It might be hard to believe now, but there was a time when Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn’t doing too well. When Kazuki Takahashi’s Yu-Gi-Oh! manga was first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1996, readership was sizeable enough to earn itself an anime adaptation in 1998, but certainly nothing record-breaking.
And that 1998 anime, a 27-episode season produced by TV Asahi and Toei Animation, kinda bombed. I couldn’t find concrete viewership numbers, but things were apparently bad enough that Toei Animation cancelled the anime outright.
The thing is, while the anime wasn’t a hit in Japan, the manga had just started hitting its stride. In fact, readership was so good that Weekly Shonen Jump’s publisher, Shueisha, desperately wanted to greenlight a second season of the anime.
At least, that’s according to Yoshiro Kataoka, the production planner behind anime such as Hunter x Hunter and Gunslinger Girl. Kataoka recently sat down with Kaishi Professional University for a multi-part interview (translated by Otaku Mantra), during which he recalled the time when Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor-in-chief at Weekly Shonen Jump, outright threatened to revoke Toei Animation’s secondary usage rights for Dragon Ball in return for Toei holding Yu-Gi-Oh!’s anime rights hostage.
The funny thing is that, even though Toei Animation didn’t want to produce a second season of Yu-Gi-Oh!, it also didn’t want to hand the rights back so that another company could do so. Kataoka says that during a meeting in 1999, Toei made clear it had no intention of handing over the rights, prompting Torishima to pull out the big guns. “Are you sure you want to say that?” Kataoka remembers Torishima saying. “If that’s how you want to play ball, then here’s my trump card: I’ll revoke all secondary usage rights for Dragon Ball.”
To put this into perspective, at the time of the meeting, Dragon Ball was at the height of its popularity outside of Japan. The FUNimation dub of Dragon Ball Z first started airing on September 13, 1996, for instance, and didn’t conclude until April 2003.
So, naturally, Toei relented, and that’s how we ended up with the TV Tokyo-produced Yu-Gi-Oh! anime we all know: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters. Also, just in case you were confused, the Toei Yu-Gi-Oh! anime in question never actually received an English-language dub and is often referred to as “Yu-Gi-Oh! Season 0” by fans as a result.
If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend watching it. It’s not better than Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters, but it is an oddly strange, alternate-reality take on the franchise that is much, much darker. Also, Toei clearly doesn’t seem to care about it in the slightest, as the full 27-episode season has been available to watch on YouTube for free for close to a decade.