Ask John: Can You Provide Some Background Info on Oh! My Goddess?

Question:
Can you give me a little background info on Oh! My Goddess? How long has it been running in Japan and how much have we see in America?

Answer:
The Ah! Megami-sama manga premiered in Comic Afternoon magazine on September 25, 1988. At the present time, Kosuke Fujishima is still writing and drawing new chapters of the manga for each monthly issue of Afternoon. Shortly after the premier of the normal manga series, Fujishima-san began a series of 4 panel super deformed A!MG gag comic strips. These “mini-goddesses” episodes starring Skuld, Urd and the rat Gan, were first collected into book format and published in Japan in 1996 as a hardcover, bilingual book intended to assist Japanese speakers in learning English. The normal manga proved popular enough to get turned into an anime OAV series, first released in September 1993. When the OAV series ended in 1996, Ah! Megami-sama anime did not return until the debut of Anime Complex in 1998. The WOWOW satellite TV network premiered an anthology series that contained short episodes of Neoranga, Android Anna Maico 2010 and Ah! Megami-sama: Chicchaitte Koto wa Benri de Ne (known as “Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses in the Handy Petit Size,” and “Ah! Megami-sama: Being Tiny is Convenient”). Like the SD comic strips, the A!MG TV series focused on Skuld, Urd and Gan-chan, with only occasional cameo appearances by Belldandy, and made prolific use of sight-gags, movie and anime parodies, and introduced the demoness Mara from the manga, who only appeared in the opening animation of the OAV series. The Mini-Goddess TV series lasted for 48 episodes. After being announced in 1997 and plagued by production delays and rumored trimming down from an initial 3 hour running time, the wonderful theatrical Ah! Megami-sama movie premiered to successful box-office on October 1st, 2000. The movie is noteworthy for introducing the goddesses’ battle costumes and their goddess “spirits” to animation, and for finally bringing the goddess Peorth from the manga into the animation.

AnimEigo has released the entire OAV series in America on VHS, laserdisc and DVD. Pioneer will be bringing the motion picture to American home video, along with a bonus episode of the TV series, in November. Pioneer will then begin the normal American, English language release of the TV series in February 2002.