Anime of the Childhood #22: Lucky Star

This is the first anime series we’re reviewing this month that has a female protagonist or an all-female cast, and the sixth anime overall we’re reviewing an anime series featuring a female protagonist, that of which we have geared up for International Women’s Month. Lucky Star is a comedy and slice-of-life anime series based on the still-ongoing 4-koma manga by Kagami Yoshimizu, serialized by Kadokawa Shoten, which doesn’t have an ongoing plot and typically focuses on the daily lives of the characters.

The manga and anime series features Konata Izumi (Aya Hirano in Japanese, Wendee Lee in English), a long, blue-haired, eccentric but friendly and outgoing tomboyish high school student and otaku, with a mischievous yet good-natured sense of humor. She is smart but doesn’t apply herself to studying, thus her grades are a bit variable. Along with Konata, her friends are fraternal twins Kagami (elder: Emiri Kato in Japanese, Kari Wahlgren in English) and Tsukasa Hiiragi (younger: Kaori Fukuhara in Japanese, Michelle Ruff in English), and Miyuki Takara (Aya Endo in Japanese, Karen Strassman in English), a pink-haired, glasses-wearing young lady from a wealthy family who is beautiful, smart, and well-mannered. She always uses extremely polite Japanese, even when talking with her closest friends. I also have a Winamp skin of the anime series’ main protagonist (which comes in two versions, one with equalizer bars, and one without)!

The Lucky Star anime, produced by Kyoto Animation (before the arson attack in 2019), aired between April 8, 2007, and September 16, 2007, containing twenty-four episodes. After the first four episodes, series director Yutaka Yamamoto was fired from his position and was subsequently replaced by Yasuhiro Takemoto. The reason given was that: “Our company has determined that the director of Lucky Star — Yutaka Yamamoto — has not reached the standard of a director yet, therefore we have changed the director.”

Kadokawa Pictures USA and Bandai Entertainment announced that they licensed the Lucky Star anime with a teaser trailer as a special feature on the volume 4 DVD of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first four English DVD volumes were released by Bandai Entertainment in 2008 on May 6, July 1, September 2, and November 18. The fifth and sixth volumes were released in 2009 on January 6 and March 17. However, the sixth volume’s limited edition release has been canceled due to low sales of the other volumes’ limited editions. Bandai released a six-disc DVD box set on April 6, 2010, as a complete collection under their Anime Legends line. The anime series, however, has never aired on American and Canadian broadcasting systems since I had a blog banner that featured the characters back in 2007/2008 with the very old version of Paint Shop Pro 9 on an old Windows XP laptop computer. Following the 2012 closure of Bandai Entertainment, Funimation Entertainment (now known as Crunchyroll) announced at Otakon 2014 that they had licensed the anime television series, which they released on Blu-ray and DVD on July 12, 2016.

The anime series has since been available to stream on Crunchyroll despite following the death of Philece Sampler (Hiyori Tamura’s English voice actress) in mid-2021. The manga series is now sold in digital format only, since Viz Media ended sales of the physical copies. The anime series’ official website (in Japanese) is still active, though you still have the DVDs before Bandai Entertainment was shuttered in late 2012 as we were victims of Hurricane Sandy. The anime series’ official English website, formerly located at http://lucky-star.bandai-ent.com (United States and Canada), is no longer available and can only be accessed through the Wayback Machine following Bandai Entertainment’s demise.