However, even in that first year of "traditional" TV anime programming a different type of time slot was attempted for anime... though it would take 33 years for it to truly see its potential realized, for better or worse.
 |
| The early late-night anime that crawled so that the "modern" productions for the past 30 years could walk. |
While Tetsuwan Atom debuted on January 1, 1963, later that same year on September 4 (& also on Fuji TV) saw the debut of Sennin Buraku, an anime adaptation of the 4-panel manga by the late Ko Kojima that would run from 1956 to 2014 in Weekly Asahi Geino (a tabloid magazine, not a traditional manga magazine), & this would make history by being the first anime to ever air in a late-night time slot, in this case 23:40-23:55, i.e. just before midnight. Now, to be fair, only the first eight episodes of Sennin Buraku would actually air in late-night, as the remaining 15 episodes were pulled back an hour & ran from 22:30-22:45, i.e. the tail end of Golden Time, but it still introduced the idea of airing a TV anime in a time slot that was very much only going to be watched by adults who stayed up late. However, the idea of "late-night anime" would be only done on rare occasion for the next few decades, as 1969 would see Roppo Yabure-kun (loosely based on Sen Saga's book Introduction to Civil Law: How to Avoid Failure with Money & Women) on Nagoya TV (now branded as Mētele), followed by a 17-year hiatus that would only end in 1986 with Heart Cocktail (based on the "urban love story" manga by Seizo Watase) on Nippon TV (a.k.a. NTV), a series that actually saw an anime revival with 2023's Heart Cocktail Colorful. Late-night anime would become a little more semi-consistent at that point, as 1987 saw Fuji TV air both Slippy Dandy (which only lasted four two-minute episodes) & Lemon Angel (a spin-off of hentai anime pioneer Cream Lemon), 1988 had Dr. Chichibuyama (based on the vulgar 4-panel manga by Keiichi Tanaka) on Fuji TV as part of its live All Night Fuji programming block, & 1989 saw both Yomiuri TV air Seishun no Shokutaku (based on the cooking manga by Miriko Takeda, with animation by Madhouse) as part of its variety show 11 PM & Mainichi Broadcasting System/MBS air Sakyo Komatsu's Anime Theater (which adapted short stories by the titular sci-fi writer, & featured animation by Gainax). Something that remained the same with all of these shows, though, was that none of them were a "full-length" program, i.e. taking up its own 30-minute time slot, but rather were all shorter works, if not part of a larger late-night variety show.
That would start to change, though, as after 1990 saw a late-night re-run of the original Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA on TV Tokyo 1992 would see the debut of Super Zugan (based on the mahjong manga by Masayuki Katayama) on Fuji TV & Yo-Yo no Neko Tsumami (an original work) on NTV, with Super Zugan being the first "full-length" late-night anime, i.e. its episodes were "standard" length (~24 minutes, minus commercials), followed by 1995 seeing The Ping Pong Club on Tokyo Broadcasting System/TBS, based on the manga by Minoru Furuya. Apparently Furuya did not appreciate the anime self-censoring the more extreme & crude moments seen in his manga, due to the producers hoping to re-run it on more traditional time slots, but that's just how things worked back then. Up to this point it's easy to see what kind of anime was being produced in rare quantities for late-night, as they were all very specifically aimed at adults by focusing on very adult themes, i.e. sex, debauchery, late-night cravings, mahjong, or simply more esoteric subject matter; also, some "traditional" anime were apparently re-run in late-night slots every now & up to this point, likely just to fill time. However, all of that would change in late 1996 due in large part to something that happened a few years prior: The End of Japan's "Bubble Economy".
The economic bubble Japan had in the second half of the 80s & the very start of the 90s would come to a crash in early 1992, and one thing that actually got hurt badly by this was the OVA market for anime, which had gone through a massive boom during that time; in essence, anyone with an idea & money was putting out straight-to-video anime, for better or worse. After the bubble burst OVAs would still see release, but they were mostly relegated to being related to something that was already successful, or a massive franchise like Gundam; original OVAs still happened, but nowhere near as often as before. Beyond that, anime was mostly back to being reliant on either being produced as a movie for theatrical release (which cost a lot) or being appealing to TV networks that aired anime in either a morning or prime time slot, i.e. options were once again highly limited. For example, back in 1992 the anime studio Group TAC had wanted to produce a TV anime adaptation of 70s Shonen Jump baseball manga Team Astro, even creating both a proper pitch document and two drawings made to show what it would look like, but no network was interested in airing it due to the failure of 1989-1990's Miracle Giants Dome-kun, which itself was conceived in an attempt to revitalize children's interest in baseball, which had waned; there wouldn't be a new baseball TV anime until H2 in mid-1995. If the economic bubble hadn't burst then maybe Group TAC could have made Team Astro into an OVA series, but by that point they were reliant on network support; Team Astro wouldn't get a TV adaptation until a live-action series in 2005.