Lucas and Chris recall some of the strangest and most surprising crossover episodes in anime history. Which are your favorite?
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Super, Fairy Tail, Isekai Quartet, Wonderful Precure!, Space Patrol Luluco, and Dropkick on My Devil! X are currently streaming on Crunchyroll, while UQ Holder! is available on HIDIVE. Kaginado is available on both Crunchyroll and HIDIVE.
One Piece Episode 590 has a crossover with Dragon Ball and Toriko and is available on Apple TV.
Chris
Lucas, I had fun chatting with Steve about all those
DC Comics anime last week, but I just realized we completely missed something! Big Western comic publishers like them are known for their constant crossover events, bringing characters together from all over the multiverse! I guess it's an element we don't need to worry about too much, though; it's not like you're going to see someone like Superman stumbling into
Dragon Ball anytime soon—
Lucas
I know crossover episodes aren't usually canon, but if Commander Blue beat up Superman, and Goku beat up Commander Blue, doesn't that mean that Goku is WAY stronger than Superman? How has this been a debate on the internet for so long???
This is what happens when you get off on the technicality of not being a crossover with an official character but rather Toriyama's own parody. But that's still fine because while some may think that crossovers are intended to settle age-old power scaling arguments, that just isn't the case. The real reason is to see characters who operate on entirely different rulesets have to deal with each other's bullshit.
Oh! We're focusing on crossovers in today's TWIA, not power scaling, and how it saps the fun out of media? Apologies, I should have inserted this screenshot of the iconic line from everyone's favorite anime,
Bojack Horseman, sooner!
But you're right. A lot of people think of crossovers as being something somewhat exclusive to American television. But they happen
just often enough in anime and manga to make me go, "Huh, that's neat" every time they do.
It's easy to understand why it
feels less likely. Manga, and the anime based on them, are known in popular culture for being singular works of particular authors, so that kind of driving vision would theoretically be free of marketing-mandated
World's Finest-style team-ups. But then you remember that many of these are still run by massive publishing, broadcasting, and licensing companies, and suddenly you recall that they did a whole
One Piece episode crossing over with
Dragon Ball and
Toriko.
One of these things is not like the others. One of these things doesn't have near the worldwide cultural cache.
What are you talking about? These are all beloved pieces of children's media created by respected authors like
Akira Toriyama,
Eiichiro Oda, and
Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro! Why, if you search "
Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro children" on the internet you'll see tha—Oh! Oh my god!!!
Yeah, let's hope that the *Dragon Ball/One Piece/Toriko* crossover was the work of corporate shenanigans. Otherwise, it's tough not to look at this piece of media as anything other than Akira Tomiyama and Eiichiro Oda trying to rehabilitate the image of a dude who was arrested and convicted of violating child prostitution laws.
This is neither the time nor the place to meditate on the fact that this isn't even the only time Oda's been involved in that sort of maneuver. Fortunately, crossovers can be viewed in far less morally misgiving contexts when authors are just doing it by themselves!
Per my opening with Suppaman from
Akira Toriyama's
Dr. Slump popping up in
Dragon Ball; this tends to be the most common kind of anime guest appearance: characters from an author's other works crashing their current series' party.
Absolutely! The kinds of crossovers where the author blends their works tend to be my favorite because they're the most, well, authored. They give the author a chance to return to their older characters and can sometimes even feel reflective on their own career.
However, there aren't a lot of mangaka who have had enough big hits to pull off this kind of crossover. It's a little apple to oranges, but Hiro Mashima is one of the few other mangaka to have pulled this off; with his infrequent crossovers between Rave Master, Fairy Tail, and, most recently, Edens Zero.
I think calling every one of those "big hits" would be stretching it, but it's still cool to see someone who's been going that long being happy to interface with their whole body of work. Granted, I'm unfamiliar enough with any of Mashima's series, and just bumping into one of these crossovers while I was reading the other might lose me a bit. But I'm sure it's quite rewarding in context if you are up on the full canon.
If nothing else, Mashima's crossovers remind me that he keeps repeatedly making the same story (and same-looking characters) and that it mostly just keeps working! I fell off the bandwagon pretty quickly after
Rave Master, but I'm happy for the folks who are still enjoying his work.
Sometimes, an author who's been going a while can use the concept of a crossover to surprise back-port in world-building. Speaking of authors we've fallen off of, as someone for whom
Love Hina was a formative way of getting into manga (shut up), I got really into reading
Ken Akamatsu's follow-up series,
Negima! as it was releasing. So it was pretty neat when a new secondary character in that manga turned out to be the younger sister of
Love Hina's Naru, indicating the two series had been taking place in the same universe all along!
For added nerdery, this was a character who was barely glimpsed in the original
Love Hina manga and only put in real appearances in its anime adaptation, making Mei's appearance in
Negima! something of a crossover between mediums as well.
Oh! Surprise-shared universes are always crowd-pleasers! I was never super into either series, but I remember a lot of people on social media losing their minds when
Atsushi Ohkubo's
Fire Force was revealed to be a stealth prequel to
Soul Eater.
While I could be pedantic and argue that shared universes are different from crossovers, this column will be way more fun if we talk about series regardless of that distinction.
You can chart a line in places where a series going from a fun crossover inclusion to a complete 'verse sort of overtakes the entertainment value of the guest appearances. Akamatsu would roll with the idea whole-hog into his next series
UQ Holder!, to the point that it wasn't so much a continuing crossover as much as just
Negima!'s Boruto.
That probably resulted in some oddness for non-superfans when
UQ Holder! got an anime adaptation despite the relevant parts of
Negima! never having been animated, but then that would require anybody caring about the anime version of
UQ Holder! in the first place. So it can be argued there are diminishing returns to this sort of thing, and sticking with incidental one-or-two-off crossovers is for the best.
Alternatively, creators can lean WAY THE HELL into the crossover skid and make a multi-season anime about protagonists in the same genre getting into wacky, low-steak hijinks together. Case in point:
Isekai Quartet.
On the one hand, I love that the isekai genre canonically allows for this kind of crossover, as the premise necessitates characters jumping into another world. But on the other hand, I can't think of a better example of isekai being oversaturated than a show with about six different isekai series packed into it.
Look, if your genre was omnipresent for any amount of time, then you've probably got a full deck of cards you can scatter around for a game of crossover 52 Pickup. That's why DC was able to start throwing their superheroes into each other's books, and it's why
Isekai Quartet isn't the first chibi tribute to multiverse madness.
See, the beauty of the comedy crossover cavalcade is that you can do it with just about anything. Including the depressing
Key series, as seen in
Kaginado.
Oh, wait, I just realized that if we broaden our focus a little bit more, there are a lot of fun examples of this in the anime games space!
Final Fantasy is famous for putting out a new crossover in the anthology series every decade or so, with my favorite of those being
World of Final Fantasy.
The long-running investment in games lets them build up a big collection of action figures they can smash together. Similar to
Key, visual novel maker
Type-Moon has done a similar comedy crossover in
Carnival Phantasm.
If you thought something like the Mashima crossovers or
UQ Holder! was obtuse, then know that this stuff is downright
impenetrable to anybody not up on decades of lore and fandom in-jokes. Which is why it's nice when you've got stuff like
Type-Moon's
Fate/Grand Order or that
World of Final Fantasy that are at least accessible as neat games you can play through. To say nothing of entries like
Jump Ultimate Stars that let players arrange dream matches between characters like Goku and Luffy, who kicked off this whole discussion.
Haha, do you picking
Jump Ultimate Stars as the go-to shonen crossover fighter example mean that we've all collectively repressed any memories of
Jump Force?
Because I'm VERY okay with burying this game deep in the annals of anime history.
I'm sure the game has its fans, but one of the tricks with crossing over characters from different artists is massaging the art styles together, and these Unreal Engine horrors probably weren't the best way to go. Still, the sheer number of these centered around
Jump solidifies
Shueisha's magazine's chokehold on culture. At least even people who don't like
Jump Force still remember it enough to dunk on it. That's better than something like the totally forgotten PSP fighter
Sunday VS Magazine, which ought to have been the
CAPCOM VS SNK of manga magazine crossovers. Alas.
Though, hey, there's
Negima! again. And
Fairy Tail too.
Yeah, it really cannot be stressed enough how important it is to find a way to blend those different art styles or just accept that characters from different series will look like characters from different series. If people half-ass it and don't commit to either route, we end up with super uncanny characters like
Eiichiro Oda's take on Goku from a few years back.
I mean, I feel like the
energy is there properly, at least. It helps that Goku and Luffy aren't entirely dissimilar characters. That's still not on the level of
Shin-chan just wandering onto the set of
Wonderful Precure! a couple of months back.
If I hadn't seen it happen to know better, I'd have sworn this was a Photoshopped shitpost.
Oh wow, yeah, that is just uncomfortable for a reason I cannot put my finger on. Seeing Shin-chan's art style in anything that's not Shin-chan media is just weird!
Dissonant art styles can be used in these things well if they are being done as a joke.
Space Patrol Luluco, for instance, wound up bringing in a whole bunch of other
Studio Trigger cameos for one of its arcs, which all meshed well enough...
...which, of course, made it even funnier when they just slotted
Inferno Cop right in there. It's really fair, given that
Inferno Cop's animation was always doing a bit. That's another point in the column for these kinds of stunts working better when they're creator-driven.
Haha, we're talking ourselves into that conclusion and finding a lot of great examples that support it along the way! I just remembered the
It's a Rumic World special
OVA where we get a crossover between
Rumiko Takahashi's
Ranma 1/2,
Urusei Yatsura, and
Inu Yasha; and a snappy reminder of what made all of those series so great.
At the rate things are going with Takahashi remakes, we can probably expect to see a new one of those sooner rather than later. Only time will tell if
Yashahime gets invited.
All this isn't to say that popular creators are the only vector for crossovers to occur. Sometimes, a property itself being popular is enough to net a guest appearance, like tossing Wolverine into a comic to help drive up sales. That's how we wind up with legends like Evangelion's Shinji or the famous Hatsune Miku popping up in Shinkalion, and making me just a little disappointed there's no streaming option here for this transforming train toy commercial show.
Wait, I'm sorry, you're telling me there's an obscure anime where Shinji Ikari from
Evangelion hangs out with Hatsune Miku??? Can
Hideaki Anno please confirm that Shinji is a baby queer already! I can't take any more of these "just shy of confirmation" winks to the audience!
This isn't even Miku's wildest anime crossover appearance. There was also that time
Dropkick on My Devil! X's successful crowdfunding netted her walk-on appearances that season to bully and/or get bullied by all of Jinbocho's angels and devils.
This is what you can do when your "special guest" is a piece of voice-synthesis software anybody can use.
Move over, Kevin Bacon. Hatsune Miku is a crossover machine! I just went down a rabbit hole on the "Cultural Impact" and "Appearances in Other Media" sections of her Wikipedia page and now believe she can be connected to any character in anime in seven steps or less.
And that she was actually in a pretty sick Pokémon collaboration called Project Voltage.
Oh don't even get me started on my beloved Ghost-type Miku, or we'll be here all night.
Like we talked about crossovers causing consternation with their uncanny art styles?
Project Voltage was the opposite of that.
She's Hatsune Miku! She can work in any art style! She's like
Pop Team Epic but with a broader appeal!
It certainly lends to her ability to team up with virtually any other anime character. Though others like
Lupin the Third could give her a run for her money.
That guy gets around.
You know, you opened this chat by mentioning the gag manga
Dr. Slump has appeared a surprising number of times in
Dragon Ball, but I'm just now remembering that gag manga are great vehicles for crossovers themselves! It's a shame that
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo never got a fair shot in the U.S. because Yugi from
Yu-Gi-Oh! appearing randomly in a panel would have blown my mind as a kid!
It's a crossover so legendary they immortalized it in Nendoroid form.
Another fun fact is that
Yoshio Sawai actually got
Kazuki Takahashi himself to draw Yugi for that panel. This is a cool example of how the practice of crossovers can bring creators together.
Absolutely! Crossovers are supposed to be fun little off-shoots for fans of the involved media properties, and the best crossovers involve the creators having as much fun as the audience.
There can easily be some cynicism to the commercial appeal of the practice, but it's still nice when a team-up seems to get everyone excited. One thing recently that got me jazzed was the announcement of a collaboration between
MyGO from
BanG Dream! and Togenashi Togeari from
Girls Band Cry. It's one of those match-ups that seemed so natural that fans of CGI anime about angsty girl bands made jokes about it happening, and now it's real!
It's just a combo concert and not a proper anime crossover for now, but seeing the performers interact should still be fun. Most importantly, the fan artists have already started having fun with the whole idea.
I couldn't tell you much about either IP, but I'm glad they're giving fans what they want! While we're right to be inherently weary of any actions by profit-driven corporations, crossover events like these are a pretty fun and relatively harmless way to make money.
It's more natural than smashing together two dissonant IPs in a mobile game collab to extort gacha money, that's for sure.
If the fun and quirkiness of crossovers can't make me like gacha games and their exploitative mechanics, nothing will!
Good call. At least that's one place where it's probably best to stay on your own side of things instead of...crossing over.