A lot of the classic greats in the anime world might be filled with epic stories, smart narratives and explosive act but in terms of quality…they haven’t aged well. Removing the 60s-70s anime—as these shows are downright dated despite how amazing some of them are—the 90s series like Outlaw Star or the original Berserk—more on this particular show later—don’t look that great on DVD or VHS, if you’re still even using VHS. Many of these classic titles didn’t have huge budgets or the editing software of modern-day and thus they look grainy, old and are in serious need of being remade. Plus, with remakes or visual upgrades we don’t always need the show to be redone story wise and many anime studios could just keep the series the way they were but add that extra polish to make for some impressive new age creations.

Remember how we mentioned Berserk—the original 90s version—a moment ago? Well, thanks to the series re-emerging, Berserk has come back to life with modern-day visual overhauls and most of those are…pretty bad, if we’re being honest. The story for Berserk still has that great dark-fantasy theme going for it but visually it looks quite honestly worse than the original 97 version. This does make you wonder if we did remake a lot of older shows, could they end up with the problems seen in Berserk 2017 and 2018? We don’t think it could happen but the fear of it makes us not want to see Cowboy Bebop being redone with some weaker visuals despite what current anime could look like.

Anime over the last decade has been seeing more and more viewership than ever before thanks to big anime movies like Your Name and anime franchises like Sword Art Online or Shingeki no Kyojin. Though even with the current anime viewers, there are still thousands of fans of older anime like Gundam Wing or Dragon Ball Z. That’s why it’s not hard to imagine that if an older series was remade, the number of viewers would be quite high on various legal viewing sites like Crunchyroll or VRV. It might be a risk to remake all anime from the 90s and before but some shows might truly blow the anime industry up like never before seen.

Now if we play devil’s advocate for a moment, let’s also realize that the anime community can be quite fickle with what they watch and don’t watch. Some anime viewers will flat out refuse to watch the remakes of shows like Legend of the Galactic Heroes or Fist of the North Star because it changes what they loved about the original. We can’t disagree with these viewers but equal it shows that with the creation of a remade series there might be less views than a studio might expect. To simplify this into one sentence, if an anime studio makes a series that doesn’t have good views, that series will flop and ultimately be a loss for the studio. In this day and age…that’s a risk many studios aren’t willing to take and for good reason.