 99.8% of people would presume upon seeing it, that it should sound like "plea" or "pleh". This led even official material to transcribe her name in three different ways as
Ple (how it's spelled)
Pull (closest to how it should sound in English) and
Puru (how it sounds in Japanese). Cue 20 years of confusion.
