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made at a specific (non-HD) resolution that leaves much less flexibility for remastering or upscaling than something originally made for film (or even video tape, at points).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?♪