Coop and Chris try to answer the eternal question: does it matter if the sequel is as good if it takes too long to show up?
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
The Devil is a Part-Timer!, Yona of the Dawn, Lycoris Recoil, and Symphogear are streaming on Crunchyroll.
Princess Principal and Flowers of Evil are streaming on HI-DIVE.
Tiger & Bunny is streaming on Netflix, Pluto TV, and Tubi.
Tiger & Bunny 2 is streaming on Netflix.
Coop
I've got a question for you, Chris. Do you ever find yourself scrolling down the timeline only to be blasted with a torrent of foundational anime memories? Because that sure happened to me when I discovered that Tiger & Bunny is leaving Hulu.
Tiger & Bunny (Season 1) is currently scheduled to expire within 13 days on Hulu www.hulu.com/series/23223...
Season 1 can still be streamed:
- www.netflix.com/title/80039972 (includes Season 2)
- pluto.tv/us/search/de...
- tubitv.com/series/1983/...
- www.hoopladigital.com/title/14762121
Chris
As we've discussed before, Coop, streaming services come and go, and so do the series on them. The good news, as noted in the post there, is that storied superhero smash-up Tiger & Bunny will still be available on a plethora of other platforms that aren't Hulu, which ain't bad for a series whose popularity nearly predates the streaming era itself.
You can even stream something called...squints "Tiger & Bunny 2" specifically on Netflix? It makes sense that such a foundational and popular series would receive a follow-up, probably released right away and to the same level of success. No wonder such an elder statesman of super-shows has been around long enough that it'd be leaving Hulu by now.
While Tiger & Bunny is still available on other platforms and easily purchased on Blu-ray (minus the second series), this classic's Hulu run is important because it blazed a trail for simulcasting as we know it today. In 2011, before I even knew what a "Crunchyroll" was, I parked myself at the computer every Saturday night for Hulu's upload of the latest episode. I'll tell you this, it was a spring season to remember. But aside from the occasional bit of buzz from the hardcore fans and the series' high ranking on Japanese best of lists, the chatter around Tiger & Bunny has cooled down in the decade-plus since its airing. Given the popularity of superhero anime and the explosion of simulcasting over the years, it's safe to say that this fan favorite was just a little ahead of its time.
In this edition of This Week in Anime, we'll be talking about a handful of series that captured the anime zeitgeist as they aired...but sadly lost steam as the years went by for one reason or another. T&B shines brightly for me because I lived through much of its North American push as a young fan hungry for more adventures with this bickering married couple of heroes.
Not to make my earlier joke too oblique, but Tiger & Bunny 2 streamed in 2022, over a decade after the original anime hit it big. That's a metric crap-ton of time for the iron to cool before you strike again, and that's without even getting into the Netflix factor.
A fan like you is waiting that long for a follow-up, and then it gets dumped out in such a way that people spend maybe a week talking about it, max? That'd take the wind out of anyone's sales.
It absolutely did! I forgot to come back and finish the sequel due to the "part dropping" model Netflix has thankfully started to move away from (in some cases). Tiger & Bunny 2 has held this bittersweet place in my heart for a while now. When it was revealed that the sequel was finally happening (11 YEARS LATER), I remember sobbing because I'd never thought it would happen. But to your point, aside from the pair of films, stage shows, and grand ambitions of a live action film, the iron was only slightly warm to the touch around the time of that announcement.
Like a lot of our interactions with fandom here on TWIA, much of this discussion is probably going to be anecdotal and based on our own impressions of social media vibes. But I feel the need to note that this cooling does manifest in concrete numerical ways. To wit, after Tiger & Bunny famously did numbers like selling over 19,000 copies of its first-volume Blu-ray in Japan, the second season only sold 2,350 copies of the first volume in its first week, per Wikipedia's favorite reference, erzat.blog and their reporting on the Oricon charts.
That's a huge drop for a series that was even bigger in Japan than its aforementioned success on our shores, as it got trounced that week by the second volume of a little show called Lycoris Recoil. Which we'll probably be mentioning again soon.
Oh boy, yes we will!
As an anecdotal indication of how hot Tiger & Bunny was in North American anime circles circa 2011, I remember multiple people making a point of filming the dedicated series panel at that year's New York Comic Con. The folks I knew in that room wouldn't stop talking up the charming presence of producer Masayuki Ozaki, who was allegedly dressed in full Kotetsu finery.
A man of style, if I do say so myself.
Photo by Crystalyn Hodgkins
And to think, this was just before Bandai asked themselves, "Can we sell this like we do our Kamen Rider and Super Sentai apparel?"
Knowing your fashion sense, I'm still surprised you DON'T have a Kotetsu hat, Chris! Speaking to the series' popularity, there was this one dude in my freshman year of college who'd never NOT be wearing his Kotetsu hat. Mind you, this was back in 2012.
But this guy was far from the only person I'd seen with the hat, because I ran into more than a few Kotetsu cosplayers roaming Youmacon the year prior.
It's a good hat and believe me, it's on the list. But like you said, that was in 2012. Convention halls are littered with bygone looks from once would-be titans. Anybody remember Vampire Knight?
And if a whole year was a long time for a series to stay popular in that era, eleven of 'em would be a downright eternity. You can see this in other odd instances of series with massive gaps like that attempting a comeback. I think the total of talk I saw about The Devil Is a Part-Timer Season 2 amounted to, "Oh right, that series is back?"
It must've done something right considering it also got a third season, which passed me by, but the MgRonald's crew didn't have nearly the presence they did in 2011.
Now, these decade-long delays between drops aren't exactly the norm, nor do they serve as some hard-and-fast indicator of popularity. Comparatively, some people have seemed pretty thrilled with the return of Bleach, and it feels like everyone I know is chomping at the bit for Panty & Stocking to grace us with their presence once again.
Still, there are cases where theoretically shorter waits can still be enough to dull the edges of series that seemed to be sharply swinging through the seasons. Case in point, your personal friends and mine, the spy-gal princi-pals of Princess Principal!
These girls will, indeed, get us across the wall.
This opening sequence sold me on the series right away! It's a perfect mix of visuals and music that made me go "I should check this out," so I picked up the Blu-ray during a Sentai Filmworks sale. However, I didn't watch Princess Principal until last year—a good seven years after it originally aired. Bummed out I didn't watch it sooner, because it's perfect for those looking for the same kind of political intrigue as featured in G-Witch... Which makes sense as both series share Ichiro Okouchi as the main writer.
I have a strong feeling that Suletta Sundays wouldn't have been a thing without this series.
It seems like a little Suletta Forgetta might be going on with this tale of spy craft—even with continuing releases in the Princess Principal: Crown Handler sequel film series.
Princess Principal was a particular fave of mine when it aired during the Summer 2017 season, even if it ironically was one I expected to be a flash-in-the-pan. But its spy-story style of narrative lent itself to some kind of expansion, and the announcement that it would be continuing via movies made sense in that manner! Even if said movies did lose Okouchi on writing duties.
The thing is, it took five years for the first of those movies to come out. I understand part of the issue, there was a COVID-sized wrench thrown into their plans during that time. But that exacerbated the issue with the movie format in this case, what with us in the English-speaking world not getting to stream the new entry at the same time Japanese audiences were watching it. And forget about a western theatrical release—HiDive just unceremoniously dumped it on streaming over half a year later. By that time, any headwind Princess Principal had built up with the seasonal anime audiences here had dissipated. It's not too dissimilar to that Netflix dump model that dogged Tiger & Bunny 2.
I feel for the creatives, because the point of doing a film series over a second season was allegedly done to avoid the burnout and headaches that come with producing television anime. However, like you said, the pandemic put the kibosh on those well-intended plans. Through that lens, it makes sense that the two Tiger & Bunny films were that series' only follow-ups for years. While I'm excited to see where Crown Handler goes next when Chapter 3 hits Blu-ray next week, we're still a year behind the release cadence in Japan. Chapter 4 of this six-part film series is set to open in Japanese theaters this May.
Also, that cadence doesn't exactly work with a serialized story without regular releases every six months or so...which the first two films roughly had.
From the outside looking in, it's not unlikely that Princess Principal could be celebrating its tenth anniversary a year or two shy of the film series' completion.
The wait doesn't seem to have hurt Princess Principal too much in its home country, where the movies' discs have reportedly done pretty well for themselves (again via erzat.blog). But those long waits between films have dented its presence, especially here in the west, where what was once topping 2017's best-of lists now comes across as an afterthought tucked away on HiDive. But then, at least the movies are still coming out and have seemed pretty cool for what they are.
Not all series are so lucky. We just hit ten years since the Yona of the Dawn anime ended, and I'm increasingly sure we're just never getting a second season of that one.
Now I'm reminded that Flowers of Evil hasn't received a second season either. What an uncomfortably amazing show.
That's still the scariest stare in all of anime, bar none.
Would more people watch these sequels if they got made? Maybe not, but I would, and that's what's important. This is all a symptom of how insanely fast the seasonal anime hype cycle moves in the streaming era. If you score any notoriety with a production, you've got to pounce immediately lest you get left in the dust. Which is my way of rounding back to wondering how the hell it took so long that we're only just now coming up on a release for an additional Lycoris Recoil anime!
Paid off the foreshadowing and tied it into the forthcoming season, I knew we could pull it off.
Simpsons gif aside, Lycoris Recoil is very much a perfect 10 for me from that season. Great characters, frenetic action, and a twist-n-turny overarching plot that made for a memorable experience. I even nabbed the Blu-ray set, I liked it that much...and Right Stuf had a big coupon at the time.
You think Chisato ever got to drive that supercar?
Hopefully, we can find out if the series ever gets a proper sequel. Lycoris Recoil seemed to come out of nowhere when it became the talk of the Summer 2022 season. Getting a boost from Hideo Kojima himself almost certainly helped. But it always seemed odd that the Spider Lily crew seemed caught so flat-footed by their own success, given how built for sequels and spin-offs Lycoris Recoil's world felt. You could easily get an entire secondary series about the cute boy counterparts, the LilyBell, just to start.
While there have since been fits and starts of expansions with comic and light novel anthologies, plus a manga adaptation, we are three years later with just an upcoming short anime to show for additional animated treatment.
I like the idea of more day-to-day adventures with the LycoReco crew, but I'd love it if Chisato and Takina were set off on a series of standalone episodes about their continued exploits. At least to me, the series has a strong, modern City Hunter-like quality about it. Like Ryo Saeba, Chisato is the person you go to if something's gone completely sideways and you know the authorities would just make it worse.
The arc of the series' first episode plays at that City Hunter vibe, with Chisato showing Takina around the neighborhood before it's time to crack down on a kidnapping plot. It's like how the folks around Shinjuku are well acquainted with Ryo. I also can't help but compare Chisato's gunplay in this clip to the City Hunter's prowess with a hand cannon. Then I learned that Tsukasa Hojo's classic was a direct influence on Lycoris after writing that last sentence.
It's a series that successfully welded cute slice-of-life shenanigans to explosive popcorn action. And given the quality of the craft on the original anime, I can understand them wanting to take their time to make sure they get it right. In that respect, it's respectable that they haven't rushed a sequel even after they tore up the sales charts, and the suits on the production were probably breathing down their neck. But speaking to the specific subject of this column, I do worry that Lycoris Recoil was a flash whose pan has since been taken off the heat, and it just won't hit quite the same when they try again.
Granted, I'd love to be proven wrong, and have this series turn into a modern City Hunter or Lupin the 3rd, where it just regularly comes around again now and then.
I'd love that, but we'll just have to see. Who knows, maybe these shorts could be something of an "anime shorts as an announcement" dealio?
Apart from getting more Chisato and Takina (and Mika, and Mizuki, and everyone's favorite tiny 30-year-old hacker Kurumi) in our lives, that possibility is a reason to tune in!
And since they're both Aniplex properties, I wouldn't say no to a "Lycoris Recoil vs. City Hunter" down the road...
Either way, it is important to remember that these potential sequelized slumps aren't new to the streaming era, being apparent in series going back to Bubblegum Crash (and don't get me started on the Dirty Pair OVA series!). But also, as I mentioned, it's hardly a hard and fast rule. Bocchi the Rock became a megahit the same year as Lycoris Recoil, and its recently announced follow-up indicates it has no sign of slowing down. The important thing is to watch and support the shows you like, whenever they come out.
And to not let awkwardly spaced streaming releases cause you to forget to keep up with them in the interim.
Not to mention that if you like a show and it has a physical release, it's never a bad idea to nab it! Doing that is a bit of financial proof to the suits that maybe they should make more.
Photo by Coop Bicknell
If CD sales allegedly are what got Symphogear followed up on for four more seasons, maybe there's hope for all these others yet.
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