You can always count on Netflix to keep things interesting, release-wise.  Any Netflix series imposes difficult choices on me from a scheduling standpoint, as they never seem to have a traditional weekly release (we’re talking about Netflix-produced shows here, not merely licensed).  Not only that, you never know just how they’re going to handle any given series.  Sometimes they dump it all at once, sometimes (as with Great Pretender) a few episodes at a time.  With Tiger & Bunny they’ve dropped the first of two cours – with no mention (that I’m aware of) of when the second will follow.

Tiger & Bunny is one of those shows that should have had a full-on sequel right after the first season proved a big hit.  But it didn’t – it dithered and dallied, and eventually offered up a recap and original films three years after the original series aired.  Why I have no idea, but it was a huge opportunity missed.  T&B was a major breakout hit, smashing records for the most tables at Comiket on the “ladies days” (a very reliable indicator of commercial success).  I can’t imagine a sequel 11 years after the series and 8 years after the original movie is going to make the same impact – a lot of fans have surely moved on.

I quite liked the original anime – it might have contended for my top 10 list in 2011 in fact, if the final arc hadn’t kind of dropped the ball.  As to the movies I have almost no recollection of their content, which I guess shows you they didn’t make much impact on me.  It’s been long enough that are definitely gaps in my memory watching these first two episodes, though I more or less managed to place who the new faces were.  I don’t recall any mention of this “buddy system” going mandatory for everybody – maybe that was in the second movie but I’m pretty sure it’s a new development.  We all know who the inspiration for it was, of course.

The strength of this premise for me was always the chemistry between the titular leads, and Kotetsu T. Kaburagi generally.  T&B was at its best when it focused on the challenges of a hero approaching middle age, as Kaburagi was (and is).  And no surprise, the best part of these two episodes was certainly watching Kotetsu and Barnaby Brooks play off each other.  It’s easy to see why all of Ikebukuro shipped them but even if that wasn’t your scene, they made and make a great team.  They have their moments to be sure, but that’s part of their charm as a duo (or a couple, whichever you prefer).

Among the newbies, the one most prominently featured here is Sengoku Subaru, hero name Mr. Black (Chiba Shouya).  He’s a 17 year-old from the inaka who’s come to the big city to make his mark, scoring highly on the hero placement test and getting hired.  He’s partnered with Thomas Taurus, imaginatively called “He is Thomas” (Shimazaki Nobunaga).  Thomas is a wunderkind who broke all of Bunny’s records at the academy, and that doesn’t do Subaru’s inferiority complex any good.  Subaru’s situation is resolved a little too easily here with a father-son talk with Kotestu, but he has his moments in these episodes.

Mostly, these eps consist of some fairly routine busts with a focus on how the buddy system is working out, though the epilogues highlight the pair of villains who I assume will be the first cour’s big bad.  There’s also a mention of a designer drug called “Max Happy” that I’m sure is going to play a role in this cour.  They also confirm Tiger & Bunny’s status as the undisputed anime king of product placement.  Because the writing incorporates it into the plot the advertising is comically over the top here.  It’s annoying on some level, but so ridiculously overdone that it plays like an inside joke.

I enjoyed these eps to be sure.  The new characters are fine, and while the returning ones are a mixed bag I like most of them well enough. And of course Kotetsu and Barnaby are great, as expected.  There’s an interesting feeling when you reconnect with a series after this long – almost like time travel, as you go back to the person you were when you were last in this universe.  That’s great, nostalgia in its best sense.  But what I want to see from Tiger & Bunny 2 is some reasonably imperative reason why it needs to exist.  Does it add something essential to the mythology, or take the characters deeper than the first series did?  Whether that will happen or not is impossible to say yet, of course – these are only 2 out of 25 planned episodes – but it’s the most important question the series has to answer.