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Why You Should Give Anime Reboots a Chance

Was there some kind of pushback against anime reboots I was unaware of?

came across as a dull, poorly-paced mess that misrepresented the appeal of the source material.

It's a good article, but I was kinda hoping there would be some expansion on older anime that keep getting rebooted for new audiences. Like Gegege no Kitaro, Cutey Honey, Tensai Bakabon

It took over six years for all of Hellsing Ultimate to be released, but it meant that at the end of that, fans of the franchise had a definitive anime adaptation of the manga, with no compromising What-Ifs lingering the way the original anime had left them with.

To be fair, the opposite (i.e. "Why You Should Give the First Anime Adaptation a Chance") can absolutely be brought up, as well, especially since most people will only be familiar with a newer adaptation.

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Really, I'm just trying to say that, when it comes to reboots, there is worth is checking out both, depending on how much you liked the one you saw first.

Strange not to discuss the most obvious drawback of rebooting, it takes resource away from something else. In a vacuum there's no reason not to reboot something, but in the real world this means that money and talent that could have gone toward something (either an original or an adaptation of something that was never adapted) instead goes toward something that was already tried (often ending in failure).

I like how the latter didn't even bother rehashing his origin story, because they knew that everyone had already seen it done twice over the previous decade, so why bother?

After that, what else could a second adaptation possibly bring to the table? I just can't figure out why it exists.

Reintroducing an established property to new audiences?

It's not always because "we didn't do it right the first time let's try again".

Where reboots really fall short with me is when they rehash content that has already been covered perfectly well by a previous adaptation. This is usually the case when the anime catches up with the original manga and chooses to leave off there, as opposed to something like FMA which decided to chart its own path from the get-go. In those cases, what we actually need are simple continuations, not reboots. As Lord Geo noted, Hunter x Hunter is a great example of this: the newer adaptation is fine and all, but I'm willing to state that the 1999 version's take on the Hunter Exam was objectively better in almost every way that mattered, and even the section of filler added to it was enjoyable and helped flesh out some of the minor candidates. (Fun fact: I was convinced until a ways into that version that Kurapika was secretly female. ) While the Yorknew arc was closer to a toss-up, the first adaptation definitely did a better job at setting the mood visually. While I didn't actively dislike the repeated content, the new adaptation could have just as easily picked things up after Greed Island. Rurouni Kenshin is another great example: there was that OVA project a decade ago that readapted the Kyoto arc, one of the best shonen arcs of all time that was portrayed expertly in the original, and shockingly enough it was completely disposable. If you're going to make an arc adaptation years after the fact, why not tackle the final manga arc that was never covered by the original, instead of a pale shadow of something that was? Something similar happened with the more recent Kino's Journey adaptation, which decided to cover some of the same stories from the early-2000s version for some reason, but in what I heard was a far inferior fashion.That's what concerns me the most about any theoretical future take on The Promised Neverland. Does it need a massive do-over? Absolutely, but for the love of Phil don't attempt to rehash Grace Field House, because season 1 was a modern-day masterpiece.

But shows that have decades between iterations most certainly should always start from the beginning. For shows like FMA Brotherhood, Hunter x Hunter, and Shaman King, starting from the beginning is the correct choice. No one should have to watch a show from 20 years ago to enjoy a modern anime adaption. I think Homecoming is a very bad example. All those Spider-Man movies are different continuities. Their origins for Peter are not applicable to MCU Peter, who is extremely different and nothing like any other version of the characters. It gets to the point it makes Peter look like he doesn't care one bit about Uncle Ben and cares more about Tony Stark being his father figure because they never really address key things about his origin. It makes him more like Iron Man's sidekick than anything else. Superhero adaptions in general are pretty messy and shouldn't be emulated. It's kinda the thing people like about anime and manga. "Where do I start with Shaman King"? "Watch episode 1". VS "Watch the first 22 episodes of the 2001 series, then switch to episode 9+ of the 2021 series" which is the kind of roundable turnoff people have with American comics and stuff.

I agree that there's basically no one saying not to give reboots a chance lol. But I at least appreciate this article for mentioning that FMA 2003 was extremely popular before Brotherhood came out, because a lot of articles recently like to pretend no one liked it and that it was heavily criticized for not following the manga.

DavetheUsher wrote:

But shows that have decades between iterations most certainly should always start from the beginning. For shows like FMA Brotherhood, Hunter x Hunter, and Shaman King, starting from the beginning is the correct choice. No one should have to watch a show from 20 years ago to enjoy a modern anime adaption. I think Homecoming is a very bad example. All those Spider-Man movies are different continuities. Their origins for Peter are not applicable to MCU Peter, who is extremely different and nothing like any other version of the characters. It gets to the point it makes Peter look like he doesn't care one bit about Uncle Ben and cares more about Tony Stark being his father figure because they never really address key things about his origin. It makes him more like Iron Man's sidekick than anything else. Superhero adaptions in general are pretty messy and shouldn't be emulated. It's kinda the thing people like about anime and manga. "Where do I start with Shaman King"? "Watch episode 1". VS "Watch the first 22 episodes of the 2001 series, then switch to episode 9+ of the 2021 series" which is the kind of roundable turnoff people have with American comics and stuff.

That is a good point, although my counter-argument to it would be that while these reboots are hoping to draw in some new fans, as anything would, their primary audience will always be preexisting fans of the franchise, people who have likely already seen the original anime adaptation and are current with the manga. I think you risk potentially tempering enthusiasm for the new work if it restarts the story all the way back at the beginning, especially if the original adaptation was well-regarded and adapted the material faithfully. In a lot of those cases I feel like you could probably get by with some sort of recap special or movie to get new viewers up to speed, with the understanding that they can track down the manga or the original series if they want to get everything in more detail. (Brotherhood was a different case, as there was already original material interspersed amongst the manga-adapted part of the 03 series, and so there wasn't really a clean break point to start from.) I mean it's not like there isn't precedent for picking up where some past work left off: a recent example that comes to mind are the Digimon Adventure films, which were clearly meant as a nostalgia play for pre-existing fans of the original TV series and advanced the story forward accordingly. That's an original work as opposed to a manga adaptation, but the same principle largely applies.