Original Video Animation - History

History

OVAs originated during the early 1980s. As the VCR became a widespread fixture in Japanese homes, the Japanese anime industry grew to behemoth proportions. Demand for anime became massive, so much so that consumers would willingly go directly to video stores to buy new animation outright. While people in the United States use the phrase "direct-to-video" as a pejorative for works that could not make it onto television or movie screens, in Japan the demand was so great that direct-to-video became a necessity. Many popular and influential series such as Bubblegum Crisis (1987–1991) and Tenchi Muyo! (1992–2005) were released directly to video as OVAs.

The earliest known attempt to release an OVA involved Osamu Tezuka's The Green Cat (part of the Lion Books series) in 1983, although it cannot count as the first OVA: there is no evidence that the VHS tape became available immediately, and the series remained incomplete. Therefore the first official OVA release to be billed as such was 1983's Dallos, directed by Mamoru Oshii and released by Bandai. Other famous early OVAs, premièring shortly thereafter, were Fight!! Iczer One and the original Megazone 23. Other companies were quick to pick up on the idea, and the mid-to-late 1980s saw the market flooded with OVAs. During this time, most OVA series were new, stand-alone titles.

In the 1980s during Japan's economic bubble, production companies were more than willing to spontaneously decide to make a one- or two-part OVA. They paid money to anime studios who then haphazardly created an OVA to be released to rental shops. Judging from sales, should a longer series be deemed feasible, TV networks paid for most of the production costs of the entire series.

As the Japanese economy worsened in the 1990s, the flood of new OVA titles diminished to a trickle. Production of OVAs continued, but in smaller numbers. Many anime TV series ran an economical 13 episodes rather than the traditional 26-episodes per season. New titles were often designed to be released to TV if they approached these lengths. In addition, the rising popularity of cable and satellite TV networks (with their typically less strict censorship rules) allowed the public to see direct broadcasts of many new titles - previously that would have been impossible. Therefore many violent, risque, and fanservice series became regular TV series when previously those titles would have been OVAs. During this time period most OVA content was limited to that related to existing and established titles.

However, in 2000 and later, a new OVA trend began. Producers released many TV series without normal broadcasts of all of the episodes – but releasing some episodes on DVD-videos of the series. Examples of this include the DVD-only 25th episode of Love Hina, while several episodes of the Oh My Goddess TV series are DVD-only. In addition, the final episode of Excel Saga was offered only as an OVA, mostly due to content issues that would have made TV broadcast impossible. In these cases the series as a whole cannot be called an OVA, though certain episodes are. This trend is becoming quite common, and furthermore, many recent OVA series pre-broadcast the episodes and release the DVD with unedited and better quality, revised animations – thus further blurring the boundary between TV, and video anime.