An Overview the Early Years of the "Modern Day Late-Night Anime Infomercial": 2001

After a seemingly full embracing of the concept of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" in 1998, things slowed down rather hard 1999, before becoming an almost literal trickle in 2000, which saw only nine TV anime debut in late-night; even a network like WOWOW had decided to instead debut its new programming in prime time. However, of those nine in 2000 six of them all debuted in October of that year, so it did look as though the format was maybe on the upswing, in some form. That would essentially be confirmed in 2001, as that year would see 21 brand new anime debut in late-night, as well as the continued run of Hajime no Ippo on NTV, throughout the year. Still not quite as many at 1998's 26 new shows, but certainly an improvement over 1999's 15, and this time around there's no Wonderful to inflate the numbers even higher! For this year we'd see some really interesting "first-evers", including the first TV anime to (allegedly) air in HD, the first late-night anime to be co-produced by an English anime company, & the first UHF anime to truly "break containment" (so to speak) & become a notable hit, alongside a number of both iconic & cult classics; also, only a mere three anime featured in this piece have yet to see official English release.

In other words, 2001's history of late-night anime can probably be best described as "The Calm Before the Storm" that would be the complete upheaval of how TV anime would primarily be made moving forward... and we begin things off with a title TV Tokyo would spend the entire year airing in late-night!

January 2001 would see only one new anime debut in late-night, but like I just indicated it's a big one that would run throughout the entire calendar year. Debuting over on TV Tokyo on "January 8 at 25:45", & replacing the variety show Sakura-yu featuring singer/actor/political analyst Kiyoshi Nakajo, Grappler Baki (or Baki the Grappler, as it's officially known in English) was an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Keisuke Itagaki that ran in Weekly Shonen Champion from 1991 to 1999 & detailed the journey of Baki Hanma, a powerful & talented fighter who fights & trains to one day surpass his utterly undefeatable & seemingly indestructible father, "The Ogre" Yujiro Hanma. Today, the Baki Series is currently made up of six manga totaling over 150 volumes of manga (& TV anime adaptations running up into the fourth manga), not to mention tons of various spin-offs, & is still running to this day. However, back in 2001 Itagaki was only on the second manga (New Grappler Baki, or just simply Baki), and the only prior anime adaptation was a 45-minute OVA in 1994 produced by Knack & released under Toei's V-Anime label. This time around, the Grappler Baki TV anime was produced solely by Free-Will, a record label run by Hiroshi "Dynamite Tommy" Tomioka that's best known for helping popularize visual kei; the animation itself, though, was done by Group TAC. Where Knack's OVA only adapted portions of the early part of the manga, which saw Baki fight in an underground arena, the TV anime actually adapted all 42 volumes of the original Grappler Baki manga (minus a handful of scenes being skipped over), though it did change things around by adapting the story purely in chronological order, so where the manga started with young adult Baki in the underground arena the anime began with teen Baki & his backstory regarding his mother. Halfway through the anime changed its title slightly, becoming Grappler Baki: Maximum Tournament (to relfect the story arc that the entire second half adapted), before ending on "December 25, 2001", where it was replaced with... the Japanese airing of The Naked Chef, starring Jamie Oliver; again, late-night has no continuity between shows.

FUNimation would license & release the anime as Baki the Grappler from 2005 to 2007, first across 12 dual-audio DVD singles, followed by two "shove the singles in the artbox" boxsets in 2006 & early 2008, & then a complete 48-episode boxset in late 2008. The international release was notable for replacing the two OP themes by Ryoko Aoyagi with the song "Child Prey" by dir en grey, though Aoyagi's two ED themes were kept intact, and even the Japanese credits were changed to reflect dir en grey's song, so this was a change implemented by Free-Will themselves, not FUNimation. I've even been told that Episodes 45 & 46 feature extra scenes in the Japanese DVD release that were not included internationally, likely also done by Free-Will. Regardless, the fact that Free-Will was the sole production company behind the Grappler Baki TV anime means that it very well could never see a re-release, since Free-Will is a music company first & foremost, despite all of the modern Baki anime produced by TMS being direct sequels to it.

Obscusion B-Side: Propeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship: Possibly the Worst Case of Unfortunate Timing in Video Game History

While some people would prefer if their enjoyment of entertainment media wouldn't be affected by the outside world, especially since said media are sometimes a way for one to take their mind off of the real world, it's just something that can't be done at times. A perfect example would be when a game's release is affected by a real world tragedy of some sort, because maybe said game comes a little too close to said tragedy, though obviously it wasn't intentionally so. For example, the North American release of Resident Evil Survivor infamously not only saw a delayed release than it did in Japan & Europe (August 2000 vs. January & March 2000, respectively) but also had support for the GunCon light gun peripheral completely removed, despite it being the intended way to play the game. While never admitted officially, it's easy to guess that Capcom likely made the decision after the Columbine High School massacre that happened on April 20, 1999, and the idea of using a light gun for a game where you had full control of the character was maybe a little distasteful; Columbine was also why Sega never released the first-party Dreamcast light gun in North America. Another example was MotorStorm: Apocalypse, which was originally planned for release for March 16, 2011 in Europe & Australasia, followed by April 12 in North America, but after the "Great East Japan Earthquake", & the following tsunamis, happened on March 11 that year the game's release was delayed everywhere except for Australasia. After all, racing around devastated city environments seemed a tad callous after what happened in the Tohoku region of Japan.

However... at least those games still came out!

Likely the most infamous example of real world tragedy affecting the release of a video game would have to be Propeller Arena: Aviation Battle Championship for the Sega Dreamcast. Developed by the legendary Sega AM2, produced by the iconic Yu Suzuki, & directed by Makoto Osaki (who directed Daytona USA 2 & would later direct Virtua Fighter 5), Propeller Arena was often seen at the time as a sort of sister game to Wow Entertainment/Sega AM1's Alien Front Online, as both were games designed primarily around online play with what was then a brand new concept for consoles: Real-Time Voice Chat via the Dreamcast's plug-in microphone, which debuted with Seaman. But where Alien Front Online was a tank combat game that was an expanded port of an arcade game, & only featured online play & voice chat via modem, Propeller Arena was all about aerial dogfighting & included support for the Dreamcast's rarely-used Broadband Adapter, which would make it the first console game to feature real-time voice chat over broadband, over a year before Microsoft launched Xbox Live in November 2002. Propeller Arena was showcased at E3 2001 that May, followed by a short postponement that meant that it would see release about a month after Alien Front Online's August 7 release in North America. Still, the game's development was 100% complete & Propeller Arena was all set for release in North America first on Wednesday, September 19, 2001...

You all know what happened a week prior to release.

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were hit by two hijacked airliners, while on that same day a third plane crashed into the Pentagon & a fourth plane was prevented from hitting the Capitol Building by the self-sacrifice of the passengers on board, resulting in the plane crashing in an empty field in Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the idea of a game that's all about dogfighting no longer looked like something that made sense to release just eight days later, especially when one of the stages was a cityscape littered with skyscrapers that planes could crash into (though, being an arcade-style game, the buildings were indestructible). While it would have made sense for Sega to simply delay the release of Propeller Arena, there was another problem: Sega had already announced its plans to discontinue the Dreamcast & switch over to being a third-party company back in January. Only 12 more games would see release on the Dreamcast in North America, post-9/11, before everything came to an end, with the final game (NHL 2K2) coming out on February 12, 2002. In short, there was simply no way for Sega to just delay Propeller Arena, since by the time it wouldn't have felt as insensitive (even if the cityscape stage was removed) the Dreamcast would have been long dead; Europe's final games for the system were later that April, but even that wouldn't have been enough time. Now, sure, Japan would continue to see official Dreamcast releases up through 2007, & Sega's own final Dreamcast game (Puyo Puyo Fever) would be in 2004, but Propeller Arena was a game designed specifically for non-Japanese audiences and online play (which, by 2004, only Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2 still had servers up), so it's entirely possible that the game was simply never even intended for Japanese release, in general; also, there was some licensed music in the game, too.

It's now 2026, 25 years after 9/11 & the cancellation of Propeller Arena, which had long been leaked to the public online (multiple times over, including a build literally dated 9/11/2001) & even just earlier this year had its online functionality made operational for the first time ever by the fan community. While I can't really judge said online play functionality myself, as stuff like FlyCast & DCNet is admittedly beyond me, I can judge the rest of the game as it's been known (more or less) ever since the initial leaks, so let's see if the last-minute cancellation of Propeller Arena resulted in the loss of something special for the Dreamcast, or if it was for the best that it never actually came out.

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 70s Part 2

For the second half of this list of still unlicensed anime of the initial two decades of "modern" TV anime's existence we're fully in the 70s now, so let's see how that decade played out, in terms of what was being made in Japan. By this point black-&-white production was 100% finished (Dororo had ended in September 1969), while by April of 1970 Mushi Pro's anime adaptation of Ashita no Joe would debut... and that's kind of the general idea with the 70s in anime. While there were definitely titles that came, went, & have mostly been forgotten with time (or simply beloved by small circles) this decade would be filled with so many genre-defining, epoch creating, or simply masterpiece titles on TV. Lupin the 3rd Parts I & II, Devilman, Gatchaman, The Gutsy Frog, Mazinger Z, Casshan, Karate Baka Ichidai/Karate Master, Aim for the Ace!, Cutie Honey, Heidi - A Girl of the Alps, Space Battleship Yamato, Yatterman, Tadao Nagahama's Robot Romance Trilogy (Combattler V, Voltes V, & Daimos), Nobody's Boy Remi, Future Boy Conan, Galaxy Express 999, Dezaki's Treasure Island, Anne of Green Gables, Mobile Suit Gundam, The Rose of Versailles... all of these have either been licensed for official physical English releases (in North America) at one point/form or another, or at least were given official streams, even if only for a little bit. It really does make one wonder if there are any other true blue "classics" of 70s anime left to even license, or if it's just the hypothetical stragglers remaining.

The answer is that there are still some iconic titles that have yet to be licensed, as well as some lesser known but still notable works... and we begin the second half of this list with easily the most confounding gap of them all.

Seriously, how is it even possible for this anime to be in a list like this, especially considering how many other vintage mech anime of the era have since seen official English release? Anyway, in 1972 Go Nagai revolutionized how giant robots were seen with Mazinger Z, as it was the first one to feature a proper pilot that operated the mech directly via a cockpit that was a part of the robot itself. Created as a media mix project the TV anime version by Toei Animation aired on Fuji TV, and by early 1974 was still running... but Fuji TV wanted more. Therefore, Toei's Ken Ariga proposed a mech anime where the giant robot was formed by the combination of three units, each with its own pilot, and the order they combined in resulted in multiple forms. While initially confused by the concept Go Nagai agreed to move ahead, but since he was so busy with other titles he decided to hand this new mech series over to his friend & assistant Ken Ishikawa... and the rest is history. On April 4, 1974 the first episode of Getter Robo debuted on Fuji TV, which saw three pilots (Ryoma Nagare, Hayato Jin, & Musashi Tomoe) work together to protect humanity from the Dinosaur Empire using their respective Getter Machines, which can combine together to form Getter Robo, which had three different forms depending on how they combined.

The Getter Robo anime was a massive success, solidifying the concept of the combiner mecha, & after 51 episodes would be followed up by a sequel series, Getter Robo G, that ran for an additional 39 episodes from 1975 to 1976. Ironically, Getter Robo G actually saw release in English as part of Force Five in the 80s, as Starvengers, so it's actually ineligible for this list. Meanwhile, Ken Ishikawa took the concept he helped create with Getter Robo & made a manga version of the story, one that eventually would become a massive franchise of works that created an epic magnum opus for the man and showcased the maddening, frightening, & essentially Lovecraftian power that were the Getter Rays that powered Getter Robo & its successive mecha. It would be Ishikawa's manga take on Getter Robo that would heavily influence the direction most Getter Robo anime would take from then on out... and most of those later Getter Robo anime would see official English release, with the only exception being Toei's Getter Robo Go anime from 1991/1992, which itself was a loose adaptation of Ishikawa's Shonen Captain manga (that did see English release via Viz as Venger Robo, though it was unfinished here). Today, Getter Robo is seen as one of the most important & iconic works to come from Go Nagai & his team at Dynamic Pro, right up there with Mazinger, Cutie Honey, & Devilman, and the continual release (& re-release) of the later Getter Robo anime productions (Armageddon, Shin vs. Neo, New Getter, & most recently Getter Arc) in English proves that there's just enough of a fanbase for the franchise... which makes the fact that the very first Getter Robo anime has still never seen an official English release (yet the sequel did, go figure) absolutely mind-boggling, especially since we have received fully subbed releases for both Mazinger Z & Great Mazinger.

Maybe there's some sort of weird hold up, or something, but hopefully one day the very first combiner mech anime will finally get its proper due over here.

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 70s (& Some 60s, Too) Part 1

Well... that two-part list of various TV anime from the 00s that have yet to be licensed for official English release seemed to do pretty good. Therefore, allow me to run this concept into the ground for the next three months by covering the decades prior to the 00s! I had decided to start with the 00s, instead of going purely in chronological order, simply because the 00s was an interesting decade where a lot of its output was essentially stuck between a rock & a hard place. The amount of TV anime being produced each year in that decade only increased compared to the year prior, but the industry outside of Japan still wasn't quite in a place where simulcasting was feasible on even a fraction of the scale it's at today, and with the anime bubble bursting in the middle of that decade many titles wound up getting lost in the shuffle, licensing-wise.

In comparison, the earliest days of TV anime in the 60s & 70s were much more simple & straightforward.

A fine selection of anime from the 60s & 70s,
some that have been licensed, & others still not.

While there was a handful of anime produced for TV prior to the debut of Tetsuwan Atom on Fuji TV on January 1, 1963, it was this adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's iconic manga that really established the standards that are still followed to this day. It's success would lead to other studios making their own "TV manga" productions in a similar manner, which included the "limited animation" style that allowed weekly production to even be feasible; Toei attempted to make Ken the Wolf Boy without limited animation, but eventually had to switch over. Atom was so instantly successful that NBC & the late Fred Ladd debuted it in the US as Astro Boy on September 7, 1963, and while the term "anime" wouldn't really be a thing in English lexicon until at least the mid-to-late 80s (& even then only in extremely small circles) this was the embryonic start of the medium's slow but gradual increase in popularity that is now undeniable today. During the 60s & 70s a fair amount of TV anime would get licensed & dubbed into English for TV broadcast, often (but not always) under new names, resulting in the likes of Kimba the White Lion, Princess Knight, Speed Racer, Gigantor, Tobor the 8th Man, Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, Tekkaman the Space Knight, Force Five (comprised of five different Toei mech anime), Tranzor Z, & Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years (though that last one also involved an 80s anime), among others. Some went on to become massive hits for their time (only to later be mostly forgotten), while others failed, but some went on to only bolster the growth of anime in English-speaking regions.

As time went on, & the English anime industry would start to truly come to form starting in the late 80s & early 90s, the anime of the 60s & 70s would sometimes still be given a chance in English, usually in the form of re-releases of those old dubs for nostalgic purposes (though sometimes given proper attention in their original form, like ADV dubbing all of the original Gatchaman in the 00s), but sometimes they were licensed for the first time, and on rare occasion even got TV time as the new millennium started up, like with the original Mobile Suit Gundam & Lupin the 3rd Part II; those attempts at TV airings in English tended to fail, but attempts were made nonetheless. After the anime bubble burst, & things started to even return to some sense of "normalcy" for the companies that either survived or were formed from the ashes, there started to be a little more focus put towards "filling in the blanks" when it came to iconic classics of those earliest decades finally being given official English releases. This is what resulted in titles like The Rose of Versailles, Dororo 1969, Devilman, Casshan, Cutie Honey, Nobody's Boy Remi, Osamu Dezaki's Treasure Island, a whole bunch more of Lupin & various mech anime, & even most recently stuff like Future Boy Conan, the original Humanoid Monster Bem, Aim for the Ace!, & Sasuke being given their first official English physical releases, while the likes of Ashita no Joe, The Gutsy Frog, & Ninpu Kamui Gaiden at least have been given official English streaming options at one point or another. Anime fandom has finally gotten enough older members to make releases of old (& maybe a little crusty) anime from the 70s, plus the rare pick from the 60s, somewhat viable today.

While prior lists with somewhat similar themes as this list that I made didn't feature any 60s or 70s anime in them, I did restrict myself to titles that had reasonable lengths to them, i.e. nothing more than a year's worth of episodes. Therefore, the Honorable Mentions for this list would be some of the most iconic classics that I felt were just too long to even consider as theoretically viable for licensing: Ken the Wolf Boy, Star of the Giants, Tiger Mask, Attack No. 1, Time Bokan, Dokaben, Sally the Witch, & Himitsu no Akko-chan. So let's just get right into things because... ♪The rest is yet to come, and babe, won't that be fine?♪ Hey, the song actually fits here, because Sinatra's cover came out in 1964!

St. Luminous Mission High School: Sister Christian, Toki ga Kita...

It can be fun & neat to explore the origins of various anime adaptations, because it's not always coming from something you'd normally expect, like a manga, a light novel, or even an iconic & classic tale dating back hundreds (if not thousands) of years prior. Sometimes an anime's origin can be traced back to something more unique & curious, and the subject of this review is a perfect example of that as its origin traces back to a format that, prior to the advent & popularization of TV, was once the most popular format for entertainment: Radio. While radio broadcasting is obviously still around to this day there's no doubt that its biggest heyday was during the first half of the 20th Century (the US's "Golden Age of Radio" is generally seen as from the 1920s to the early 1950s), though in Japan radio managed to hold on just a little bit longer, due to television taking just a little longer to fully reach the entire country; even by 1967, four years after Tetsuwan Atom's debut, only about 1/5 of Japan had TV access. Still, even in later years there were interesting & unique attempts at making radio more appealing to audiences in Japan, like radio dramas & talk shows that appealed to specific niches. Hell, aside from local radio, niche appealing is what most radio stations rely on now. In fact, the origin of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" that came about in late 1996 was due, in part, to the concept of "aniraji/anime radio", which were late-night radio broadcasts aimed at otaku by featuring things like interviews with voice actors & the like. Therefore, it's not shocking that eventually an entire late-night TV anime series could be created that first originated from radio.

In April of 1997 Nippon Cultural Broadcasting debuted a new late-night radio show titled Saint Luminous Jogakuin/St. Luminous Mission High School, a two-person broadcast starring Kaihei Kijima & Sister Akane, who were voiced by Tetsuya Iwanaga & Mifuyu Hiiragi [now Tomoko Ishimura], though the voice actors' real names weren't actually revealed until the final episode (though that didn't stop magazines like Newtype from spoiling the surprise early). The concept of the show was that Kaihei had just inherited an all-girls school from his recently deceased grandfather, one that's been suffering a decline in enrollment to a newly established rival school. Kaihei & Akane decide to solicit the listeners for ideas & advice that would help keep the school afloat & raise enrollment, but instead of simply calling in listeners would submit their responses via pager/beeper; it was the late 90s, so pagers were still more than popular enough in Japan. This radio show would run until March 1998, but a few months later, in July, St. Luminous Mission High School returned to Nippon Cultural Broadcasting's airwaves, now in the form of a 12-episode radio drama that was broadcast as a part of the radio show Manabi Mizuno's Harapekopai, with there being a segment on the show after each episode where Mizuno spoke with the voice cast of the radio drama. The entire radio drama would be released on CD on October 9, 1998, along with a new bonus episode, but just a few days earlier on "October 5 at 25:15" TV Tokyo debuted the first episode of a TV anime version of St. Luminous Mission High School, which replaced Serial Experiments Lain. Unfortunately, I can't tell if the anime was simply an adaptation of the radio drama, or if it was its own unique interpretation, though it was produced with help from Genco (this being one of its earliest productions, in fact) & Pioneer LDC. In that regard, it's interesting that Pioneer Entertainment (or its later incarnation, Geneon) never licensed this anime for English release.

The St. Luminous Mission High School anime was only the fourth TV anime made by the now defunct Triangle Staff, following Hareluya II BØY, Shinkai Densetsu Meremanoid, & Serial Experiments Lain, and today remains one of only two TV anime from the studio that has never seen official English release, alongside Meremanoid. However, there were still yet even more St. Luminous Mission High School productions made, as there would also be both light novel & manga adaptations of the anime, while on May 25, 2000, 17 months after the anime's 13th & final episode aired on December 28, 1998, a romance simulator for the PS1 came out by Xing simply known as St. Luminous. However, aside from being about a young man who inherits a school from his grandfather it features a completely different cast from any prior interpretation, & features none of the mystery aspect of the anime's story. It's pretty amusing that the only two Triangle Staff TV anime that have never been licensed for official English release are the two that both had notably different video game tie-ins released by Xing that came out long after each anime had ended. They were also both conceived of, in some way, by legendary writer Kenji Terada (Final Fantasy I to III, Kimagure Orange Road TV), though Terada had no direct involvement with the St. Luminous anime, unlike with Meremanoid. Without a doubt, a lot of attention was given to St. Luminous Mission High School for the better part of four years in Japan, from its debut as a simple radio show in 1997 all the way to the PS1 game in 2000, so it's kind of remarkable at just how forgotten & obscure the entire thing has become in the decades since, though the anime is at least streaming in Japan... which makes the late-night 1998 anime interpretation the perfect kind of title for me to cover here!

Therefore, my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial continues with a review of St. Luminous Mission High School!