Fuji TV is turning its Saturday morning slot over to the fans. From October 4 at 9:00 a.m. Japan time (October 3, 7:00 p.m. EDT), the broadcaster will run favorite episodes pulled from the first four Digimon anime series, picked by viewers worldwide as part of the franchise’s 30th anniversary celebration.
That isn’t even the biggest development. On Saturday, the staff behind the Digimon anime confirmed that a new project is set to reach broadcast next year.
Specifics are scarce. That appears to be deliberate.
What we actually know
A new anime project. Broadcast next year. Those two lines are the entire announcement, which guarantees months of hot speculation with nothing concrete for anyone to push back on.
The current series, meanwhile, hasn’t wrapped. DIGIMON BEATBREAK, the franchise’s newest TV anime, opened its “Kyō Arc” with the show’s 38th episode on July 12, after premiering on Fuji TV and other channels on October 5. Crunchyroll carries it as it airs, and an English dub is streaming there as well.
Thirty years of pocket monsters that aren’t those pocket monsters
Count from the toys and the anniversary math works. The first Digital Monster digital pets reached shelves in 1997, with the anime arriving two years later in 1999 via Digimon Adventure.
Digimon Adventure 02 aired from 2000 through 2001. Digimon Frontier delivered 50 episodes in Japan between April 2002 and March 2003. Digimon Ghost Game, the last entry before BEATBREAK, debuted in October 2021 and closed out with its 68th episode in March 2023.
That’s a deep catalogue for a franchise most people still file under “the other one.”
The fan vote is the interesting part
It’s rare for a network to let the audience program a broadcast block. Fuji TV is doing precisely that with episodes drawn from the first four Digimon anime, and the outcome will double as a public record of what this fandom genuinely treasures after three decades.
The episodes that make the cut will say more about Digimon’s legacy than any anniversary press release could. The answers arrive October 4.