GOATed Anime You Can’t Watch Anymore

Classic, important anime are getting harder to watch by the day, and it’s only gotten worse since Crunchyroll and Funimation merged. Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 is just the tip of the iceberg.
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List of Funimation Anime Not Moved to Crunchyroll: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1a26y6sN_-GyK7PKatJmBPSL7idETFWa4qmDpvmHoE-c/edit

Chapters:
0:00 Pop Quiz
3:02 The Other Missing Arakawa Anime
6:21 I Took This One Personally
7:06 Sayonara, Toonami Memories…
11:31 Cult Classics, The Real Victims
15:30 A Solution on The High Seas

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In the depths of his Mother’s Basement, Geoff Thew creates videos analyzing the storytelling techniques of anime and video games. He has been named the number one Worst YouTube Anime Reviewer by The Top Tens.

all right class pop quiz time what English streaming service do you use if you want to watch Full Metal Alchemist uh no not that one yeesh definitely not that one no no I’m talking about Full Metal Alchemist The Original Classic 2003 anime you know the one that put Studio Bones on the map and turned my gen genertion from kids who watch The Big Three after school into capital a anime fans the one that gets unfairly written off because Brotherhood exists even though it mostly stands on its own merits has generally better animation and storyboarding and Loki the whole first half of the anime is kind of better I was going to make a no never heard of it joke here but if you’re watching this a couple years from now there is a distressingly high chance that is actually the case because the answer to that pop quiz is none of them well none of the legal ones anyway you used to be able to watch fma3 and it’s god tier dub on FUNimation now Netflix and Amazon Prime but after the license lapsed back to aniplex a few years ago it began fading from those platforms one by one and now there’s straight up no way to watch it besides buying the increasingly expensive outof print DVDs and blue Rays or of course though interesting ly you can still watch the Conqueror of Shambala movie on Crunchyroll just with no context as to how Ed ended up in Weimar Germany right before the rise of the Nazis okay look I know it’s nowhere near as tight as the plot homu arakawa cooked up but you got to admit some parts of that anime original ending are prettying metal sorry getting off track I’ll save that argument for its own dedicated video at some point if anyone’s interested right now my concern is that ma is far from the only great old anime that slipped through the cracks like this I mean you’d think after FUNimation and crunchy roll were bought and merged by Sony they could have worked out some kind of deal to get the license back from aniplex which is also part of Sony but instead of bringing anime back now there’s a whole bunch of anime that they just straight up forgot to bring over to crunchy roll when they shut FUNimation now down a couple months ago so my aim with this video is to shine a spotlight down through those cracks onto some of the gems we’ve lost in hopes that all the shiny Sparkles might spur some of you to seek them out you know by whatever means necessary and ideally put some pressure on Crunchyroll and other anime licensers to resurrect at least a few of them though to be frank the chances they actually will are about as likely as Ed and owls of bringing their mom back and honestly thinking about what we’ve lost is just as horrifying as that scene this is definitely not hyperbole like while we’re on the subject of FMA that’s not even the only haromu arakawa classic that’s been abandoned in the last couple years the heroic Legend of arsin is one of my personal all-time faves an epic work of historical fantasy about the deposed Prince of not Persia Gathering allies and raising in Army to take back his father’s Throne dogged at every step by the traitors and Invaders who stole it from him you know classic war drama stuff written by the guy behind the most legendary classic anime War drama of all time legend of the galactic heroes see originally arsin was a novel by yoshiki Tanaka with illustrations by the equally legendary Yoshi taka Amino and that novel was so damn good it’s been adapted four separate times way back in 1991 they turned it into both a manga and a six-part OVA series which you can still watch illegally on YouTube if you’re curious it’s an excellent PowerPoint presentation on why amino’s character designs just are not great for animation no matter how much money you throw at them then like a decade later aawa took a crack at turning it into her own style of manga which then got optioned for three seasons of anime which in contrast serve is a beautiful demonstration of why her designs work so well in animation even on an extremely limited production now ultimately that anime was never finished so even if it was still available her manga would be the best way to experience the story and you can still read that on bookwalker promo code basement but nonetheless the anime’s loss is a tragedy it had some beautiful cinematography and music of course if you are a fan of aawa it’s probably for her writing at least as much as her art so maybe that’s not all that disappointing for you but don’t you worry you still get to be disappointed about her other other cult classic that’s lost down the memory hole now ginosaji or silver spoon is a delightful Shonen Slice of Life about kids learning The Facts of Life at an agricultural High School based Loosely on arakawa’s own childhood at her family’s Ranch in Hokkaido if you’ve ever wanted to know about the ins and outs of farming the nitty-gritty the good and especially the really uncomfortable bad parts where you got to wake up at like 4 in the morning and dig your way through animal this anime is so educational and wait hold up a sec okay Golden Boy still on there but Silver Spoon is not and that is a crying shame because in addition to its legitimate educational value this is one of the best Dar Coming of Age stories I’ve seen the characters are as delightfully quirky as anyone in FMA it manages to find drama in very surprising places and the humor is arakawa at her funniest which is really saying something also the op [Music] slapped speaking of beautifully down to earth Coming of Age type things with amazing openings baby steps which longtime viewers will recogniz is that one tennis anime I won’t shut up about also isn’t available in English anymore actually that license also lapsed a couple years back before FUNimation disappeared and just never got renewed which was my personal Canary in the coal mine for this whole issue most of you probably won’t care too much about that one but you should especially if you enjoy Silver Spoon cuz baby steps has a very similar way of handling its characters plus some of the best Mind Games in Sports Anime amazing Romance and okay okay I’ll move on to a different Coming of Age anime with more General audience shock [Music] value that’s right urea 7 one of the defining Mecca series for cultured Millennial bionics enjoyers like me and our equivalent tunami heads down in the States was not considered worthy of bringing over to crunchy roll when Funimation shut down one of the best dubs they ever put out and arguably the best original anime that studio bones has ever made is just fing gone from all subscription streaming sites as is one of the other defining Mecca series for older Millennials especially vision of eslon a peak of lat stage pre-digital animation from back when isekai was mostly a Mecca sub genre oh and while we’re on the subject of tunami they also forgot to bring over Outlaw Star you know the other other space cowboy anime the one that awakened most of my generation’s love of cat girls and while we’re still speaking of tunami and Awakening things you know Fooly the seminal gyx OVA that redefined what anime could be in the digital age and redefined what sex jokes could be forever if I rush it won’t pop go slow well don’t worry you can still watch an anime called folly coie on crunchy roll but I hope you like alternative and Progressive cuz that’s all they got the original is now exclusive to Hulu and adultswim.com while Outlaw Stars only on Hulu which leaves us poor Canadians with no option but to buy them digitally from Apple TV or Amazon Prime and you Americans just kind of waiting out the clock until those licenses run out but at least those are still available legally in some digital capacity for now Escalon and urea 7 likewise are still on Apple TV to buy 51 bucks for the latter 26 for the former so it’s not like they’re actually gone for good just yet it’s just more of an expensive pain in the ass to watch them now actually the same goes for a lot of historically important and culturally relevant anime that were on that big list of shows Crunchyroll failed to pick up which you might have seen doing the rounds a month or so back if you’re in the habit of discussing anime online not trying to be an alarmist here some of those are even still available on streaming services that you still have in some capacity just without their English dubs which is absolutely tragic if we’re talking about say Gan lagon if there isn’t a path and we carve one ourselves the magma of our souls burns with a mighty flame just who in the hell do you think we are or in some very strange cases without the original Japanese audio also there are some weird edge cases like Gundam unicorn where technically it is still available but not the original OVA just the shitty TV cut that keeps inserting increasingly chunky last time on recap segments that eventually take up like half of each episode so you can still watch it just in the most dog way possible even FMA can still be bought digitally if you live in America but only from Fandango at home on demand which is also at present the exclusive digital home for Darker Than Black for some reason it is still thankfully rare for certified classic anime that are still that widely beloved in the English fandom to just be completely inaccessible like say Evangelion was before Netflix grabbed it and bakano has been for years now despite having one of the greatest dubs of all time how are we going to do that we don’t have enough money to buy a non-expensive gift then we’ll just have to commit a train robbery oh that’s a great idea all right then just like before the only way to steal is to steal from the mafia and in most of those cases the real problem has more to do with complicated legal and Licensing issues like the whole storm around Macross and Robotech then anime companies simply not giving a f at all because they do know there’s some money still to be made on all those series off of all of our Collective Nostalgia now the anime that we really have to be worried about and the ones that I use those more prominent titles to bait you into hopefully still listening to me about at this point in the video are the cult classics like baby steps and silver spoon that are disappearing and Samurai flamco which you might remember me mentioning in my review of bang Brave bang braver in a little while back I just made that connection cuz it has the exact same Vibe of absolute Insanity where you never know where the plot’s going to go next I mean seriously no hyperbole Samurai flamco had me shouting holy what like literally out loud at my TV every three episodes or so as it went from this Kick-Ass style story about a wannabe real world superhero styled after common rider rather than Superman who just gets his ass beat night after night by the pettiest of criminals as he slowly gets stronger to suddenly he’s fighting real mutant alien monsters straight out of an actual common rider episode but he’s still just a normal guy in a bike helmet with like a taser and the guillotine gorillas straight up murdering cops right in front of them and that’s just the first twist out of I can’t even count how many normally I wouldn’t even spoil that much of the show I just say trust me go watch this anime but of course I can’t do that now because Samurai flamco is gone so you have to either go to some sketchy ass website to watch it which I cannot in good faith recommend or torrented which is a lot safer and also way better for media preservation we’ll get to that later but is also a massive pain in the ass that a lot of kids today straight up don’t know how to do because digital literacy has gone way down since the rise of apps Sorry I’m rambling again it’s the anime like that and the gleefully insane World conquests vesa plot Rage of Bahamut virgin Soul once hailed as the Pirates of the Caribbean of anime masaki UA’s Avant guard mindblower tatami Galaxy gx’s deeply absurd prao isekai magical shopping arcade of Ben oashi and perhaps most tragically for me personally recre creators that really suffer from this the weird wonderful experimental deeply personal anime that a few hardcore evangelists fell in love with years ago and keep recommending to anyone who will listen anime that are important in every sense but the financial those are in the most danger of just being lost to time and apathy because of course you can still watch them obviously if you know where to go but it is so much harder to convince the average anime viewer to go there than it is to ask them to open their crunchy roll and throw it in a queue and it’s even harder to ask them to go out and buy an expensive DVD or Blu-ray for an anime they haven’t even tried out yet and as time goes on and the anime streaming market calcifies and there’s less and less incentive for streamers to compete on the sheer volume of shows they have more and more of these obscure anime are just going to up and disappear I mean license renewals aren’t free the lines got to keep going up and there definitely isn’t an infinite number of people out there who even want an anime streaming subscription to begin with especially not with how many other streaming services they got to pay for now it’s not hard to do the math and see where things are going here hell I’ve brought this up before but one of the best shows this season girls band cry a hilarious and heart felt blend of comedy and drama written by the immensely talented juki hanada same guy who gave us a place further than the universe and animated with some of the most cuttingedge CGI techniques in the whole anime industry has already slipped through these cracks doomed to be a nisho taku obscurity before it even started airing when it deserves so much more and it won’t be the last great new anime to suffer that fate the current phase of the anime streaming Wars is all about big ticket Buzz generating shows like frein chainsaw man and Sakamoto days and even those are swiftly forgotten by marketing as soon as the new seasons’s new hotness rolls around if you want your favorite Niche anime to find its place in history now it’s up to you to keep up the oral tradition by telling all your friends about it and never shutting up about it and to make sure those those friends actually can watch it it’s up to all of us to preserve The Unofficial anime Supply by learning how to safely torrent and most importantly keeping our seeds going like true internet gentlemen because the reality is streaming licenses run out illegal sites only keep going as long as they can pay their host plus their to begin with and all physical media degrades eventually until big companies start caring about the long-term historical value of their art over its monetary value and put real effort into preservation so never decentralized file sharing is the best most reliable tool we as fans have to keep our faves alive for future Generations which by the way has always been the case the only reason some shakespear plays are still around to bore middle schoolers today is because of play Pirates Who snuck into the audience and wrote the dialogue down on sheets of paper seriously look it up that said I said my piece on piracy and preservation way back in the times Jeff was wrong episode of our podcast up on the basement Life channel if you want to hear me talk about that more we also talked about our move to Japan and the threat of AI translation in the newest episode which was a really interesting conversation or if you’d prefer to watch something shorter I recently did a game review of another crabs treasure on there that I know most of you haven’t seen yet which might even inspire you to try your first Souls like this video and the Disney plus one were actually originally slated for basement life too but the issues at play felt a little too important to let the algorithm potentially bury them on a smaller Channel if you want more rambly rants like this though plus fun off the cuff stuff possibly some Japan Vlogs soon and other variety content please go subscribe to that second channel it’s called basement life links on screen and don’t worry you can look forward to a more typical mother’s basement video on here next weekend