Ask John: Will There Be More Outlaw Star?

Question:
One day when I was at Charms and I was looking at some Outlaw Star merchandise, one of the clerks came up to me and we began to converse. He told me about how there is supposedly another season of Outlaw Star going on in Japan that America doesn’t have yet. Can you tell me if there is any truth to that statement?

Answer:
Contrary to popular rumor, it’s an easily verifiable fact that there is no existing Outlaw Star animation (excluding the 13 episodes of Angel Links) beside the 26 episode TV series now or scheduled for future production. Television broadcast listings in Newtype and Animage magazine, along with a search of Japanese anime news and fan websites can attest to this fact. The Outlaw Star TV series concluded its Japanese broadcast in 1998. The manga concluded in 1999, and the most recent Outlaw Star release, the novel “Outlaw Star: El Dorado Covered with Clouds” was published in Japan over a year ago.

Sunrise, nor any other Japanese news source, nor any reliable American resource, has suggested any hint of plans for any new Outlaw Star animation. The series was successful, but not a major hit, during its peak of popularity in Japan 4 years ago, and virtually no amount of success in America is likely to convince Sunrise to create new animation specifically for the American market. It’s not impossible for older series to make a come-back, as the upcoming new Rurouni Kenshin (released nearly 3 years after the end of the previous OAV series) and Fushigi Yuugi (released 3 years after the last prior FY anime and 7 years after the end of the TV series) OAV series prove. But both Rurouni Kenshin and Fushigi Yuugi were much more successful in Japan than Outlaw Star, and still retain a much larger potential market in Japan than Outlaw Star is likely to have. And that’s most commonly what determines which anime get revived. Regardless of how much some Western fans may wish to see sequels to particular anime created, if there’s little interest in Japan for a revival of a particular series, the odds of new animation for that series being produced are infinitely slim.