While the OVA, theatrical film, & TV special were the primary forms used to adapt video games into anime there were also numerous TV anime adaptations, including Virtua Fighter, Street Fighter II V, Monster Rancher, Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai (based on a manga, but itself based on a game franchise), Touma Kijinden Oni, Shinkai Densetsu Meremanoid (which came out before the game, but was based on the IP), Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective (PC games count, too!), Power Stone, Arc the Lad, Psybuster, Wild Arms: Twilight Venom, & (obviously) Pokémon; hell, there was even Shinken Legend Tight Road, an adaptation of a fighting game that never happened! Meanwhile, over in the United States & Canada, the 90s would be the first decade to truly see a "proper" English anime industry, one that aimed to release anime in its original form (& often wouldn't even see TV airing here), as this was the decade that saw the establishment of ADV Films, FUNimation, Pioneer Entertainment (later Geneon), AnimeVillage.com (later Bandai Entertainment), Urban Vision, Central Park Media, Media Blasters, & the US division of Manga Entertainment, among various other companies. This was also the decade where anime fandom transitioned from small little groups into its earliest form of a truly collective "fandom", helped in no part with the rise of anime-focused conventions, like Anime Expo, Otakon, Anime Central, A-Kon, Animazement, Sakura-Con, Katsucon, & Anime North, among many others. The decade also saw a stronger establishment of magazines covering anime, both made by fans & professional, while the eventual mass introduction of the internet resulted in it being even easier for fans to find each other & communicate via forums & message boards (like the legendary rec.arts.anime on Usenet), while anime-focused websites became a thing, with places like Anime News Network, AnimeonDVD, Anime Web Turnpike, & more first going live in the 90s.
And to make a long story short ("Too late!"), while "anime" & "fandom" certainly existed in prior decades in English-speaking regions, it was in the 90s that an actual "industry" became truly established that only helped encourage the growth of that fandom to even greater heights; the modern-day anime industry & fandom that exists is due, in large part, to what was established in the 90s. However, due to how anime had to be released in English during the 90s, i.e. either aired on TV or released on VHS (which would hold anywhere from one to five episodes on a single tape), it was more common for OVAs & movies to be licensed & released by companies that didn't have TV network connections, since they could be released without committing to long-term hurdles; TV series certainly still saw release, but they were definitely less common. Because of that many TV anime of the 90s got skipped over for official English release the first time around, and while many of them would later be given releases after the advent of DVD, the later shift over to straight-to-boxset, & now streaming there are still tons of 90s TV anime that have still been left behind. Therefore, for one last time (at least for the time being), let's take a look at 12 TV anime that remained unlicensed & without an official English release, of some sort, and this time around the Honorable Mentions that I had included in prior lists of a similar nature would be The Violinist of Hameln, Shinken Legend Tight Road, & Nekojiru Gekijou - Jirujiru Original.
After all... ♪The rest is yet to come, and babe, won't that be fine?♪
We begin with a title that, surprisingly enough, actually has some modern-day relevance by way of its currently-running next-gen sequel receiving a TV anime adaptation of its own... one that was summarily never picked up for official English release via simulcast (in North America, at least). In the world of sports, dodgeball is probably seen as one of the least "serious" of them all, despite it being ubiquitous in schools & having an official worldwide governing body since 2011. Part of that would likely be due to the 2004 film Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, a very enjoyable & silly comedy film (though one that would lead to ESPN8: The Ocho eventually becoming a real FAST channel), but over in Japan dodgeball has a different legacy made up of two iconic series. First was 1987's Nekketsu Koukou Dodgeball-bu/Hot-Blooded High School Dodgeball Club, an arcade game by Technos Japan that's better known abroad as simply Super Dodge Ball & is a spin-off of the popular Kunio-kun Series. This became so popular that there's actually a real-life variant of the game called "Super Dodgeball" that looks to follow a lot of the same rules as the game, though I'm not sure which came first. Then, in late 1989, mangaka Tetsuhiro Koshita debuted Honou no Tokyuji Dodge Danpei/Flaming Dodgeball Boy Danpei in the pages of Shogakukan's CoroCoro Comic, which told the story of Danpei Ichigeki, the son of a now-deceased famous dodgeball player who joins the dodgeball team at Kyugawa Elementary School & rises up the ranks with his teammates.
The Dodge Danpei manga would run until mid-1995 & total 18 volumes, and then on November 28, 2022 Koshita returned with Honou no Tokyujou Dodge Danko/Flaming Dodgeball Girl Danko, a next-gen sequel starring Danko, Danpei's daughter, who finds herself in a similar situation as her father once did, right down to Danpei now being deceased. Dodge Danko is still running, & currently totals nine volumes, and during the Summer 2026 season a 12-episode TV anime adaptation aired... but the only international simulcast the show would receive would be in Southeast Asia/SEA, a rare instance of a modern anime being (effectively) 100% skipped over for simulcast by most of the world. But we're not here to talk about Dodge Danko, but rather I'm here to bring up the Dodge Danpei TV anime that aired on TV Tokyo from October 1991 to September 1993 for 47 episodes! Yeah, while the Dodge Danko manga is technically for kids, the anime was technically made for adults who watched the OG series' anime adaptation back in the early 90s that was the debut work for the short lived anime studio Animation 21 & saw the legendary Hiroshi Sasagawa lead everything as the "General Director" (as he did for all of Animation 21's productions); the anime was seemingly a big hit with kids & helped popularize dodgeball in elementary schools. The Dodge Danpei anime was also the first production for Shogakukan(-Shueisha) Productions, i.e. ShoPro, which would most notably help produce the Pokémon anime a few years later, among many other anime. Normally a 100% kids show like this wouldn't be something I'd include in a list like this, especially since it was never licensed for English release before, but it being a literal dodgeball anime helps give it a real sense of uniqueness, and now with Dodge Danko existing (plus the notoriety it received as a rare simulcast skip) it helps give Dodge Danpei a bit more notoriety now, I'd argue.
Really, all I'm saying is that an official English release for Dodge Danpei can only dodge, duck, dip, dive, & dodge for so long...
Our next entry is one that did actually have an official English release back in the 00s, so I have no idea why I'm including this here... oh wait, that was the sequel series, not the original. In late 2004 ADV Films announced at Oni-con that it had licensed, amongst other titles, Papuwa, the 26-episode TV anime adaptation of the manga of the same name by Ami Shibata that was running in Square-Enix's Monthly Shonen Gangan & had finished airing in Japan earlier that same year. It'd then see release via dual-audio DVD singles from 2006 to 2007, followed by a DVD boxset in 2008, where it more or less came & went. However, it managed to find a small cult following for its zany antics about a young boy who lives on a tropical island with a variety of bizarre creatures, & an amnesiac friend who (unknowingly) hides a major truth. However, Papuwa (both the anime & manga) was a sequel to one of Shonen Gangan's earliest hit manga, Nangoku Shonen Papuwa-kun/Tropical Boy Papuwa, and in fact it's generally seen that Shibata's return with Papuwa in 2002 was a "break glass in case of emergency" move by (then) Enix to maintain readers, as the mass exodus that led to the founding of Mag Garden & Ichijinsha had just happened. Regardless, it's not as though Papuwa necessarily required people to be familiar with the original series to be watched... but what about the original series?
Well, as stated, Ami Shibata's debut serialization was one of Gangan's earliest hit manga, so it's no surprise that there would be a TV anime adaptation of Nangoku Shonen Papuwa-kun that ran from 1992 to 1993 & totaled 42 episodes, nearly double what the sequel got; in fact, Papuwa-kun is literally the very first anime adaptation of a Shonen Gangan manga. Much like the Papuwa anime, the Papuwa-kun anime was also animated by Nippon Animation... though that's more or less where the similarities end, as aside from Papuwa-kun's director Jun Takagi returning for Papuwa as a supervisor (& the color designer being the same guy, too) they were very much wholly different productions, even down to there being literally no returning voice actors from the original. The Papuwa-kun anime covered about half of the manga, telling the original stories involving Papuwa, his animal friends, & their original amnesiac ally Shintaro, and admittedly I'm not sure if English-speaking anime fans are necessarily asking for this series to be given an official English release. Still, the fact that we got the sequel anime series but never the original puts it in a similar position as something like Sonic Soldier Borgman, which I did feature in the 80s list, so I think that makes it worthy enough of an entry in the 90s list.
I'm sure it's not considered anything close to a priority for any English anime company, but maybe one day we'll get both halves of the Papuwa anime duology in English, instead of just the second half.
Mech anime was still very much alive & well during the 90s, and alongside the numerous Gundam shows that were made Sunrise also had another major mech franchise that resulted in yearly productions for most of the decade: The Brave Series. Co-created by Takara & Sunrise to act as a successor to Tranformers, the Brave Series began in 1990 with Brave Exkaiser & would (initially) come to an end in 1997 with The King of Braves GaoGaiGar, though there have been related productions made since then, mostly GaoGaiGar-related due to it being the most iconic & (eventually) popular of the eight shows that were made. By that same token, the only entry in the Brave Series to receive an official English release so far has been GaoGaiGar (as well as sequel OVA series GaoGaiGar FINAL & TV anime spin-off Betterman), but there are other entries that have managed to gain strong cult followings outside of Japan via fansubs. I knew that I had to include a Brave Series entry for this 90s-themed list, & I had some good picks to consider, like Brave Fighter of Legend Da Garn (which is usually seen as having one of the best overall stories in the franchise), Brave Police J-Decker (which has probably one of the most beloved casts), or even Brave of the Sun Fighbird (if only because it's the origin of the "Is this a_____?" meme); if I was to ever make another "The Rest is Yet to Come" list for the 90s then I'm sure one of them would be included.
However, I decided to go with the series that (from what I can tell) is usually seen as the second-best overall entry in the Brave Series, Brave Express Might Gaine. Airing from January 30, 1993 to January 22, 1994 in Japan for 47 episodes, Might Gaine took place in the year "Showa 125" (i.e. 2050), a century after the world's supply of oil ran out & humanity relied fully on trains instead of automobiles, & followed Maito Senpuuji, a 15-year old boy who's inherited his billionaire father's company & assets after his passing three years prior. This includes the Brave Express, a squadron of transforming giant robots that fight back against any & all crime, & Maito can combine his train with the robot Gaine to form Might Gaine, should things get especially bad (which is pretty much always the case). Brave Express Might Gaine is generally lauded for having an excellent cast of characters, including a memorable rogues' gallery of recurring villains that Maito & his crew take on, as well as a metatextual finale that has been misinterpreted by some over the years as Sunrise seemingly airing any grievances it had with Takara at the time via the show, but more than likely wasn't really the case. Might Gaine was also the TV directorial debut for Shinji Takamatsu, who'd move on to direct anime like J-Decker, the second half of Gundam Wing (though uncredited), Gundam X, KochiKame, School Rumble, & Gintama, among many other shows. Might Gaine is also the second Brave Series entry to receive any sort of official English representation when it was included in Super Robot Wars V in 2017, becoming the second Brave Series anime to ever get included in the franchise, so maybe one day the actual show itself will finally be given an official English release, too.
OK, so far I've included stuff that either has a notable cult following or, at the very least, has some connection to either a prior official English release or a modern-day anime production... so let's go with something much less known, but still generally well regarded. In 1994 a trio of productions all titled "Yamato Takeru", after the legendary Japanese folk hero, saw release in Japan and were all looked at as a collective media mix project. The most well known of these would be the epic kaiju film produced by Toho that debuted on July 9, 1994 & is known outside of Japan as Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon; it saw release in English via ADV Films in 1999 (dubbed VHS) & 2003 (dual-audio DVD). Then there's the manga written by Wataru Mimura (who wrote the Toho film) & drawn by Kenji Takaya, which was technically the first to debut & ran in CoroCoro Comic from December 1993 to September 1994; this looks to be more or less a manga version of Toho's film. In between the two, though, there was the TV anime Yamato Takeru by Nippon Animation... and this was pretty much nothing like the movie or manga. The first mech anime made by Nippon since the infamous Cho Gattai Magic Robo Ginguiser in 1977, & only the studio's third ever mech anime, Yamato Takeru takes place in the 25th Century on the planet Izumo, which 12 years prior saw an Earthling colony land on it & start to live alongside the natives of the planet itself. However, an entity called Tsukuyomi & its Demon Sky Warriors start attacking villages on Izumo, hoping to revive Yamata no Orochi by gathering the eight jewels it was sealed within in ancient times & hidden away on eight planets... and Tsukuyomi already has seven of them. All that remains is Izumo's jewel, but when a 13-year old boy named Takeru Yamato discovers a giant robot named Susano'o he manages to fend off Tsukuyomi's forces. However, Takeru's battle nearly destroys his village in the process, resulting in him being banished, so Takeru eventually decides to use Susano'o to defeat Tsukuyomi & prevent the resurrection of Yamata no Orochi.
So, yeah, while the general concept of the Yamato Takeru anime follows some of the same general plot beats seen in the movie, manga, & even the original folk tale, the actual execution is completely different by being a mech anime. However, that would wind up working out in the anime's favor, as both the Toho film & the manga by Mimura & Takaya would go on to be seen as complete failures, with the movie performing so poorly that sponsors even pulled out, resulting in the cancellation of some planned tie-in products. This also affected the anime, as it was originally planned to run for a full year, only for the movie's failure to result in the anime being cut down to 37 episodes, which itself resulted in the anime's story needing to rush a bit in the second half in order to reach a proper conclusion. Still, Nippon Animation's TV anime would go on to be seen as the only real success of the whole Yamato Takeru media mix project, later receiving a two-episode After War sequel OVA on November 22, 1995, & I've always heard almost nothing but praise for the show itself; I've only seen the first one or two episodes myself long ago, but I remember liking what I saw.
There has been some licensing snafus regarding its theme songs, though, namely its first OP & ED, which were both performed by Glay, a rock band that now is considered a legendary band but at the time was literally just making their professional debut when the anime began airing. When the anime first aired the songs "Manatsu no Tobira" & "Rain" by Glay were the OP & ED themes for Episodes 1-18, before switching over to "Flower of Desert" & "Twilight Songs" by Naoko Hamasaki for Episodes 19-37; "Rain" was also the ending theme for Toho's film. However, when it came to home video Glay's songs were replaced entirely by Hamasaki's, though the animation sequences themselves were kept the same, & this was seemingly due to King Records handling the home video release (which Hamasaki was signed to), while Glay were signed to Platinum Records. Despite that, some reruns the anime has had on certain networks in Japan ever since then kept Glay's songs fully intact, & even Nippon Animation's YouTube channel includes Glay's songs for its recent (& Japan-only) HD remastered streaming option, so maybe the issues are now all resolved. Regardless, the Yamato Takeru anime would be my personal pick for this half of the list, as it's a series that most people in English-speaking fandom almost never talk about, but I'd love to see it be given an official English release, if only so that I could finally watch it without relying on what could very well be subs from an old bootleg release.
In the prior list focused on the 80s I had to put the legendary Touch down as an Honorable Mention, and that was for a simple reason... it's 101 episodes long. However, it would be wrong to not have a Mitsuru Adachi manga adaptation included in one of these lists, and luckily the 90s allows me to do just that. After ending Touch in 1986 Adachi would take a break from baseball manga & make the diving manga Rough from 1987 to 1989 & the jidaigeki-esque (but totally taking place on another planet) Niji-Iro Tohgarashi for Weekly Shonen Sunday, before finally returning to the sport that made him a household name in manga with H2, which debuted in Issue #32 of 1992. The title was in reference to the fact that the manga starred "two heroes & two heroines", who also all had first names starting with "H", as the manga told the simultaneous stories of Hiro Kunimi, Hideo Tachibana, Hikari Amamiya (three friends since childhood), & Haruka Koga, who experience their own baseball journeys across two high schools. Hideo & Hikari are dating & attend Miewa Daiichi High (which has a renown baseball team), while Hiro & Haruka attend Senkawa High, which initially doesn't have a baseball team but later founds one once Hiro decides to return to the sport, with Haruka acting as team manager. Also, as expected for a character-focused Adachi sport series, Hiro finds himself in a bit of a love triangle, as both Hikari & Haruka slowly realize that they each have feelings for him.
There's a neat little dichotomy between Touch & H2, as while Touch is the more iconic & successful manga for Adachi, selling over 100 million copies, H2 is actually the longer story as it would run until late 1999 & total 34 volumes, eight more than Touch's 26. However, where the Touch TV anime would total 101 episodes & five films, the H2 TV anime by Ashi Pro & Toho that ran from June 1995 to March 1996 would only total 41 episodes; also, where the Touch anime adapts the entire manga, the H2 anime only looks to adapt the first eight volumes. Still, where the Touch anime is often seen as a truly impossible anime to license, both due to its sheer length as well all as likely having a ridiculous price tag because of its legendary status, I imagine H2 would (in comparison) be a much more reasonable thing to see licensed. Sure, 47 episodes is still nothing to sneeze at for a mid-90s baseball anime, and maybe there would be a sense of "in lieu of" behind it, but it's not as though H2 was some minor title for Mitsuru Adachi. As of this piece H2 remains Adachi's single longest manga of all time & has sold over 55 million copies, putting it up there with the likes of Ranma ½ & The Seven Deadly Sins. Meanwhile, there has been generally been a lack of English physical releases for anime adaptations of Mitsuru Adachi's works, in general, as it still only amounts to Western Connection's UK-only VHS release of the Slow Step OVA & FUNimation's boxsets for the Mix anime (& only for Season 1, at that), while the Cross Game anime only ever saw a streaming option via Viz for a few years (& has since long expired).
Considering the legend that Mitsuru Adachi is when it comes to sports manga I think fans of his works would be happy to get any of the anime adaptations they can get their hands on in English, so I imagine H2 would be a happy little middle ground, in that regard.
Finally, we end the first half of this 90s-themed list with a shojo series (we'll have a couple more next time, so excuse the sole inclusion here) that's also the return of a creator whose prior work was included in the 80s list. So in that prior decade's list I included the TV anime adaptation of Tokimeki Tonight, the iconic shojo manga series by Koi Ikeno that's actually still going strong today via a second sequel series. After ending Tokimeki Tonight in the October 1994 issue of Shueisha's Ribon Ikeno would then debut her next work only three issues later, but this time it was part of a media mix project. For this new work Ikeno would team up with Yasushi Akimoto, a bit of a polymath who got his start as a lyricist & television writer, before eventually becoming a music producer who's worked with acts like AKB48 (& its various offshoots), KinKi Kids (now Domoto), & Onyanko Club, eventually being nicknamed an "Extraordinary Hitmaker". Akimoto is also an experience author, too, as he wrote the horror novel Chakushin Ari, which would be the start of the multimedia One Missed Call horror franchise. The end result of Ikeno & Akimoto teaming up would be 1995's Nurse Angel Ririka SOS, which ran as a manga in Ribon from January 1995 to June 1996 for four volumes, & from July 1995 to March 1996 a 35-episode TV anime version by Studio Gallop would air on TV Tokyo.
Ririka SOS was a magical girl series starring Ririka Moriya, a girl who on her 10th birthday is given a nurse cap by Nozomu, a recent English transfer student she has a crush on, only for her to discover that Nozomu is actually Kanon, an emissary from the planet Queen Earth, which has recently been taken over & polluted by an evil organization called Dark Joker. Both Kanon & Dark Joker are looking for the "Flower of Life", and Kanon has decided that Ririka is the perfect candidate to become a "Nurse Angel", a magical girl who can fight back against Dark Joker's forces on Earth. Ririka's powers come from a substance called "Green Vaccine"... and in the anime Ririka has a limited amount of it on hand, which means that she can't fight against Dark Joker forever. If you look up information regarding Nurse Angel Ririka SOS you'll often see it cited as an early example of a "dark" magical girl series, 16 years prior to Madoka Magica making that concept popular, but in reality it's not that this is a "dark" magical girl series, bur rather is simply a series that has real stakes to it, complete with consequences. Ririka has a limited amount of magical power, so she can't just transform whenever she feels like it, while Kanon eventually gets infected with "Dark Vaccine" but refuses to use any of Ririka's power to heal him, as it would limit her ability to fight back even more; she eventually gets the help of her friend Seiya, who inherits Kanon's powers, but the point still stands. Of the two version of Ririka SOS it's the anime that's mostly become a strong cult classic, as it managed to be both a silly & comical magical girl series that could appeal to kids (it marked the directorial debut for Akitaro Daichi) while also telling a story that had stakes & consequences to it, one where it's entirely possible that the magical girl could actually fail, especially if she's unable to find the Flower of Life before she runs out of Green Vaccine... and don't forget that this is all up to a 10-year old girl, for the most part, by herself; she doesn't have an entire squad of fellow magical girls to back her up.
To no surprise, Nurse Angel Ririka SOS was covered by MediaOCD/AnimEigo's Justin Sevakis as a Buried Treasure back in 2007, and while he was recently hit a bit with the release of Looking For the Full Moon (which he admitted had strong initial sales, but quickly petered off... like many shojo anime tend to do in English, sadly) I wouldn't be surprised if, eventually, Sevakis will do what he's been doing lately with AnimEigo & licenses Ririka SOS himself one day; hey, if he won't license it, then who would?
-----
And thus we come to the end of the first half of this 90s focused list of unlicensed TV anime. Check back in next week for the second half, which will also mark the end of this multi-month stretch of 12 anime lists focused on unlicensed TV anime. Hopefully you've been having as much fun reading about these titles as I have had picking & writing about them these past few months, because it's certainly been a good time, amongst all the other stuff I've been writing about lately.
Honou no Tokyuji Dodge Danpei © Tetsuhiro Koshita/Shogakukan © Tetsuhiro Koshita/Shogakukan・ShoPro
Nangoku Shonen Papuwa-kun © Ami Shibata/Square Enix・Nippon Animation
Brave Express Might Gaine © Sunrise
Yamato Takeru © Nippon Animation
H2 © Mitsuru Adachi/Shogakukan・Toho
Nurse Angel Ririka SOS © Yasushi Akimoto・Koi Ikeno/Shueisha・NAS
No comments:
Post a Comment