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!

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 00s Part 2

As mentioned last time, the 2000s were a more than tumultuous time for the industry. Japan was only seeing the sheer number of new TV anime being produced on a seasonal (let alone yearly) basis on grow larger over the course of the decade, all while the international market was seeing a major downturn due to the collapse of major outlets that supported the medium, bringing with it the end of the "anime bubble" & the gradual closure of numerous companies, most notably ADV Films, Geneon Entertainment, Manga Entertainment, & (in 2012) Bandai Entertainment. If it wasn't for the rise of Crunchyroll & the advent of legal simulcasting in the late 00s it's honestly hard to tell how the anime industry outside of Japan would look like going into the 2010s. I'm sure simulcasting would have still come about, but likely nowhere near the way it did under Crunchyroll's lead.

And, really, while the first half of the 00s certainly had their notable titles that have yet to be licensed for official English release, it's the second half of the decade where the biggest names truly reside. The first half of the decade was, for the most part, the titles that were simply skipped over by the companies during the apex of the 00s anime bubble. The second half, though, is where we start to get the titles that were skipped over more because the industry was simply going into free fall, and while Crunchyroll certainly wanted to simulcast "everything" ASAP they obviously couldn't do so right away. Therefore, here are six TV anime from the second half of the 00s that remain unlicensed, and in this case most of them are still wanted strongly to this day... but first something that's definitely less talked about & still fits in during the anime bubble days.

Despite being the most widely known manga magazine in the world, one that's still so (relatively) popular in Japan that it only recently hit a physical circulation below 1,000,000 for the first time since 1970 (while all of its competition went sub-million years ago), the actual first 10+ years of Weekly Shonen Jump (i.e. from its debut in 1968 to at least the early 80s) are almost a mystery to most fans, likely even in Japan itself. A big reason for that is due to the fact that only a handful of Jump manga during the late 60s & all of 70s actually received anime adaptations, with only four being made during that time (Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho, The Gusty Frog, Koya no Shonen Isamu, & Samurai Giants), as well as two media mix titles that weren't really adaptations (Judo Boy/Kurenai Sanshiro & Mazinger Z). It wasn't until the near-instant smash success of Dr. Slump Arale-chan on Fuji TV in 1981 that Jump truly embraced anime adaptations (& never looked back), so because of that most of the magazine's earliest hits have either remained manga-only or only saw live-action adaptations, usually via movies (but some TV series, too). In fact, only two Jump manga that date back to the 70s have since seen first time TV anime adaptations post-serialization, as Cobra & Kinnikuman both got anime while they were still running. One is Ring ni Kakero 1 from 2004 to 2011 (which, as mentioned in Part 1, got "Honorable Mention" status for this list due to it being included in a prior list of similar subject matter), while the other is the first entry in the second half of this list, Play Ball.

The Rest is Yet to Come: 12 Unlicensed TV Anime of the 00s Part 1

The 00s was a decade of great upheaval in the anime industry, and in some ways might go down as one of the most important in the history of the medium. Over in Japan it was the decade where TV anime production truly shifted over from "traditional" cel animation to fully digital, alongside the gradual shift from 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9, while native HD productions also slowly started becoming a thing. This resulted in what many fans still sometimes call the "digipaint" era of anime, one filled with anime that have become mighty tricky to re-release on more modern formats like Blu-Ray, due to them being made at a specific (non-HD) resolution that leaves much less flexibility for remastering or upscaling than something originally made for film (or even video tape, at points). This was also the decade where the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" truly started to take hold, as by 2003 the number of TV anime debuting in late-night began growing at an almost exponential rate. Internationally this was the decade that saw the near-collapse of the original anime licensing industry in North America following the bankruptcy of Musicland Group (the biggest retail partner for anime in the region, at the time) in 2006, and in that same year a little online video site focused on anime launched that allowed users to upload any & all fansubs they wanted... it was called Crunchyroll. In 2008 Crunchyroll went legit, with the help of some venture capital partners, & slowly started licensing anime so that it could start "simulcasting" them, eventually bringing an end to that era of "digital fansubbing"; the rest, as they say, is history.

A collection of various 00s anime... girls.
Hey, I didn't make this image.

However, it would take a few years for Crunchyroll (& the competition that either managed to survive the 00s anime bubble bursting or rose up from the ashes) to truly get anywhere near simulcasting "every" new show on a seasonal basis, Toei infamously didn't board the simulcasting train fully until around late 2011, & when combined with the deluge of anime that was simply passed over prior to the rise of Crunchyroll & simulcasting that means that there is still quite a lot of TV anime between 2000 & 2009 that have yet to be licensed for official English release (in North America, since that's where this blog is based out of). Sure, companies like Discotek Media, Sentai Filmworks, Media Blasters, & even the modern-day version of AnimEigo have certainly chipped away at that decade's previously ignored/skipped over titles over the past 10+ years, but even then there are still tons of titles that have yet to be given a chance. In fact, I recently collected together a list over on Bluesky that only included the titles that either "I personally enjoyed, titles I know have a good reputation, or are at least interesting (if maybe flawed)"... and I still wound up with 57 titles from the 00s alone; if I had truly just listed everything still never licensed it would likely have gone past 100! Now, to be fair, one could certainly argue that, by & large, the "best" anime of the 00s have in fact already been licensed & released in English at one point or another, though some certainly have long needed a license rescue nowadays, and some of the titles that have yet to be licensed may be stuck in some form of licensing limbo for a variety of reasons. However, I have always refused to believe that "All of the good stuff has already been licensed", so let's go over 12 TV anime from the 00s that, 26 to 17 years later, have yet to have been licensed for official English release (in North America) in any way whatsoever.

Also, if only to remove redundancies & prevent myself from simply repeating myself, I am excluding anime that I've already included in my two "Twelve Anime I Would License" lists from 2011 & 2012, my "10 Most-Wanted Anime Licenses from the Past 100 Months" list from 2019, & even the "Twelve(+2) Anime with 'Missing' Portions Yet to be Licensed for English Release" list from 2024, as those lists all featured unlicensed anime, in some way. Therefore, the following 00s TV anime would be what can be considered Honorable Mentions: Ring ni Kakero 1, GR -Giant Robo-, Government Crime Investigation Agent Zaizen Jotaro, Monkey Turn, Kanon [2002], Platinumhugen Ordian, & xxxHolic: Kei (this was mentioned in passing in the license rescue list from 2025, so I'll count it); that's more than half a 12 anime list already. So let's get started, because... ♪The rest is yet to come, and babe, won't that be fine?♪

Shadow Skill TV: The Power of My Blow Has No Equal... Except for My Drinking Tab

Today almost any kind of genre of anime can be found debuting in late-night TV time slots, but in the early days of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial", & even in the earlier examples predating the "modern" format, there was definitely more of a focus on not simply offering what could be seen on other time slots. In particular, there was almost nothing along the lines of a "standard" action series, i.e. the kind of fighting-focused fare that you'd find in the shonen magazines of the era. There were some action-heavy anime in late-night, sure, but the 90s was also the era where "battle manga" were often seen adapted into anime that would air in prime time, so there really was no reason to produce one for the more limited & restricted audience that late-night would primarily be aimed at. The closest equivalent early on would maybe have been Hareluya II BØY in 1997, but that was also a delinquent series, a genre that really wasn't being made for TV at the time. No, it wouldn't be until the Summer of 1998 that late-night would finally see its first anime adaptation of a "battle manga"... and it adapted a manga with a very interesting (& sometimes confusing) serialization history behind it.

Born on March 15, 1971, Megumu Okada first got his start in manga as a member of Takehiko Ito's staff for the series Future-Retro Hero Story (the manga that Outlaw Star would later be a spin-off of) in the late 80s & early 90s, before making doujinshi. One doujinshi Okada had made would then be repurposed in 1992 to become Shadow Skill, Okada's first ever professional work that was part of the debut issue of Takeshobo's Comic Gamma, a magazine that was meant to appeal to junior & senior high school students, i.e. those who had grown out of shonen magazines but weren't meant to read seinen magazines quite yet. I should make note of a common misconception online that the "full" title of Okada's manga technically includes the word "Eigi", which comes about from the fact that the official Japanese title is "影技 SHADOW SKILL" (or, in some instances, "SHADOW SKILL -影技-"), and that the way to read those kanji is "Eigi". Now, to be fair, the series does indeed use the term "Eigi" when referring to a specific style of combat in the story, but the literal translation of "Eigi" is simply "Shadow Technique", i.e. "Shadow Skill" (which happens to also be the nickname for the main character), so the manga & anime are simply titled Shadow Skill. A-ny-way, Shadow Skill would run for the entire duration of Comic Gamma's existence, which came to an end in May 1996, resulting in a total of 23 chapters across four volumes. At that point Okada put Shadow Skill on hiatus, but a year later the manga would find a new home with now-defunct Kadokawa brand Fujimi Shobo's Monthly Dragon Jr., continuing on from where the Comic Gamma run left off at. This second run wouldn't last long at only about 1.5 years, & totaling 13 additional chapters, before going on hiatus once again, though in this case it wasn't due to the magazine going under; Kadokawa wouldn't collect the newly serialized chapters, but would re-release the first four volumes in 1998.

After yet another year-long hiatus Okada revived Shadow Skill once again, now being published under Kodansha & its Afternoon series of magazines. It first ran in Afternoon Season Zokan from February 2000 to October 2002, before getting moved over to Monthly Afternoon itself in February 2003, where it would run irregularly until March 2014, when Okada finally brought the series to its end. The main reason why Shadow Skill ran irregularly in Afternoon from 2003 on was due to Okada also debuting a new manga over at Akita Shoten's Champion Red in late 2002, namely Saint Seiya Episode.G, a spin-off/prequel to Masami Kurumada's iconic Shonen Jump manga, which itself has become a trilogy of manga that's since become Okada's primary focus to this day. The main confusion regarding Shadow Skill, aside from the silliness with some people being way too literal with its title, mainly comes down to publication history, which sometimes results in people not knowing how many actual volumes there are. In short, the original Comic Gamma run was four volumes, which were then reprinted by Kadokawa during the Dragon Jr. run. In preparation for the Afternoon run, then, Kodansha did a new aizouban set of releases that collected the initial four volumes across two books, while the previously uncollected Dragon Jr. run was now finally released as the first aizouban, & instead of simple numbers these books each had their own subtitle (black howling & black wing for the original Comic Gamma run, & phantom of shade for the Dragon Jr. run). Finally, the Afternoon run itself would be collected across 11 volumes, which means that the full & complete Shadow Skill manga, as released by Kodansha between November 1999 & May 2014, totals 14 volumes. Finally, earlier this very year, Megumu Okada revived his OG action manga in the digital pages of Tokuma Shoten's Comic Ryu Web with Shadow Skill Dawn, which is naturally still running as of this review & hasn't been collected yet.

And that's not even taking into consideration the anime adaptations! As the Comic Gamma run was in its final months a four-episode OVA adaptation of Shadow Skill by Studio Zero-G Room & director Hiroshi Negishi would come out, with the first 45-minute episode (comprising the "First Season") coming out on October 25, 1995, while the following three 30-minute episodes (comprising the "Second Season") actually all came out after Comic Gamma's closure, from September to November of 1996; whoops. This OVA would see official English release via Manga Entertainment in 2001 via dubbed & subbed VHS & dual-audio DVD, with the "Second Season" being treated as a single, 90-minute "Motion Picture". Then on December 12, 2003 a 60-minute OVA titled Shadow Skill ~Kuruda-ryu Kousappo no Himitsu/Secret of the Kuruda-Style Annihilation Technique~ saw release that was in full-CG & utilized cel shading... and looked notably different from anything prior, due to it reflecting the change in Megumu Okada's own art style, as seen in Saint Seiya Episode.G; this OVA has remained Japan-exclusive, though it's considered the "Third Season". In between the two OVA productions, however, came the focus of this review, which is the TV anime adaptation of Shadow Skill that debuted on TV Tokyo on "July 2, 1998 at 25:15" & replaced (coincidentally enough) Outlaw Star. Much like the first two OVA "seasons", Shadow Skill TV would eventually see official English release, though this time it was via ADV Films, which initially released the show across six dual-audio DVD singles from late 2005 to mid-2006, before re-releasing it via DVD boxset in both 2007 & 2009. But enough with the preamble, my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial continues with a review of Shadow Skill TV, so let's see how late-night's first "pure action" anime holds up after all this time.

Reading Through Classic Literature with Manga!: A History of the Manga de Dokuha Series in English

As someone who writes long-form pieces on a regular basis (probably because I might be a little crazy, but that's neither here nor there), I think it's fair to say that I value reading. However, I'll fully admit that reading straight prose or poetry isn't exactly my forte, and while I can certainly do so & enjoy it (I read the first two Lensman books, Triplanetary & Galactic Patrol, for my reviews of the two Lensman anime last year, for example) I will say that I do tend to prefer something a bit more... illustrated. Yes, I'm a filthy heathen who may not necessarily read an iconic novel in its original form but will gladly read a "graphic novel" interpretation of it, even if doing just that removes a good amount of the personal sparking of imagination the original prose was meant to give the reader. However, the comicalization of iconic written works certainly has its place in the world, as it does allow those stories to be enjoyed by people who would other possibly never read them, and they can certainly have their own appeal as works, in & of themselves.

So let's take a look at how one series did just that via manga.

The idea of "manga" adaptations of classic literature is by no means a rare thing, as there have been countless examples of that across the decades, & some English publishers have even taken advantage of manga's popularity to create new "manga" adaptations of their own, most notably Udon Entertainment's Manga Classics line. Before that, though, Japanese publisher East Press had a line of its own that did the same exact thing in Japan. Prior to 2007 East Press was a fairly small name publisher known most for Comic Cue, a yearly magazine (except for 1999 & 2000, where it was published biannually) that ran from 1994 to 2003 & focused primarily on one-shots, with each issue having a shared theme. However, in August 2007 East Press launched a new line of releases titled Manga de Dokuha/Reading Through with Manga, which looked to adapt various works of literature (both from Japan & abroad) into manga form, with the first two books that came out that month being No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai & The Broken Commandment by Toson Shimazaki. Manga de Dokuha was unique amongst manga in that it technically never credited any specific artist, as instead all books in this line were made by a group calling itself Variety Art Works, which would later rename itself to Team Banmikas.

Manga de Dokuha initially came out at a bit of a rapid pace, roughly 2-3 books every two months, & by July 2008 the first 17 books alone had collectively sold over 900,000 copies, with ~200,000 of those copies alone coming from the manga adaptation of The Crab Connery Ship by Takiji Kobayashi from October 2007, the original 1929 version of which had become a sudden half-million+ best-seller in 2008 & benefitted the manga version immensely. East Press would then start releasing two new books every month starting in February 2009, though starting in October 2012 the pace slowed to just one new book per month, before slowing down to one new book every two months a year later, & finally only two new books per year after February 2015; the 139th & final Manga de Dokuha book, Meisaku Koten Rakugo: Shibahama, Shinigami, Jugemu Hoka (a collection of three iconic rakugo stories), came out in August 2017. In December 2020 Team Banmikas terminated its eBook contract with East Press, instead working with Gakken to re-release 62 of the books digitally in April 2021, with some new edits made. The Manga de Dokuha line would wind up adapting titles like Crime & Punishment, War & Peace, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the Origin of Species, both the Old & New Testaments of The Bible, the literal Book of the Dead, 1984, the Quran (no, I have no idea how they handled Muhammad), & (most infamously) Mein Kampf; yeah, this entire line seemingly had no limits on what it adapted into manga.

Shockingly enough, though, only a comparatively small amount of the Manga de Dokuha books have ever seen English release. The biggest attempt was between November 2011 and November 2012 when the now-defunct digital manga service JManga offered 14 titles for purchase, specifically No Longer Human (not to be confused with either Junji Ito or Usmaru Furuya's respective manga adaptations), Das Kapital, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Night on the Galactic Railroad, The Book of Five Rings (not to be confused with the manga adaptation that Tuttle released in English in 2024), I Am a Cat (not to be confused with the manga adaptation that Tuttle released in English in 2021... though the two manga adaptations actually came out in the same year in Japan), Seton's Wild Animals, Sutta Nipata, One Thousand and One Nights, The Metamorphosis, Journey to the West, In Search of Lost Time, The Art of War, & The Narrow Road to the Deep North; to no surprise, none of these releases are now legally available following JManga's closure in June 2013. However, alongside these digital offerings, there were five Manga de Dokuha books that actually saw physical release in English in 2012, four from One Peace Books under what it called "Manga Classic Readers" (not to be confused with Udon's Manga Classics line), & one from Red Quill Books. One Peace Books did also plan to release Manga de Dokuha's version of The Great Gatsby, even releasing a cover for it, but from what I can tell it never actually came out. As I said before, I'm a dirty heathen who's never read any of the original prose versions of these books, but let's see if the physical English releases of these Manga de Dokuha adaptations still work well on their own.

Obscusion B-List: Bizarrely Late GameCube Ports (& If They Offered Something New, in Return)

The Nintendo GameCube is a video game console that has more or less always had a bit of a reputation ever since it first launched in the last quarter of 2001 (September in Japan, November in North America, & May 2002 for Europe & Australasia), and a decent part of that comes down to what it kind of represented for Nintendo, as a whole. After having an industry dominating presence with the Famicom/NES & then managing to fight off tough competition with the Super Famicom/SNES, the Nintendo 64 suffered a good bit from Nintendo's insistence on sticking with cartridges when everyone else had moved on to optical media, which in turn allowed Sony to take command with the PlayStation. In that sense, the GameCube was Nintendo essentially giving in to peer pressure by finally going with optical media... but, in true Nintendo fashion, the company still showed resistance by going with their own proprietary take on miniDVD. While Nintendo did manage to get third-party support back with the GameCube, including the return of Square(-Enix), the GameCube still wound up being the third-place console of its generation, both in terms of sales (~21.7 million vs. the Xbox's ~24 million) & even game catalog (651 games vs. the Xbox's 989); I won't even bother with the PS2's numbers, because they utterly smoke both competitors.

Thank Evan Amos for such great console images.

However, probably the most bizarre thing about the GameCube is that it also sometimes felt as though the console was treated as a bit of an also ran by the publishers themselves, namely when it came to multi-platform releases. While there were certainly plenty of games where the GameCube port came out more or less at the same time as on the other consoles, maybe no more than a month later, there were seemingly way more examples of games coming out on Nintendo's fourth home video game console literal months after the initial release, if not a year or even more! For some of these releases the same was true for an Xbox or PS2 port, so in those cases it was likely a case of timed exclusivity, which is nothing too shocking. Still, there was a surprising amount of consistency when it came to GameCube ports coming out notably later than almost anything else, which in turn made it feel like Nintendo's console truly was the also ran of the lot, where those who decided to go with the GameCube over the PS2 or Xbox were seemingly punished by having to wait longer for certain games, while their friends who sided elsewhere were rewarded with games first (& more games, overall).

So, in this 25th Anniversary year of the GameCube's launch, let's go over some of these games that wound up coming to the GameCube way, way, waaaaaaay later than other consoles... and see if GameCube owners at least received something special for their patience.

I must admit, some of the entries I came up with are a bit odd &, really, if it weren't for the fact that they were bizarrely late arrivals to the GameCube then some of them wouldn't really be brought up by most nowadays. Case in point is out first entry, 4x4 Evo 2. Originally released for PC & the Sega Dreamcast in October 2000, the first 4x4 Evo(lution) was an off-road racing game developed by a pre-BloodRayne Terminal Reality & could maybe be seen as a spiritual successor to its two Monster Truck Madness games, with the titular monster trucks instead replaced by more standard licensed 4x4 trucks. 4x4 Evo was most notable for being one of the first examples of true cross-platform online play, as owners of the Windows, Mac, & Dreamcast versions could all race against each other, as well as download each others' custom race tracks, & in fact the game's online play is still available to this day, even on Dreamcast. The game would later receive a PS2 port in early 2001, but that version featured no online play whatsoever.

An Overview the Early Years of the "Modern Day Late-Night Anime Infomercial": 1999 & 2000

When we last left off this series of general overviews of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" back in March we went over 1998, which had literally more than double the amount of brand new shows that debuted in late night than the year prior. In that case, then one would think that the following year would see even more new late-night anime than the year prior... but, as you can tell from the title of this piece, we're covering two years this time around in 1999 & 2000. That's because the two years following 1998 actually saw a decrease in the number of new late-night anime that debuted, with 1999 only seeing 15 new standard-length shows, plus 11 (mostly) short-form anime via TBS' Wonderful program (the last time Wonderful would air new anime, in fact), while 2000 literally only saw nine new late-night anime, period. As for why there was such a downturn for two years straight, with 2000 having fewer new late-night anime than even 1997, there really doesn't look to be any real answer to that, though I guess some can be surmised. First, it's entirely possible that production times for shows were starting to become longer, especially since this was the point where digital animation slowly started to become more widely used, before eventually replacing traditional cel animation entirely; new tech could result in slower production, due to staff needing to acclimate. Second, I believe there were some other late-night re-runs of older shows happening, similar to Evangelion in 1997, which would have taken up some time slots here & there; I won't be covering those, however. Third, as I'll bring up over a couple of times in this piece, there were some moments where a late-night slot that had been used for anime for a bit would instead be used for a non-anime program, so it's entirely possible that some networks were taking precautions, in case this really wound up being more of a fad than anything long term. However, things would certainly pick back up starting in 2001, proving that late-night anime was not a fad, in any way.

Regardless of all of that, though, 1999 & 2000 are still notable when it comes to late-night anime for a few reasons. 1999 was (possibly) the first year to feature what's now known as a "split-cour" anime, as 2000 was home to the first true long-form anime to air in late-night. Also, while not as inundated as 1998, there were still some iconic classics that debuted in late-night during these two years, so let's see what 1999 & 2000 offered in their (comparatively) meager individual years.

We begin 1999 with WOWOW, the satellite network that first entered the late-night anime business in 1998 with Nessa no Haoh Gandalla &, more importantly, the first full run of Cowboy Bebop. In fact, by the start of 1999 Bebop was still running, with Episode 11 even airing on New Year's Day(... sort of), so WOWOW clearly wanted to continue that momentum by having a second late-night anime airing semi-alongside Bebop. So the very next night, "January 2 at 24:30", saw the debut of Crest of the Stars, a 13-episode TV anime adaptation of the 1996 space opera light novel series by Hiroyuki Morioka (story) & Toshihiro Ono (art) from Hayakawa Publishing. The series starred Lin Shu Rock Yalulug Dril Hydal Jinto, the son of ex-president of the Hyde Star System who had surrendered to the Abh Empire that had invaded. This resulted in Jinto's family becoming nobility, with Jinto being sent to military school where he meets Abriel Nei Debrusc Borl Paryun Lafiel, a pilot trainee who (unbeknowst to Jinto) is actually an Abh princess. However, the two become quick friends that balance each other out, Jinto being familiar with terrestrial things & Lafiel being familiar with space travel, before war eventually breaks out between the Abh Empire & the Four Nations Alliance of Humankind. In true space opera fashion Crest of the Stars did not tell the entire story of the war, instead only acting as the opening act, & its success (which was unexpected, as space operas were seen as mostly dead in Japan at the time) led to a sequel novel series shortly after in late 1996... but we'll get to that in the next overview. From what I can tell, the Crest of the Stars TV anime by Sunrise looks to adapt the entire three-book series across 13 episodes, & on April 7, 2000 a "Special Edition" film edit of the series came out, more than likely to help promote the TV anime adaptation of the sequel novels... which initially debuted in prime time but, again, we'll get to the sequel series next time.

TokyoPop actually released the Crest of the Stars novels in English back in the mid-00s, while J-Novel Club would re-release them together in hardcover omnibus form in 2020. As for the Crest of the Stars anime, Bandai Entertainment first released it in English in the first half of the 00s, both via dual-audio DVD singles & later DVD boxsets, while FUNimation would later re-release the anime via DVD boxset in 2018, alongside its anime sequel productions.

Dr. Dezaki is Out: Looking at (Most of) the OTHER Black Jack Anime Productions

Out of the enormous catalog of manga & characters that the "God(father) of Manga" Osamu Tezuka brought to the world, one of the most iconic is easily Black Jack. First debuting in Weekly Shonen Champion back in late 1973, the Black Jack manga ran until late 1983 & totaled 25 volumes detailing the medical adventures of the titular Black Jack, an unlicensed doctor with two-toned hair & face who charges exorbitant fees but is also likely the best surgeon in the world; in some instances he'll even do it for free, if it's for the truly needy. Alongside him at all times is Pinoko, his loyal assistant/adoptive daughter, though she prefers to say that she's his "wife"; really, the truth behind Pinoko is something you should learn about on your own, as its pretty wild. Tezuka was able to tell compelling, detailed (enough), & dramatic medical stories due to his own real-life medical doctorate, & he even passed the national examination in 1952, over 20 years prior to Black Jack's debut. Over the past 53 years Black Jack himself has appeared in numerous titles, both manga & anime, and has had numerous cameos in other works & spin-offs detailing things like his younger days as a proper licensed doctor.

Naturally, as mentioned, there have also been anime adaptations of Black Jack... and more than you'd normally think.

If you were to ask most anime/manga fans about anime adaptations of Black Jack you'd probably get two responses instantly. First would be the iconic 10-episode Black Jack OVA that was directed by the late, great Osamu Dezaki, which came out intermittently between 1993 & 2000, & then following Dezaki's passing in early 2011 it was decided to dust off work on two more unfinished episodes & properly complete them, which came out at the end of that same year as Black Jack Final. The second would be the 1996 theatrical film Black Jack: The Movie, which was also directed by Osamu Dezaki & told a complete original story. Both the OVA & movie have seen English release multiple times over the decades, with the movie last seeing release on DVD & Blu-Ray by Discotek Media in 2016, while the OVA just saw re-release this past December on Blu-Ray by AnimEigo, which included the two "Final" episodes for the first time in English, officially. If you were to then press those same fans about any other anime adaptations of Black Jack then some of them would likely be able to point out the two TV anime series that were produced, namely 2004 to 2006's Black Jack TV that lasted 62 episodes, which was immediately followed up by 2006's Black Jack 21, which lasted 17 episodes. The former was mostly a straight, episodic adaptation of stories from the manga, though with some other Tezuka characters added in as recurring supporting cast (like Sharaku from The Three-Eyed One being one of Pinoko's friends), while the latter was a serialized storyline where "B.J." is on the run from a mysterious organization that wants him dead; that said, it still also technically adapted stories from the manga. The anime adaptation of Akihito Yoshitomi's manga Ray, which unofficially featured some Black Jack cameos, aired the same season as Black Jack 21, & Tezuka Pro allowed "B.J." to appear in the first & last episodes of Ray the Animation as an official cameo, seemingly connecting the two shows together. Both Black Jack TV (or, at least, Episodes 1-52) & Black Jack 21 are currently streaming dub-only over on Tubi as of this piece, alongside the OVA & movie, while the first 25 episodes of Black Jack TV saw a crowdfunded sub-only DVD release back in 2014 via Anime Sols; this predated the English dub's production.

However, there are still OTHER Black Jack anime out there, and I think it's time that someone gave those oft-forgotten & ignored productions some time in the limelight, especially since it's entirely likely that some, if not all, of them may never see official English release for one reason or another. Now, to be fair, I actually won't be covering all of these OTHER Black Jack anime myself here, and that's mainly because there is one that I simply cannot cover in any way. Between 2001 & 2002 Tezuka Productions made a 12-episode Black Jack ONA that was only available via subscription service download through the now long-defunct TezukaOsamu@Cinema; it is streaming on some Japanese services today, though. This "internet" anime adaptation utilized Flash for its animation & featured a unique gimmick in that each episode included both a "Zapping system" & "Action system", with Zapping allowing the viewer to change the camera viewpoint at certain parts of each episode, while Action was more or less just a comedic gag that changed certain items around. However, these were still half-to-full-length anime episodes, so even if I could experience the Black Jack ONA it would be long enough to cover as its own piece; Tezuka Pro has a short snippet of the ONA on YouTube, if you're curious. However, even without that I still have four anime productions to go over, so let's see how these OTHER Black Jack anime fare.

The Doctor is In!

Ai no Jidai BEGIN: My, My, This Here Masami Guy; Maybe Seiya Someday Laytah, Now He's Just a Small Fry

Today it's immensely easy for someone to get their start in some sort of storytelling medium by simply making something & sharing it online, whether that be via some form of social media, a personal blog ("Hi!"), or a service that's made for such "amateur" offerings. Over in Japan there have already been numerous examples of a novel author getting their start at a place like Shosetsuka ni Narou, or a mangaka first sharing their work on places like Twitter, Bluesky, or pixiv. However, there are still plenty who continue to do things the old-fashioned way, which in the case of manga would be drawing your own one-shot & visiting a manga publisher, with many of them offering the chance to make an appointment to see an editor who you can show your work off to; some editors even visit conventions like Comiket to offer "first come, first serve" meetings. Said editor can then critique the one-shot & offer advice to the mangaka hopeful, and if things work out well enough they can even decide to publish the one-shot, with the chance of being able to draw other one-shots for future publication before maybe even being given the opportunity at a proper serialization later down the line; this is actually how Akira Toriyama got his start, making one-shots for two years. Many publishers also run contests that act as the same thing, only now with the guarantee that the top one-shots get publication, & the authors being guaranteed serialization spots in the future.

However, while pre-serialization debut one-shots tend to see some sort of collected release if they were officially published previously, most often either as bonuses in volumes of said serialization or put together as a "tanpenshu" (literally "short story collection"), seeing a mangaka's actual amateur work published after the fact is immensely rare... which is what makes this review really neat.

As the final part of the 40th Anniversary of his debut as a professional mangaka, 2015 saw Masami Kurumada draw the manga Ai no Jidai -Ichigo Ichie-/Indigo Period -Once in a Lifetime-; yes, his 40th Anniversary was in 2014, but oh well. Running in Weekly Shonen Champion from Issue #33 to #41, & collected in a single volume, Ai no Jidai was unlike pretty much any other Kurumada manga in that it was a semi-autobiographical story about Masami Higashida, a young man who decides to try his hand at becoming a mangaka after discovering Hiroshi Motomiya's Otoko Ippiki Gaki Daisho and realizing that even an everyday ex-delinquent like him can enter the industry. As mentioned, Kurumada based Higashida's story on his own real-life one, though naturally fictionalized so as to make for a better, more interesting story, like having Higashida's two best friends go through their own respective personal hardships (life as a yakuza & on death's door due to illness, respectively). I read & reviewed Ai no Jidai back in 2016 & absolutely loved it, and thankfully in more recent time it actually received an English fan translation, so it's never been easier to recommend that people check it out. A neat touch in Ai no Jidai, though, was that Kurumada actually showed the cover pages to some of his initial amateur one-shots in the manga, with them acting as Masami Higashida's own work in the story, marking (to my knowledge) the first time they had ever been publicly shown in some form, since in real life Kurumada didn't win the single contest he submitted a work to, so he never had anything published until he made his debut in 1974 with Sukeban Arashi.

However, two years after Ai no Jidai's serialization, and a little over a year after my review of the manga, something really neat happened. When Akita Shoten published the October 2017 issue of Champion Red there was a bonus book included with the magazine, a rare but not unheard of thing with manga magazines. In this case the bonus book was Ai no Jidai BEGIN, which actually collected all four of Masami Kurumada's amateur manga one-shots in their entireties, with three of them being bookended with the pages of Ai no Jidai that indicated where they technically fit into that manga's story. For all intents & purposes, you could simply insert (three of) these one-shots into Ai no Jidai & they really wouldn't interfere with the overall story. Unfortunately, I didn't find out about Ai no Jidai BEGIN until long after that issue of Champion Red came out, and since it was never given a traditional release the book's kind of become a bit of a white whale for my personal collection of Kurumada's catalog, alongside Sukeban Arashi, Silent Knight Sho, & Akane-Iro no Kaze's individual releases (which are all similarly tough to get a hold of physically today, likely due to low print runs). However, much like how Ai no Jidai has now received an English fan translation, the same is true of Ai no Jidai BEGIN, so I can at least read & review this book. This actually is the very last of Kurumada's manga for me to write about that have absolutely no connection whatsoever to any of his major works, so let's finish (to some extent) things off by going all the way back to the beginning... in fact, it's the genesis beyond the beginning.

The Legend of the "Final" Makyu Manga: Team Astro, 50 Years After Its Final Chapter

In many ways, the modern shonen action "battle manga" that's usually seen as the most popular type of manga around the world is essentially an off-shoot of the good ol' sports story. The drive for the main character to become the "best", encountering various rivals that push them to be better/stronger than before, said rivals possibly becoming allies later on, & the idea where, with the help of things like "friendship" & "effort", something akin to "victory" could be achieved are really the same things seen in sports stories as they are in action-heavy titles, even if the finer points can most-definitely vary wildly between them. By that same token, though there were obviously other influences to them, the idea of named special moves can also be traced all the way back, in some ways, to the simple curveball. Widely credited to Candy Cummings, who pitched the first one in a professional baseball game on October 7, 1867, the curveball is the quintessential type of specialty pitch that to a newbie might initially look like "magic"... and that's exactly what it was called in Japan when Hiroshi Hiraoka, "The Father of Japanese Baseball", brought the pitch back home with him after studying abroad in America: The "Makyu", or "Magic Ball".

The Houston Astros posted their first winning record in 1972.
Coincidence? Yeah, definitely.

Over time the term "makyu" would slowly go out of fashion, especially when other such "breaking balls" would be invented, and by the 1950s the term "henkakyu/changing ball" would instead be used for such pitches. However, right around that same time manga truly started to blow up & change from the rental-only market it initially was known as to more readily available serializations by way of proper manga magazines. Alongside that was a shift in focus in baseball manga from starring a batter to instead focusing on the pitcher, and this shift allowed the idea of the makyu to truly flourish. Throughout the 60s & 70s there were numerous baseball manga that would see their main characters throw wild & fantastical pitches, usually (but not always) with some sort of logic behind their execution but often portrayed in ways that were simply impossible in real life. Rintaro Tsubaki from 1963's Kuroi Himitsu Heiki was a literal descendant of the Iga ninja clan, utilizing his ninja skills to help pitch makyu for the Yomiuri Giants. Hyuma Hoshi from 1966's Star of the Giants had the Dai League Ball, which was iterated on numerous times as the opposition found ways to beat prior versions of it. Ban Banba from 1971's Samurai Giants was drafted to the Yomiuri Giants as a teenager because his makyu pitching prowess was so absurdly strong... so much so that Ban literally died on the mound in the final chapter, due to the strain pitching continual makyu put on his body. Rintaro & Hyuma were both also physically hurt by their continual makyu pitching, resulting in each of them eventually leaving the sport, so it's clear to see that gradual escalation was most certainly a thing when it came to makyu-focused baseball manga of the era. However, one manga took the makyu to its ultimate escalatory limit... and then continued to escalate things even further, in turn laying the initial foundation for what would become the modern "battle manga".

Issue #39 of Weekly Shonen Jump back in 1972 saw the debut of a brand new baseball manga titled Astro Kyudan/Astro Baseball Team, i.e. Team Astro, which came from the duo of writer Shiro Tozaki, a former freelance editor-turned-writer at Jump (the story of which is wild enough on its own), & artist Norihiro Nakajima, a relative newbie who only had two very short series under his name by that point. The manga was about a group of nine baseball players who were all born at the same exact time (9:09:09 on September 9, 1954, a.k.a. Showa 29/9/9) & had a baseball-shaped mark somewhere on their bodies. This was predicted by Eiji Sawamura, a legendary young pitching prodigy who once struck out Charlie Gehringer, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Jimmie Foxx in succession during a Japan/US exhibition game in 1934 at just the age of 17; this is actual, real-life history. Sawamura told this prophecy he had to a young boy named J. Shuro he met while stationed in the Philippines during World War II before dying in battle during the war; this is actual, real-life BS. Shuro, now a pearl magnate, has made it his goal to gather all nine of these prophesized players, the "Astro Supermen", so that he can help achieve the dream Sawamura had, one where Japan & the US fought each other not on the battlefield, but on the baseball field.

To put it simply... Team Astro is pure & unadulterated mad insanity of a manga, featuring characters (both fictional & real life, but mostly fictional) performing baseball-related feats that literally break every law of physics & common sense possible, all executed in a fashion that makes you continually wonder if what you're reading (or watching, if you were to see the sole TV adaptation of it) should even be taken seriously as a baseball story in the first place. The Astro Supermen's motto is "Isshiai Kanzen Nenshou/One Game, Full Throttle", i.e. play every game like it's the last damn thing you'll ever do in your life, & the end result is a manga where literally everything is treated as though it's life or death... and, for some characters, it actually is just that; there may not be any crying in baseball, but there is indeed dying in this manga! Team Astro would take the concept of the makyu in a direction where, quite simply, nothing could possibly follow it up, and after its 183rd chapter appeared in Issue #26 of 1976 it all came to an end, currently making it the 81st longest manga in Jump history, slotting in right between Black Cat & The Promised Neverland; it's also Jump's fifth longest baseball manga of all time. Now, roughly 50 years after that final chapter was first serialized, it's time we honor & pay our respects to the series that may have killed the makyu manga entirely (not really... but kind of, sort of) but, in doing so, opened the field for so much more.

WARNING!! This goes into spoilers regarding various part of the story of Team Astro... but, to be fair, the chances of this manga ever getting translated, official or otherwise, are the same as a professional baseball game ever surpassing 33 innings, i.e. nil. PLAY BALL!!!

Legend of Basara: Don't Change the Channel, Don't Touch That Dial, We Got It All on UHF!

Television, much like radio, is broadcast "over the air" by way of radio frequencies that are otherwise invisible & inaudible to human eyes & ears. As early as 1938 TV "channels" are really nothing more than different frequencies that something like an antenna would be able pick up & attune itself to, depending on the current setting of the TV, i.e. "changing the dial" on a set or "changing the channel" on a remote. Initially TV broadcasts were assigned to "VHF/very high frequency" channels, with the North American standard of Channels 2 to 13 being established in 1948. Right around the start of World War II, though, advancements in technology (namely better vacuum tubes & color TV) led to early experiments in utilizing the next category up from VHF, "UHF/ultra high frequency", & by the early 50s all TVs sold on the consumer level had the ability to pick up UHF signals. However, UHF had the draw back of having less clear signals than VHF, which meant that they didn't really reach as far out as VHF signals would, so over time UHF often became known as the signal for more regional broadcasts from networks that were much smaller than the big name networks that could pay for the more prized, cherished, & longer-reaching VHF signals.

So buckle up & allow me to explain how UHF created today's modern anime hellscape!

Over in Japan the major networks (TV Tokyo, TV Asahi, Fuji TV, TBS, NHK, NTV, etc.) are all based either out of Tokyo or Osaka and are essentially the entirety of VHF broadcasting over there. Because of that the smaller independent networks all broadcast using UHF, and for the longest time they more or less relied on the major networks for programming, and that was especially true for anime. For decades the UHF networks simply acted as regional broadcasters for TV anime that was first aired on one of the major networks, and this was also true when it came to the early days of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial". However, that would all change on "April 2, 1998 at 24:30", i.e. April 3, 1998 at 12:30 am, when the first episode of Legend of Basara debuted not on any of the major networks, but rather on UHF network Chiba TV, with Hyogo prefecture's Sun TV airing it five minutes after Chiba TV that same night, while TV Hokkaido did so 30 minutes after Chiba TV's broadcast ended. This 13-episode anime produced by the now-defunct KSS was an adaptation of the 1990-1998 shojo manga epic Basara by Yumi Tamura that was mere months from ending in Shogakukan's Bessatsu Shojo Comic (now known as Betsucomi) when the anime debuted & had already won the Shogakukan Manga Award for shojo in 1993. Basara turned Tamura into a manga legend in Japan, and she'd continue her celebrated status by winning another two Shogakukan Manga Awards, first in 2007 for 7Seeds & then in 2021 for Don't Call it Mystery; she even won a Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award for Fine Arts in 2024.

However, today the Legend of Basara anime is known best as being the very first "UHF anime" ever produced, the first time an anime in general (let alone one made for late-night) ever debuted on a smaller, regional network instead of one of the major ones. The broadcast looked to be a notable success, as UHF stations would immediately follow up Legend of Basara's final episode with TV airings of the Dokyusei 2 & élf Version Kakyusei: Anatadake wo Mitsumete... OVAs, with Dokyusei 2 in particular becoming the first anime adaptation of an "adult" game to ever air on terrestrial TV (with some censorship, obviously); clearly, UHF stations were hungry for new content that they could be the first-run networks of. Now, to be fair, the next two years would be really slow for UHF anime, as 1999 only saw two titles & 2000 saw nothing, but the year 2001 would change everything. While only five shows debuted via UHF that year, the anime adaptation of Comic Party is often considered to be the first UHF anime that truly "broke containment", so to speak. Though 2002 only saw four new UHF anime (out of a total 22 new late-night anime that year), 2003 saw 19 (out of a total 49), followed by 2004 seeing 25 (out of a total 65), 2005 seeing 27 (out of a total 70)... & 2006 saw 46 (out of a total 110) brand new late-night anime debuting via UHF, or ~42%! Ever since the advent of the "modern day late-night anime infomercial" there had been worries that the concept could potentially result in there simply being too much TV anime being put into production on a yearly basis (remember, this isn't even including the TV anime that's debuting in more "traditional" time slots!), but at least when it was left contained to just the major networks the number could potentially be kept in check. However, once the idea of regional UHF networks getting first dibs really caught on in the early 00s the dam had well & truly burst, unable to ever be repaired & closed back up, and while the major networks certainly didn't help things by opening up more late-night time slots for new anime over time I think it's fair to say that it was done (in some part) to combat the rise of UHF anime; you really think the major networks were going to let the regional networks take over?

Yes, today's utter deluge of new seasonal anime, where a single season/cour today will have just as many new late-night anime as an entire year did in the early 00s (if not more!), is the direct result of the creation of UHF anime back in 1998. While Legend of Basara itself isn't necessarily the direct cause of UHF anime's proliferation, it is the first anime of that kind & therefore should shoulder some of the blame. Therefore, my year-long celebration(?) of the 30th Anniversary of the modern-day late-night anime infomercial continues with a review of the very first UHF anime ever produced, Legend of Basara!