Cognition Dissemination: Watching Monster Shouldn’t Be This Hard

It’s been far too long since the anime adaptation of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster has been readily available to watch, but this long, national nightmare is partially over. Partially.

It was announced in late August that Netflix secured a deal with Nippon TV to stream 13 popular anime on the service. The 1997 adaptation of Berserk garnered the most attention from the list, the series responsible for establishing the fanbase outside Japan when Media Blasters first released it in the early 00s, alongside the manga translation from Dark Horse. Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting! stuck out too. The actual most important offering among them was Monster, thanks to how long it’s remained unavailable despite being previously given an excellent translation from Viz Media before they lost the license.

This news did not turn out as positive as it initially seemed. Warning signs first emerged when Berserk arrived on Netflix last month, though not in the United States, Canada, or the United Kingdom. Fortunately, Monster didn’t adhere to this trend by arriving on Netflix in nearly every territory at the start of this year. Unfortunately, only the first 30 episodes were made available, not even half of the 76-episode series. It’s also only presented with Japanese voices and the French dub options despite receiving a very solid English dubbing job.

This is a crushing disappointment for anyone who wanted to finally watch the entire series in one batch, something Netflix and Nippon TV easily could have done here. This isn’t a new series that necessitated uploading the episodes in batches like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, nor is it a long-running series. Netflix themselves has uploaded longer series all at once, anime or otherwise, so I’m betting the blame here lies with Nippon TV. But it’s tough to tell for sure.

Perhaps that same party is to blame for the lack of the English dub, a solid one from the late 2000s that featured the talents of Liam O’Brien (Dr. Kenzo Tenma), Tara Platt (Eva Heinemann), and Laura Bailey (Dieter), names who’ve largely moved on from anime dubs. Not to say the Japanese voicework is a bad alternative — far from it. Options are nice, though.

The wait for the series to return to legal channels has been unacceptably long. The series was first licensed by Viz shortly after it aired in Japan, and subsequently aired in its entirety on SyFy when the channel developed their second relationship with anime. (Plenty of people in the US, myself included, first discovered anime on the SyFy/Sci-Fi Channel in the 1990s, but that’s a story for another post.) This was, unfortunately, where the series’ legal availability in North America started and ended. Viz released the first volume on DVD, which included the first 13 episodes on two discs, but cancelled subsequent releases due to poor sales. This occurred at a time just before streaming started to take off.

Thus, anyone who wanted to watch it in America was of luck, with no way to legally watch it. When I wanted to sit down and watch it in in 2014, I had to venture to the usual anime piracy source (Nyaa, if you aren’t aware) and download the entire batch of episodes, all of which were ripped from the Australian DVD collection. This was, as far as I could see, the only way in which the dub could be watched outside ad-filled versions recorded from the SyFy broadcast. The series has, since then, remained proof of how bad some companies can be with maintaining access to their archived works.

It’s a crying shame that it’s gone unavailable for so long, because I count it among the best anime series I’ve ever watched. Monster feels less like other anime and more like an HBO drama in anime form thanks to its superlative writing and character and world development. It’s a crying shame that this mimicked other Urasawa works outside Japan by not being more popular during its run. You could almost count the number of people who’ve watched Master Keaton on one hand too — if they’ve even heard of it.

(Interestingly, a live-action adaptation of Monster was planned for HBO at one point, with Guillermo del Toro involved. It unfortunately never came to fruition. This series could have made for one of the best live-action anime/manga adaptations around thanks to the subject matter it covers, which would have expanded its popularity, and del Toro would have been talented enough to handle it.)

The problems outlined in the paragraphs above should be easily fixable. Netflix will hopefully upload the rest of the series in due time, and perhaps add other dubbing options. It would be best if that happens sooner rather than later — like, within the month. The wait has been long enough. But the point remains that this series never should have gone unavailable for such a lengthy amount of time to begin with, even if it was easy to find through alternative means.