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A new anime adaptation just joined Netflix’s lineup of largely sub-par live-action attempts.
One Piece serves as a rare outlier of the streamer’s largely lackluster attempts to adapt our favorite anime’s to live-action, and many fans were hoping for more of the same with Yu Yu Hakusho. The anime isn’t nearly so disappointing as Netflix’s god-awful take on Fullmetal Alchemist or Cowboy Bebop, but its not quite what fans expected either.
There are some truly excellent fight scenes nestled in the show’s recently-debuted first season, and it sports a bafflingly handsome Shûhei Uesugi as the notoriously ugly Kuwabara (I’m not complaining), but it was how thoroughly condensed the story is that really took fans off guard. Anime, and the manga they’re based on, often stretch into more than a hundred books and dozens of episodes, leaving plenty of fluff and filler to cut away in later adaptations, but there’s still plenty of content to make for a robust live-action adaptation. Why, then, is Netflix’s take on the story so short?
How many episodes are in the original Yu Yu Hakusho?
The manga, written and illustrated by Yoshihiro Togashi, that both Yu Yu Hakusho adaptations are based around, is quite lengthy. Not nearly as lengthy as some of the competition — looking at you, One Piece — but the completed manga series still rings in at a full 175 chapters in total.
The anime based around Togashi’s story, which first started airing in Japan in 1992, is nearly as long. It sports 112 episodes in total, over four seasons.
How many episodes are in Netflix’s Yu Yu Hakusho?
Then there’s Netflix’s live-action adaptation, which no one expected to stretch into more than 100 episodes. We did, however, expect it to at least reach eight episodes, which is the typical length of streaming shows in 2023. Instead, viewers were baffled to start the series only to discover that it boasts just five episodes in total. No more are expected to drop in a few months — season 1 consists of, in total, five episodes. That’s it.
Even worse, the series didn’t really leave room for a season 2. Which indicates, for fans familiar with the story, that Netflix is already finished with Yu Yu Hakusho. It seems the streamer produced five measly episodes, condensing four seasons worth of content into what used to be half a season, and called it quits. The baffling decision leaves us with a solid live-action attempt that feels hugely rushed and predictably full of holes. Its not necessarily even bad, its just painfully short — but at least the anime is streamable, both subbed and dubbed, over on Hulu.