I was trying to come up with a way to work on my listening skills without too much drilling. The idea I came up with is to go through long series of a Japanese show without subtitles. Unfortunately, I think that with my current vocabulary (core 2k's financial paper vocab + a bunch of other random words) I wont understand a significant portion of the more common words. So, ironically I decided the best approach was to first drill the most common words from the show and then watch it.
Does anyone know if a list already exists, or how I can pull them out of a transcript. I'm leaning towards One Piece (despite never having been interested in anime) just because I've heard from a lot of people that they really like it, but I'm open to almost anything where I can easily put together a list.
And it would be helpful if anyone can let me know where I can find a transcript, and a hard copy or download of the show. I don't want to use youtube since I'm currently living in a college dorm with unreliable internet access.

-- see my post below --

I took a look at the CB tool and I think it will work well once I find a transcript. I've been having trouble finding one in an english language search. How would I say "script" in Japanese in the sense of "a movie transcipt"? I looked it up in jisho.org and found several different english translations for the word.

I would also be interested in video game transcripts if you know where to find them, especially Final Fantasy 8. I just finished going through FF7, while having to painfully look up every one of the microscopic, low resolution kanji I didn't recognize. I'd really like to avoid that in the future.

If you do go for One Piece, there's subs available here:
http://kitsunekko.net/dirlist.php?dir=su...e_Piece%2F

Video game scripts are hard to come by, in my experience, since it requires someone with the know how and desire to rip (and often decrypt) them. I'd be excited if someone has come across a repository for such things

For shows and movies, you should be able to find what you're looking for by searching for subtitles, as opposed to transcripts. Search for 字幕

For frequency lists, you can just use cb's Japanese Text Analysis Tool. Word frequency reports are one of the options. Open the resulting txt file in a spreadsheet program (or otherwise isolate the field with the word in it for easy extraction) and you have your frequency list. Remember, for frequency lists, more data makes a better list. While you could do lists per episode, it'd probably be better to run it on a whole series (or maybe just a season or two in the case of shows like One Piece).

As for creating cards from them... I haven't done that before, since I only used Core and occasionally added a word by hand or just memorized it through reading. I know there are tools to auto populate a field with definitions pulled from a dictionary file, but then you have to worry about verifying them...

For game scripts, see:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=7933

The method for getting together a frequency list has become much less cumbersome thanks cb making some changes to his Japanese Frequency List Sorter. Now all you have to do is use cb's Text Analysis tool to scan the document, then load the file that creates into the Frequency List Sorter linked above. Simply set the input column to 2 and make sure you tick the Append Frequency Rank option, and that's it, you've got yourself a list of words sorted by the same frequency found using Rikaisama.

Additionally, if you are using Anki and don't want to see words you've already covered then you can then make use of cb's Word List Duplicate Remover with a file containing the vocabulary you've covered against the output from Frequency List Sorter so you only see new words.