Streaming anime is one of the greatest things to happen ever on the internet while simultaneously being one of the worst. Before Crunchyroll revolutionized the industry by inventing anime simulcasts at the very beginning of the previous decade, the only ways to watch anime legally was by buying or renting DVDs and Blu-rays of series that were licensed by a company (many of which no longer exist as their former selves; RIP ADV Films, Central Park Media, Geneon, Bandai, and the many others who tried their best in an unforgiving market). If you were lucky, you might have caught a television broadcast.
You’ll note that I said “legally” in the last sentence of the above paragraph because thanks to the wonders that are high-speed internet and basic video editing software, fan subs took off in a huge way during the 00s. Still, mostly during that era, I was a good little anime fan who tried my best to avoid watching anything illegally.
That said, I’ve grown quite accustomed to having thousands of different anime series offered to me at only a moment’s notice. The only effort I need to put in is to tap on an icon and hit play. However, streaming anime isn’t perfect as there are a ton of series from the last couple of decades that, for whatever reason, have fallen through the cracks and become forgotten gems because they aren’t available to stream anywhere. For this list, I’ll be looking at five series from this millennium that are not available to stream legally (in the United States at least) but which absolutely should be!
Diary of a Crazed Family (2008, Studio: Nomad)
One of the very first series I ever watched via fan subs and it’s still not available to stream legally. There’s something wrong with that.
Adapting a light novel series, this 26-episode comedy showed me what I was missing in the world of anime in terms of things that weren’t getting licensed for home video (and eventually streaming). Diary of a Crazed Family (Kyouran Kazoku Nikki) is a surprisingly heartfelt series about what it means to be a family even if you’re not blood-related (years before Spy x Family was even a thing).
In this series, a government official working for the Great Japanese Empire Paranormal Phenomena Bureau of Measures (who is in charge of keeping the descendent of a god from 1,000 years prior from destroying the world) and a self-proclaimed goddess are put together as the parental units of several children, any of whom could end up being the fated destroyer of the world. These children (which range from a 23-year-old trans female to a jellyfish to a biological weapon to a robot, to others and I’m not kidding with any of these), all come from troubled backgrounds that could lead any of them to justifiably blowing up, which is why they must learn the value of family and what it means to love and be loved.
FLAG (2006-2007, Studio: The Answer Studio)
To this day, I can’t think of a single other anime series that has ever dared to be so different with its presentation.
Told 100% from a first-person perspective, this is a war story unlike any other. In the fictional Eurasian country of Uddiyana, civil war is ravaging the land and people. After a young journalist takes a picture that is seen all over the world as an iconic symbol, peace seems to be getting closer, but it’s not quite ready to arrive yet. Told from the perspectives of both the young photographer, Saeko Shirasu, who is embedded within a military unit, and her mentor who is digging up information back in the main city, the story about how this war began and who are the ones who want to keep it going come to light.
FLAG is one of those series that I saw when it was first released on DVD but never actually had the chance to add to my personal library. This is a series that I love to go out of my way to show to people who are looking for a unique viewing experience.
Baccano (2007, Studio: Brain’s Base)
This series not being available to stream anywhere legally blows my mind.
While my first experience with this series wasn’t entirely pleasant (fun fact: Baccano and Claymore were the last series to be released as DVD singles by Funimation in the late 00s, so I was watching this series four episodes at a time with two-to-three-month breaks in between sets of episodes), once I could go back and binge watch it (and thus, be able to keep track of the various timelines without a bleeping flowchart), it became an all-time favorite.
Taking place in the United States during the 1930s, there are multiple, interlaced stories in this series. In one story, a large group of passengers aboard the transcontinental train, The Flying Pussyfoot, are going to have the most exciting trip of their lives as there are multiple gangs who want to cause harm to someone else on board. In another story, a young man named Firo joins a mafia family in New York and meets the girl of his dreams. When he tries to track her down, however, he gets caught up in a centuries-old war that stems from the desire to have the power of immortality. In yet another story, a young thug named Dallas Genoard has gone missing and, while everyone tells his little sister to move on, she refuses to give up the search. Which of these characters is the “main character”? That’s for you and a certain young girl to figure out.
Madlax (2004, Studio: Bee Train)
While Noir and El Cazador de la Bruja might be more popular with the few people in the world who watched all three of Koichi Mashimo’s “Girls With Guns” series, I will always be the outlier who praises Madlax far more than the other two.
This is another series that features a civil war in a fictional country (this time it’s called Gazth-Sonika), but in this case, the main characters aren’t documenting the war, they’re each an indirect part of it. On one side, you have a teenage mercenary named Madlax who has no memories of her past. All she knows how to do is kill people and, with the help of her handler SSS (short for Three Speed), she goes out into the war-torn country and destroys lives with her guns. On the other side, in the faraway country of Nafrece, there is another young girl with no memories named Margaret Burton. While these two ladies start the series with zero knowledge of the other, by the end they’ll find out exactly how closely related they actually are.
Madlax is a series that to this day I go back to regularly. I collected this series as DVD singles as soon as ADV Films released each one (which was a rare feat for me back in the day when I had even less money than I have now) and still consider this series a prized part of my personal anime library.
Petite Princess Yucie (2002-2003, Studios: AIC and GAINAX)
Is this the most hidden of the hidden gems released on DVD in the 00s? Quite possibly.
While it’s easy to dismiss this anime thanks to it being based on the GAINAX daughter-raising simulator game series, Princess Maker, to do that would mean that you’re missing out on one of the cutest children’s series to be released so far in this century. Petite Princess Yucie is all about the power of friendship and staying loyal to those who have helped you along the way. Five princesses from five different lands within this fictional world all find out that they’re under the same curse that caused them to stop growing when they were ten, so despite actually being seventeen, they still look like children. The answer to this problem arrives in an ancient prophecy that says that it will grant one wish to the one who can travel to all five lands and retrieve all the parts of the Eternal Tiara.
Even after this series was released on home video, it was a tough sell to get people to give it a chance. Now, here we are years later and Petite Princess Yucie has become almost entirely forgotten and is rarely talked about. Since they released this series years before anyone ever considered streaming anime to be a realistic business idea, it’s likely that it will remain an unknown classic that will stay tucked away in the darkest recesses of the anime community.
