Why did the Hades chapter take so long to animate?
Thirteen years of silence, then the dead came back in three instalments.
The television series ended on April 1, 1989, having spent its final episodes on Poseidon. Kurumada’s manga kept going for two more years, finishing the Hades arc in 1991, by which time the anime machine had stopped. The arc that fans consider the series’ peak, the underworld war, existed only on paper until 2002, when the franchise’s revival made finishing the story commercially possible.
THE THREE WAVES
2002 to 2008Sanctuary · 2002–03
Thirteen episodes, broadcast on SKY PerfecTV! from November 9, 2002 to April 12, 2003, then seven DVDs from Bandai Visual. Araki and Himeno returned to design; Yokoyama’s television score returned with them. The original cast, miraculously, largely returned too.
Inferno · 2005–07
Twelve episodes in two blocks (December 2005 to February 2006, then December 2006 to February 2007), now from Avex. The gap inside the gap: mid-production, the principal roles were recast, so the underworld journey changes voices halfway down.
Elysion · 2008
The final six episodes, March to August 2008, closing the manga nineteen years after the television series stopped. Thirty-one OVA episodes in total, across six years, to finish what print finished in 1991.
WHY THEN?
The revival economyThe 2000s return
The Hades OVAs rode the same revival as Episode.G (2002) and the WonderSwan remake (2003): satellite channels and DVD economics let a beloved but dormant property finish its story for an adult audience that had grown up with it.
The Myth Cloth handshake
Bandai launched Saint Cloth Myth in 2003 explicitly alongside the Hades OVAs. The figures sold the anime to collectors and the anime sold the figures; the arc’s completion was underwritten by die-cast armour.