The Mike Toole Show

Unfinished Business

It's July, and we're basking in the glow of a packed Media Blasters, who are not dead but are starting to smell funny?

Just wanted to idly pose that question, along with one other one. In the past several weeks, myself and several other anime writers have noted the increasing usage of a peculiar little loanword: “cours” (クール). It's a bit of jargon that's been present in Japan for some time, but it's starting to get more recognition here. In Japan's broadcasting business, a cours is a period lasting 3 months, or a single traditional season - summer, fall, winter, spring. In other words, there are four cours per year. On the low end, most TV shows, anime and live-action J-drama, start with one or two cours (13 or 26 episodes) per season, but that can go all the way up to four cours, or 52 episodes. Naturally, fans in the west like to use this word to refer to 13-episode anime series, or 13-episode segments of longer shows.

Initially, I dismissed this as another attempt to take a simple concept and make it seem cooler by using a common Japanese word for something we already describe as “season.” But cours does raise a good point - it's a bit more descriptive than just “season.” Lupin the 3rd: a Woman called Fujiko Mine got just one 13-episode cours. Pirates and Fujiko are single-season shows, but one's season is half as long as the other. Fate/Zero is being sold as two seasons, but I've tended to think of it as one continuing series. But in all of these different cases, cours always means the same thing: 12 or 13 episodes, broadcast over a 3-month period.

Does this mean I'm going to start using cours regularly? I don't know about that. I've been saying “13-episode season” and “26-episode season” for a pretty long time. Also, cours doesn't necessarily for everything; what do you call Don Dracula, a TV series that only lasted for eight episodes? Would it be a cours lite?

Man. That was a pretty long setup for a terrible joke! Anyway, like many of you, I've been soaking in the particularly excellent spring 2012 season, and savoring many shows as they wound to their conclusions. The prequel Fate/Zero ended with an oddly muted bang and crystal-clear hooks to its predecessor Shinichirō Watanabe. For the most part, I was very happy with the finales of the shows I've been watching, which got me to thinking about all of the anime that have had bad, dodgy, or just plain unfinished endings. Let's look at some of those!

Actually, the aforementioned Don Dracula is a pretty good place to start. This 1982 TV series, from the mind of the great Space Runaway Ideon would continue the trend, with a prematurely-ending TV series followed by movies.

The true champions of unsolved cliffhangers, cancellations, and cop-outs have to be OVAs. I'll bet every single one of you has seen at least one anime Bubblegum Crisis. BGC, which fearlessly lifted imagery and concepts from fare like Blade Runner and boasted a staff of some of the best anime talent of the time, was originally planned for thirteen episodes - but after the dust cleared, there were only eight.

So what happened? If AIC and ARTMIC were Bubblegum Crisis’ parents, just think of it as a messy divorce. The reasons for the split aren't made clear in my AIC 15th Anniversary retrospective book, but the series might've simply underperformed in Japan. BGC was a hit in North America, one of the first entries in the fledgling anime market of 1991, but going back and checking Oricon charts from ‘91 reveals that the show's final episode, the action-packed Scoop Chase, sold well under ten thousand units on Bubblegum Crash, but AIC sued to get them to stop making that, too! Bubblegum Crisis remains a prized treasure of many older American anime fans, but it never got the proper ending it deserved.



I was never a big Bubblegum Crisis fan. I think my favorite failed OVA story is that of Kickstarter, I Mighty Space Miners, and think of what Iida and Triangle Staff might've accomplished if they had that platform.

There's another “unfinished anime” category, but it's one that has a fairly sensible explanation. An awful lot of anime is based on successful manga, and is planned to both please existing fans and draw in new readers. The thing is, doing this can be awfully tricky when you have an animation staff capable of turning out 52 30-minute episodes (or, well, four cours!) of anime per year. Even with a new manga chapter every week, most manga-ka couldn't keep up with that pace. A lot of popular favorites, like Saint Seiya - Hades Chapter picked up where the TV series left off.

A more obvious example of this phenomenon is probably Tytania as a 2-cours anime series. Naturally, I was interested, and enjoyed the only occasionally patchy writing for about eighteen episodes. At that point, I realized that there was no way that Ishiguro would have enough time to wrap up the story, so I did some research and found out that Tytania, the novel series, is still going. There was no way the anime could end well. I felt a bit cheated! Did that ever happen to you?

Sometimes anime isn't finished because the production company runs out of money. Sometimes there are legal problems. And sometimes, the end comes abruptly or sloppily as a stylistic choice, no less. End of Evangelion, it just raised more questions. I still look at the next-ep previews, in all of their scribbly, penciled glory, and laugh; Gainax had no money, but by cracky, they went for it, and it worked!



I think my favorite unresolved anime story is one that eventually did get resolved, in a pretty unexpected way. That'd be a 1999 13-episode series from Keiichi Satō, creator of the Big O, signed on with Sunrise with a 26-episode story in mind, but it was cut to 13.

For a long time, I assumed this was the whole truth; it made sense. It continued to make sense after I got an email from Konaka confirming production of a Cartoon Network-funded sequel, in a brief message titled “good news from Japan”. (I still got that email!) Then, in 2004, I met the series director, Anime Central. Mr. Katayama told a somewhat different story-- according to him, nobody on staff had any notions that the show might get “picked up” or “renewed.” It was meant to stand alone, as a 13-episode project, for all time. Then why, I countered, did it all end on a cliffhanger? Katayama smiled wryly, and said that it seemed like a good joke. An unresolved TO BE CONTINUED really fit the mood of The Big O, right? I must it, he had a point!

Finally, sometimes an anime ends on a weird, jagged moment for of one simple, universal reason: laziness. My favorite example of this is panning shot, while the narrator intones, “And then, for some reason, the story ended.”

And then, for some reason, the column ended. Wait a minute, no it didn't! I'm done talking about unfinished anime, but I would like to let you all know that I'll be appearing as a Featured Presenter at Otakon in just a few weeks! I'll be doing my usual DUBS THAT TIME FORGOT, with a brand new 60-minute program of all-new, all-different clips, plus a 30-minute “best of” intro, and a on THE WORST ANIME OF ALL TIME. Come see, and come meet me! In the meantime, what's your favorite unfinished anime? Do you think anime needs a neat, clean, satisfying ending to be good?  Are there some anime that you just prefer seeing unfinished? Let me know in the comments!