New 'Prince of Tennis' Anime Debuts Poster
Celebrating its upcoming 20th Anniversary in 2019, The Prince of Tennis is returning for a series [...]
Celebrating its upcoming 20th Anniversary in 2019, The Prince of Tennis is returning for a series of OVA (or original video animation) projects under a "BEST GAMES!!" series cataloguing the best tennis matches in the series.
The first episode of this new anniversary series portrays the match between Seishun Academy's Kunimitsu Tezuka and Hyoutei Academy's Keigo Atobe. You can see the first poster for it below.
Titled The Prince of Tennis BEST GAMES!! Tezuka vs. Atobe, the new OVA special will feature voice actors Junichi Suwabe and Ryotaro Okiayu returning for their respective roles along with singing the opening theme, "Eien." This special will have a brief screening in Japan on August 24, with it being available to purchase on Blu-ray and DVD in October.
This is the first OVA special in the BEST GAMES!! series which retells some of the series' best matches. Keiichiro Kawaguchi will be directing the project for M.S.C., 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.
For those unfamiliar with The Prince of Tennis, the series was originally created by Takeshi Konomi. 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.
A sequel series, New Prince of Tennis takes place after the events of the original series where Ryoma returns to Japan and takes part in the Japanese Under 17 High School Representatives Selection Camp against 50 other players. The series was first published in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump and ran from 1999 to 2008. The series was 379 chapters long, and collected into 42 volumes. Viz Media has licensed the series for an English language release and has sold over 40 million copies in Japan.
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.
