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?♪