The episodes covering the first two seasons of The Prince of Tennis anime series are directed by Takayuki Hamana, animated by Trans Arts, and co-produced by Nihon Ad Systems, J.C.Staff, and Production I.G. It originally aired on the terrestrial Japanese network TV Tokyo from October 2001 to October 2002. The anime is an adaptation of Takeshi Konomi's Prince of Tennis manga series created in 2000, and the story revolves around a 12-year-old tennis prodigy named Ryoma Echizen, who moves back to his native Japan in order to attend his father's alma mater, Seishun Academy, a private middle school famous for its strong tennis team.
Viz Media handles the distribution of the series in North America, where the episodes debuted as streaming media on Viz's and Cartoon Network's joint online broadband service called Toonami Jetstream on July 14, 2006. It first began airing on North American television as part of Toonami's Saturday programming block on December 23, 2006. However, it was removed from Toonami's schedule on June 9, 2007, and was also removed from Toonami Jetstream after episode fifty's broadcast on December 3, 2007. As of January 15, 2008, a total of four DVD compilations, containing the first fifty episodes of the two seasons, have been released by Viz Media. All four compilations contain three discs, each containing four episodes, save the final discs of the first two compilations, which contain five episodes.
Five pieces of theme music are used for the Japanese language episodes; two opening themes and three ending themes. The two opening themes, "Future", used for the first season, and "Driving Myself", used for the second, are both performed by Hiro-X. The first ending theme, "You Got Game" by Kimeru, is used for the first season. For the second season, there are two ending themes which periodically alternates, "Keep your style" and "Walk On", both performed by Masataka Fujishige. In the English language episodes, the opening and ending themes were replaced with electronic music compositions.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The prince in disguise makes the most charming beggar in the world, no doubt; but that is because—as all fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us—the prince wears his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn. And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can ... only reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“The boneless quality of English conversation, which, so far as I have heard it, is all form and no content. Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)