This Week in Anime
Back in in My Day, We Had Abridged Series

by Lucas DeRuyter & Coop Bicknell,

This week, Coop and Lucas reminisce about a vestige of the Old Internet: abridged anime series.

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.

@RiderStrike @BWProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Lucas
Coop, with the end of the year and the related holiday sprint that it entails, this is the time of year when I find myself feeling nostalgic. Maybe it's because I spend a week with my folks in my childhood home every Thanksgiving and crash in my largely unchanged teenage bedroom, but I've once again felt the impulse to turn to the kinds of media I enjoyed when I was a teenager 15-ish years ago.

Except this year, I don't have to venture too far into the corners of the internet I used to dwell in, as Team Four Star put out a new abridged series, and the folks over there have not missed a beat!

Coop
It's funny, Lucas.... Much has changed over the past 20 years of nerdy videos on YouTube, but a lot has also remained the same. Whether that's good or bad is up to the ravages of time to decide. However, I do fondly remember those days I'd walk home from school in the cold while watching the latest episode of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series on my iPod Nano.

I've got more than a few fuzzy memories from this era, but I do question the motivations behind keeping this old internet pastime a-rollin' today. Despite what's remained the same, the changes can't be overlooked either.

Similar to AMVs, abridged series are such an interesting and specific craft within the anime community. Established by Martin "LittleKuriboh" Billany in 2006 with Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, out of the gate, this craft started blending early internet fan animations with the kind of memetic humor popular in online anime spaces at the time.

While I think that anime was always destined to get as big as it is today, god knows I've used some choice clips from various abridged series to help convince my normie friends to take the plunge into the media type.

That's a good point! Back in my high school days (2009 specifically), I made a close friend through our shared enjoyment of YGOTAS. We'd both end up just standing around during our free period in freshman gym, either watching episodes or talking about them. I have a feeling that YGOTAS provided a springboard for him to dive headfirst into anime and manga in the late 2010s. If it wasn't for LittleKuriboh's tomfoolery, I'm not sure if my friend would've dug Golden Boy as much as he did upon watching it for the first time last month.
coop-1
© 2005-2006 BONES / BANDAI
In fact, it wasn't long after the two of us hit it off that another friend tried his hand at producing a Eureka Seven abridged series within the paper-thin walls of his apartment at the time. Crazy to think we were all like 14 years old with such lofty aspirations. Really, ask me about the four or five times I tried to record a podcast without the slightest clue of what I was doing...or the multiple Tokusatsu toy reviews I futzed around with.
Haha, you're immediately touching on another part of the abridged series that made them stand out to me as a kid and endears me to them as an adult: they seem like something anyone can make with enough time and know-how!
lucas_01
© 2025 Thebluemicrophones.com,All rights
I also took a crack at making a few abridged projects of my own (that WILL stay buried in their various corners of the internet), after dropping like US$120 on a Blue Yeti USB mic and making use of the free version of Adobe Premiere I had access to at my university.

This isn't to say that anyone can quickly or easily produce something on par with Team Four Star's work out of the gate, but the prospect of doing so felt approachable in a way that I think much of the internet today has lost. A lot of the internet, especially YouTube and social media, now feels like something people often treat as a business, where the end product needs to feel as prestigious as possible. I miss when fun stuff on the internet felt like something you could make with like-minded friends, and abridged series are the epitome of that kind of material for me!

I understand the sentiment, especially because the most notable (or obnoxiously visible) "fun stuff with your friends" projects are often tied up within a business these days. For instance, I'm pretty sure everyone spotted the Raycon ad at the end of that Sailor Moon video. Teens just goofing with an unmonetized, "for funzies" video is one thing, but there is a key element that cannot be overlooked when cash enters the picture: these folks do not own or have permission to be working with these materials.
coop-2.png
© Team Four Star
Unless someone's dealing with a savvy contact on the Japan side, I can easily see the license holders writing off all of it as piracy and issuing takedowns. I doubt it would be an easy (or possible) task to explain what an "abridged series" is while also navigating language barriers and international copyright laws. If I remember correctly, Team Four Star has allegedly encountered these very issues with Dragon Ball Z: The Abridged Series.
Oh, 100%! Even as parody is protected under the First Amendment in the United States, most businesses don't like losing control of their brand in any capacity and have been extremely litigious in trying to scrub the internet of abridged series. Between this penchant for entertainment companies and YouTube's policy of complying with legal requests first and checking to see if those requests are legit later (if ever), I can't even imagine how much of this kind of work has been lost to time.
lucas_02
© Ryōgo Narita © Media Works/Project Baccano!
Hell, I can't find either hide nor hair of one of my favorite abridged series from back in the day, Baccano! Abridged, anywhere online. This is also likely a big factor in why the abridged series kind of stalled out as an art form; if a work can't be hosted on a major platform, that really limits its reach and discoverability at a time when the internet is more oversaturated with content than ever.
Reminds me of how Gantz Abridged evaporated from YouTube just before I entered college...and how some of that humor probably doesn't hold up very well today. This brings me to the primary feeling that hit me while checking out that Sailor Moon video: we're long past the heyday of this form of media. It's the same kind of emotions that arise within me whenever a new Angry Video Game Nerd video or Doug Walker disaster hits my recommendations. It feels like a relic—for both the fuzzy memories it conjures and the long-in-the-tooth vibes it exudes.
You have a point; in a digital entertainment landscape where short-form content is king, even "abridged" videos can feel long. Like a lot of early YouTube, abridged videos have the energy of content created for younger millennials and older members of Gen Z by elder millennials and younger Gen Xers, and I think that energy has endured. Hell, the first Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged episode is packed with 90s pop culture references, and I don't think much of the scene has deviated from that energy.
lucas_03.png
© 1996 by Kazuki Takahashi/SHUEISHA Inc.
Additionally, it's generally most of the same people as well. But being tied to that scene has also had some pretty disastrous effects on those trying to go further with a voiceover career. For instance, Little Kuriboh has openly alleged for years on social media that becoming known as "the YGOTAS guy" has led to many situations in which he was turned away from a job. He still does appear in the occasional project, like Gundam Seed Freedom, but that's apparently not a constant. But with talk of fandubs on the rise once again (for reasons involving AI nonsense), LittleKuriboh's stories are a good reminder to use a pseudonym and keep your mouth shut if you are involved in such a project. Many actors rose up through the fandub scene, but they'll never tell you because it WILL endanger their career.

I am so bummed that contributing to this kind of fan project can sometimes prove detrimental to the long-term careers of those creators and voice actors, because abridged series acting as a way for new talent to cut their teeth is one of my favorite parts about them!
lucas_04
© King Records Ltd ©Masumi Asano・Kenjiro Hata/Earphones Fan Club
I'm no expert on the voice acting industry, but I get the sense that these kinds of low-stakes, just above hobby grade projects used to be a great way for people to come up in this space and build a portfolio. With these kinds of works becoming less common, I feel bad for all of the careers that stall out before they even begin, thanks to a lack of entry-level opportunities.
I'm there with you. I'm no expert either, but these sorts of hobbyist projects were probably great for some toe dipping. I'd imagine today your best bet would be to become solid friends with an animator working on an original project. Then again, working in animation hasn't been great these days... Unless you're able to work out a way of making money outside of the conventional wisdom, like Glitch Productions, for instance.

So we've gone from "you might have a chance at turning something you have fun doing with your friends into a career" to "you have to have a connection with a person already working on a near professional level to even have a chance of STARTING your career." That shift doesn't feel great!
Es muy no bueno.
Though I'll admit that maybe that framing is a bit cynical. There are plenty of folks perfectly content with making a living as niche entertainment content creators, and it's cool to see that people can seemingly live sustainably off of that kind of work. I love that the folks at Something Witty Entertainment are making what's, imo, the only version of Sword Art Online worth watching and have created a nice little digital media business for themselves in the process.
I hope those folks can carve out their own sustainable niche, but boy, is my "you're playing with fire" alarm going off for all the reasons we've discussed.
I totally see where you're coming from, but I wonder if that attitude might be a little too protective? Both the culture and the history of the Western anime community are rooted in piracy and fan projects. As fan subs (and dubs) feel increasingly less necessary in a world where mainstream platforms are licensing anime, I like that fan projects that increase the visibility of, or even iterate upon, a work still have a place under the big anime umbrella.
I agree, the Western side of the industry and community wouldn't exist without piracy and fan projects. However, in the specific case of abridged series, we're no longer in the wild west of the late aughts internet—that was almost 20 years ago. I wouldn't say this is a protective mindset (I'm not precious about the original works themselves), but more pragmatic for the times we currently work within. There are elements from that era I'd like to see return—like people being treated as part of a community rather than just customers—but the modern, influencer-flavored version of that visibility could be a double-edged sword depending on the situation. But perhaps it is a more protective attitude, in that I don't want talented folks to accidentally step in it and endanger their livelihoods.
We agree on that. To get there, though, I'd much rather see corporations stop being so precious with their properties (especially the ones they're not doing anything with) and instead find ways to participate in this vibrant fan community in a way that is both constructive and beneficial to the creators of a given work. It's my sincere belief that anime would be even bigger right now if anime companies acknowledged fandom spaces and fandom works to a greater degree today.
Absolutely! If we could find a middle ground that works for business joes, online entertainers, and the anime community at large, then we're getting somewhere. We'll have to see, though, because, like with the passing of the YouTube wild west, it may require a giant tumbleweed to crunch on off into the desert before the larger companies will seriously consider meeting their audience in the middle.
It's good that we're moseying into the sunset with this column, because only time will tell how things shake out for many of the artifacts that once served as pillars for this very strange, very online community.
lucas_05
© 1998 Sunrise
And even as we're uncertain of the future of something like an abridged series, I'm glad they're a part of this community's past and hope that newcomers in this space find a way back to them! They're really special to me, and hopefully they will be for new folks as well.
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