28 years ago today, a classic anime franchise made its debut in a totally unrecognizable kind of way, and it still hasn’t gotten an English language release after all these decades. Kazuki Takahashi’s Yu-Gi-Oh! is one of the most successful franchises to ever make its debut out of the pages of Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump magazine. Not only has the anime released many different sequels, iterations, and spinoffs, but has even launched a full trading card game too. But it started out in a much different place than fans might expect.

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28 years ago today, Yu-Gi-Oh! made its official anime debut in Japan. But unlike the version that fans in the United States or other English language territories might recognize thanks to 4Kids Entertainment, this original version of Yu-Gi-Oh! was much different than seen there. Rather than being focused on the trading card game, this original incarnation of the Yu-Gi-Oh! anime was taken on by a different anime studio and focused more on death games with much higher stakes.

Yu-Gi-Oh Season 0 Premiered 28 Years Ago Today in Japan

Yu-Gi-Oh’s very first anime adaptation was actually produced by Toei Animation, the same studio behind hits like Dragon Ball Z and One Piece, rather than by Studio Gallup as fans would see with the anime later. This was a 27 episode long series that took inspiration from the first few volumes of Kazuki Takahashi’s original manga and expanded on its ideas. Much like the manga at first, the series saw Yugi Mutou unleashing a dark spirit from within the Millennium Puzzle as it helped him deal with tough situations in his school life.

Dubbed as “Yu-Gi-Oh! Season 0” by fans, this incarnation of the anime introduced new faces to the core cast such as a second female character, Miho Nozaka, who was there to balance the scales of the main group (and not seen in the manga). This season has some new materials compared to the manga’s version of the story, but is much darker than the version of the anime we had gotten later. Because when the Pharaoh took over Yugi’s body, he would then gamble his life against criminals and other no-goods in death games. These games would briefly be teased in the later eras of the anime, but never got as intense again.

The death games in this original series ranged from the Pharaoh saving a restaurant from a hostage situation (by getting him to think he’s being burned alive), a man gets clocks embedded into every pore of his body as a punishment to one of the games, Seto Kaiba has green hair for a while and more. This was an experimental era of Kazuki Takahashi’s franchise before it really exploded with popularity for its trading card game (which originally was introduced as yet another death game), and the world was never the same from there. Which meant this original incarnation of the anime had been left behind in turn.

What Happened to Yu-Gi-Oh! Season 0?

If all of the censorship within 4Kids Entertainment’s later Yu-Gi-Oh! anime has told you anything, there’s probably no need to guess why this anime has never gotten an official English language release. Just two years after it ended its run in Japan, the franchise would then return with a newly revived version of the series with Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters. Focusing more on the trading card aspects, this version ultimately became the anime that fans still fondly remember to this day. Essentially, it buried that first release.

With Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters serving as a new way into Kazuki Takahashi’s original franchise, and with updates to the series that streamlined those early death games to its most important events, the anime was then able to morph into the more family friendly version of the franchise from that point on. It would still carry the dark stakes of that first anime series, and characters would still be put under duress, but gone are the days of the Pharaoh getting threatened by knives. It would all be settled through children’s card games with no need to look back.

This has made Yu-Gi-Oh Season 0 such an interesting relic in anime history. It not only started the trend of the anime franchise reinventing itself with each new iteration, but it was also the kind of retooling the franchise ultimately needed. If things didn’t change, this hidden anime might have been the only version of Yu-Gi-Oh! that we ever got to see. And with it never making it to the United States, and likely not even attempting to release to a young audience like the Duel Monsters version, we could have had a world without Yu-Gi-Oh! in it at all.

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