Discotek Media Licenses Medabots for Blu-ray Release

Although anime has been in the United States for a long time through video tape exchanges and smaller interest circles, franchises began to get far more recognition among a wider variety of audiences in the late 90s and early 2000s. Ask anime fan of a certain age about their favorite anime franchises, and chances are there will be a large amount of support for series like Digimon and Medabots that introduced anime to children as part of the Fox Kids Saturday morning line-up.

But now the original Medabots anime series will be getting a clean new release as Discotek Media has announced that they have licensed the anime for an English Blu-ray release in the United States

Discotek Media announced during Otakon 2019 that they will be releasing the first season of the Medabots anime on Blu-ray. This will feature the English dub of the series only, and will be the standard definition release of the original series. Scheduled for a release sometime in 2020, this Blu-ray will include the 26 episode first season and Discotek Media plans to release future seasons of the series at a later date. Not only that, the original Japanese release of the series — known as Medarot — will be hitting a later date as well.

Although the series has been released on DVD in the past through Shout! Factory years ago, this will mark the first Blu-ray release of the series. The English dub release of the anime is the one fans in the United States know the most, but it’s also great news to hear that the Japanese release of the series will be available later as well.

For those unfamiliar, Medabots (known as Medarot in Japan) is an RPG franchise originally created by Natsume and Imagineer in 1997. Adapted into an anime series by Bee Train in 1999, the series ran for 52 episodes total before a sequel series titled Medabots Damashii was produced by Production I.G. in 2000 and ran for 39 episodes. Both series were first licensed by Nelvana Limited for an English language release, and the series eventually found its way to the Fox Kids programming block in 2001 and became one of the most popular shows at the time.