There’s decades worth of old anime to be explored, and I hope that the Ranma 1/2 is a starting point for a lot of newer anime fans.
For a long time, anime was this pretty inaccessible thing for Western audiences, outside of what was shown on Toonami in places like the US and UK, or those sneaky not-very-legal typically expletive-laden fan-subs, there wasn’t really a good way to watch it. Big names like Dragon Ball, Naruto, One Piece, Bleach, Sailor Moon have long been popular over here, but it’s only really over the past 10 years or so when anime has actually been something you can easily find outside of Japan.
Particularly in the last five years, more and more streaming services are after a piece of the pie that Crunchyroll has dominated, with platforms like Netflix even acquiring the rights to anime that will also be on the aforementioned anime streaming site. Now you don’t have to watch just Goku duke it out for the millionth time, you can check out, uh, VTuber Legend: How I Went Viral after Forgetting to Turn Off My Stream, on the very same day it airs in Japan.
It’s honestly great, with this season treating us to a simulcast release of Mappa’s remake of the classic gender-bending series Ranma ½ on Netflix. Sure, there’s conversations to be had if an already good series needs a remake at all, I’m not going to comment on that right now (a thought for another day, maybe), but the first episode is already a lot of fun.
