Maze☆The Mega-Burst Space (Ogeretsu-ban): A "Vulgar" Display of Power?

On "October 3, 1996 at 25:15", i.e. October 4, 1996 at 1:15 am, TV Tokyo aired the first episode of Those Who Hunt Elves, marking the start of what I love to (semi-jokingly) call the "modern day late-night anime infomercial". I call it that because the very reason TWHE aired in that kind of time slot was seemingly purely for marketing reasons. In short (read what I wrote earlier this month for the long version), the end of the OVA boom in the early 90s due to the Bubble Economy bursting resulted in anime production shrinking for a few years, & eventually it was decided that if otaku were listening to late-night anime-themed radio shows then maybe they would just watch anime on TV during that time, which in turn could double as advertising, i.e. the anime was, in essence, an infomercial; also, the time slot was sold to the production by the network... just like an infomercial. Anyway, Those Who Hunt Elves did well enough to keep the experiment going & after that came the first Eat-Man anime (as well as a batched re-run of Neon Genesis Evangelion, to hype up the Death & Rebirth movie), so TV Tokyo decided to expand its late-night offerings starting in April 1997. Instead of offering only one new anime in late-night the network would now offer four, and two of those new offerings would debut on "April 2" (i.e. post-midnight April 3) one after the other, effectively creating the first late-night anime block. I've previously covered what aired at "25:45" back in 2016 when I reviewed Haunted Junction, so I think it's only right to start my year-long look at early examples of the modern day late-night anime infomercial by looking at what is, chronologically, the third ever example...

Our story begins in 1986, when a young mangaka named Kia Asamiya (real name Michitaka Kikuchi, and he'd swap between the two throughout his career) made his professional debut in manga with the series Shinseiki Vagrants over in Kadokawa Shoten's Monthly Comic Comp magazine. During that same year, though, Asamiya would also draw a 16-page short in Tairiku Shobo's Comic JAM magazine titled Ijikuu Gyo Kitan OZ/OZ: A Bizarre Story from Strange Spacetime, appearing in Issues #1 & #3 specifically; it later got reprinted in 1996 via the book Colors Side-A (which you can find over at the Internet Archive, actually). Then, in 1990, Asamiya returned to the concept of that one-shot with the manga Jikuu Kitan OZ/Mysterious Spacetime Story OZ, which he co-created with writer Satoru Akahori & ran in Hobby Japan's RPG Magazine for six issues before it went on indefinite hiatus, never to be continued. While Asamiya seemingly had no interest in continuing this concept, though, Akahori still wanted to do so, & in 1993 teamed with Eiji Suganuma (normally an animator, & now director, but was also a talented artist) to debut Maze☆Bakunetsu Jikuu/The Mega-Burst Space as a light novel in the pages of Kadokawa Shoten's magazine The Sneaker. Apparently Akahori more or less just took the same exact story that he & Asamiya had made with the second OZ manga & changed the names around in order to make Maze, but since he co-created the unfinished manga I guess he technically had every right to do so. In the end Maze would handily outlive its predecessor, running in The Sneaker until 1998 & totaling 14 books, with nine telling the main story, two telling side stories, & the remaining three simply telling bonus stories. I have no idea how Kia Asamiya felt about Satoru Akahori effectively co-opting a concept that he had first created on his own, but I guess that's just how the house falls from the sky sometimes.

Maze would also receive two different manga adaptations, one by Rei Omishi (who co-created Sorcerer Hunters with Akahori) that ran in Monthly Comic Dragon from 1995 to 1999 across six volumes & another by Suganuma himself in Comic Newtype in 1996 that only ran for a single volume. Also in mid-1996 was an OVA adaptation of Maze, a two-episode affair produced by Kadokawa, Victor Entertainment/JVC, & J.C. Staff that seemingly did well enough to prompt a second anime adaptation. This time around, however, it'd be a two-cour TV anime that aired in late-night, though it was produced by the same companies & even featured more or less the same exact major staff & cast reprising their respective roles from the OVA. The only main difference looks to be that the OVA was technically based on Rei Omishi's manga, crediting them with "Original Characters", where the TV anime was based on the light novel drawn by Eiji Suganuma (though Suganuma also did the character designs for the OVA). Central Park Media would license both Maze anime productions, first releasing them on VHS in 2000 before later re-releasing both on dual-audio DVD... but that's not what I'll be covering here. You see, CPM seemingly kind of got screwed over when it licensed Maze TV because what they released in North America was simply the original TV version, which is what came out in Japan on VHS.

However, over on Laserdisc Japan received an alternate version of Maze TV. Known over there as the "Ogeretsu-ban", or "Vulgar Edition", the LD release was an uncensored version of the show, featuring altered cuts of scenes that were apparently just too hot for even late-night TV in 1998. Not just that, but CPM's release was also missing a bonus 26th episode that has stayed exclusive to Japan to this very day, one that was released on VHS in Japan (& maybe also LD?), but only as a mail-in "proof of purchase" deal. So, sorry, no coverage of CPM's dub this time around as we start off my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial by checking out the "Vulgar Edition" of Maze☆The Mega-Burst Space!

An Overview the Early Years of the "Modern Day Late-Night Anime Infomercial": 1996 & 1997

While not technically the first anime to be made for TV broadcast, 1963's Tetsuwan Atom/Astro Boy (based on Osamu Tezuka's most iconic manga) was the first anime to air on TV as a "proper" 30-minute (including commercials), long-form serialized program, similar to how other TV programming tends to work; any TV anime prior to this were all either short-form (i.e. only a few minutes long) or were short-run (one to three episodes). When Atom first debuted on Fuji TV it initially aired Tuesdays from 18:15-18:45, i.e. 6:15-6:45 pm, before later being moved over to Saturdays from 19:00-19:30, i.e. 7:00-7:30 pm, the latter time slot being the start of what Japan calls "Golden Time", or what is usually referred to worldwide as simply "prime time". While the exact time frame may differ depending on the country (Japan goes with 7-11 pm, while the US goes with 8-11 pm EST), the idea of prime time (or sometimes "peak time") is that those hours of the day would be the most ideal time to air new, hot, or "prestige" programming that would attract the potential largest audience possible, hence why it's considered "Golden" in Japan. After all, kids are home from school (& adults from work) by then & it's after most people's dinner time, while simultaneously it's also not yet too late that most people would be going to sleep. As the concept of TV anime grew more popular it became standardized for those shows to air in "Golden Time", though eventually weekend mornings also became a regular time frame for certain programming, usually for more children-focused shows, while prime time became the time for something the whole family could watch, or at least older children & teenagers.

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.

But wait... there's more!!