The marketing strategy eludes me here.  Take an immensely popular series, then wait 8 years to release a sequel – and when you do, go with an all-new cast and mostly new staff?  Yes, Tiger & Bunny did get a couple of movies but that almost never taps into the true commercial potential for a massively popular TV series.  And T&B was, make no mistake, massively popular.  It still is, as anyone who’s attended a recent Comiket or looked at any calendar of doujin events in Japan could tell you.  I don’t know if making Tiger & Bunny a huge hit with female otaku was in the original business plan (I could ask the same question about Osomatsu-san) but that’s certainly what ended up driving the sales.

“Strike while the iron is hot” is apparently not a rule to live by with every production committee, but Double Decker! Doug & Kirill still might have a shot to be successful even after this too-long wait.  Tiger & Bunny may have faded from Western anime consciousness but it remains a big deal among those who buy doujins and character goods.  The question, really, is whether this sequel is going to have the chops to either appeal to those same fans, connect with a broad audience, or both.  The first series was quite influential in many ways and spawned a number of imitators, but Double Decker! is going to have to play more like a true successor than an imitator if it doesn’t want to share their fate.

Crunchyroll decided to drop this premiere a month or so early as a draw for their Crunchyroll Expo event in the Bay Area, so we have the privilege to make an initial assessment of Double Decker! before the Japanese do.  My first reaction is modestly positive – I did think their premiere was fun, though for me what drove the charm of the original T&B was mostly the world-weary quiet heroism of Kotetsu T. Kaburagi.  It was certainly a campy show, but his presence grounded it – and as a whole, it was a pretty sharp take on American superhero mythology (at least until largely coming unmoored in its final third).  With a new director and head writer (both worked on T&B, but in supporting roles) it remains to be seen whether DD! can match its predecessor in narrative terms.

This time around the major hero is, rather than a middle-aged family man, an eager rookie cop named Kirill Vrubel.  He’s played by Amasaki Kouhei, Hi Score Girl’s Haru and getting a lot of traction as one of anime’s new “it boys”.  The theme driving the plot is Anthem, a powerful drug villains are popping which eventually gives them superhuman powers even as it drives them insane.  There’s a special branch of the police (they answer to the military) called “Seven-0” set up to deal with Anthem users, but they can only intervene when Anthem use is proved.  After chasing his landlady’s lost cat Kirill ends up by chance at a crime scene, an abandoned factory, where detective Doug Billingam (Mikami Satoshi) is stuck in a drainpipe and unable to act anyway, since the criminal in question is only in “phase 1” (Anthem use suspected).  The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s way, way too early to hazard a guess whether Double Decker! Doug & Kirill is going to work, but so far it delivers a fair amount of entertainment.  There are some odd elements here, like Koyama Rikiya’s character – the head of Seven-0 who seems to be a cross between John Waters and Hugh Hefner.  And no character, including Kirill, immediately connects with me the way Kotetsu did in the original series.  But I love the art design, the animation is very good and the direction seems more than competent.  So far so good on that score.

Still, Double Decker! may be an odd fit for the current anime environment.  In describing the premise one could almost mistake it for something out of Boku no Hero Academia – and indeed, though it’s rarely mentioned I think Tiger & Bunny was an influence on Horikoshi Kouhei for that series.  But that was then, this is now – and it’s stuff like BnHA that this show is going to be compared against.  It either has to recapture the magic – and audience – of T&B, or strike a chord with an entirely new audience for whom the original is a non-factor. Neither one of things is going to be easy to accomplish, though I’ll be rooting for Double Decker! to be able to pull it off.