New ‘Prince of Tennis’ Anime Short Shares First Promo

Much like many other classic anime this year, The Prince of Tennis is having a cool anniversary revival with a return to some of the series’ best tennis matches in a brand new anime special.

Directed by Keiichiro Kawaguchi for M.S.C., the first episode of The Prince of Tennis special recently released in Japanese theaters. With this new short promo video for the first episode, fans can see exactly what the new special is offering.

With a later home video release planned for October 23, The Prince of Tennis BEST GAMES!! is a short special that recaps many of the series’ best matches. The first episode features the match between Seishun Academy’s Kunimitsu Tezuka and Hyoutei Academy’s Keigo Atobe, which can be seen just a bit in the new promo video.

The second episode of the special highlights doubles matches as it recaps both Shuichiro Oishi and Eiji Kikumaru’s game against Hiroshi Yagyu and Masaharu Nio, and Ryo Shishido and Chotaro Otori’s game against Sahadaru Inui and Kaoru Kaido. This will be followed by a third episode featuring the match between Shūsuke Fuji and Akaya Kirihara during the Kanto tournament.

Both of these episodes have revealed cool posters too. The release date for the following two episodes is still unconfirmed, however. Mitsutaka Hirota will be returning to the series to handle series composition and scripts, Akiharu Ishii is designing the characters, Cher Watanabe is composing the music, and the ending theme of the new special will be the first ending song the anime series had, “You got game?” sung by Ryoma Echizen voice actress Junko Minagawa.

The Prince of Tennis was originally created by Takeshi Konom for Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump in 1999. The series follows Ryoma Echizen, a tennis prodigy attending a private school famous for its strong tennis players. After making his way onto the school’s team by defeating a number of strong upperclassmen, his team decides to enter the National Middle School Tennis Championship as Ryoma slowly learns his own unique style of tennis and really cements what the sport means to him.

It was later adapted into an anime series by Trans Arts, and ran for 178 episodes. The series was licensed by Viz Media and aired as part of Cartoon Network’s Toonami block in 2006, but was later moved to Toonami’s streaming platform, Toonami Jetstream, for the remainder of its broadcast.