Slayers Universe OMG! Slayers 4th TV series is official!

The official site is live for the 4th TV series, Slayers Revolution! This was the new Slayers series announced last month in the ever popular Dragon Magazine.

http://www.starchild.co.jp/special/slayers_revolution/

The director and character deisgner, as well as the animators at J.C. Staff from the previous three TV series are back, as well as the original voice cast of Lina, Gourry, Zelgadis, and Amelia.

Needless to say, I am psyched. Slayers is still one of my all time favorite anime titles and I've been hoping to see some more since that last scrap we were tossed 7 years ago. Wow, has it been 7 years since Premium already?

 

dude! this is great news!

which actually gives me time to catch up to the 2nd and 3rd series

 

A great site to keep tabs on every scrap of information regarding the new series is here:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/QPHOUSE/s-again.html

Apparently hints were dropped for the fourth series as early as January this year... as always, I'm behind on hearing about things.

What I've learned so far:
-The story has been described as "anime exclusive". This is a bit of a personal bummer, as I was hoping it would use plot from the thus-far unanimated light novels (9-15). Slayers Try (the third series) was the weakest of the three in my opinion, and was entirely new material as well. But as a Slayers fanatic, I'll take what I can get!
-The series will consist of two 13-episode seasons, each with its own story arc.
-There will be a new character
-It appears there have been talks about a new Slayers projects for years, but nothing concrete was put into motion due to Megumi's inability to take on the Lina role with her busy schedule. It has now become possible with her daughter beginning kindergarten this Spring. She and Gourry's actor apparently had some terrible conflicts as well, with Yasunori saddled with a role for Sazae-san when Megumi was free, and then herself recording for Pocket Monsters when he was later free. Even now, it looks like the latest Hello Kitty might need scheduling adjustments to make room for Lina Inverse.
-A bit off-topic, but I found the transliterated transcript from memory of Megumi's recollection of recording both Rei (Evangelion) and Lina (Slayers) at the same time interesting: "At that time, one day I went to the studio to work for Evangelion, and on another day, I did a job for Slayers. The job for Slayers made me happy and optimistic, besides the job for Evangelion made me blue. Eva pulled a half of my body, and Slayers pulled another half of my body, too. And I myself stood in the middle but tottered from right or left. I remembered my feelings at that time." Megumi turned 41 this past March 30, by the by.
-The original set of 15 novels are being re-released with new cover art. An edit was made to the 1st volume so far. In Kanzaka's words, "The text in each books are the same, but there is only one part which I revised. It's in the first book. There was a scene in which Lina cast a Fireball spell at a pure Mazoku, and this was a contradiction. I revised the scene. And I wrote new afterwords."
-There are plans for the release of a new compilation audio album of Slayers.
-The next issue of Dragon magazine (the July edition, which will be out in May) will have much more detail about the series.

 

Hmmm, more Lina and...by hope...Naga? Awesome!

 

New information and corrections (again gathered from QP's site linked above):
-While Revolution is considered "anime-exclusive", the story will be based on unused canon material from the novels. (Yay!)

-The first episode is planned to be tailored to introduce the world and characters to those who are unfamiliar with Slayers (It's been ten years since the last TV series ended after all - it's sad, but probably true that many viewers of today aren't familiar with it), but at the same time still be entertaining for the hardcore fans.

-Megumi will once again sing the opening theme

-According to Dragon Age Magazine, the Slayers Revolution anime starts in July!

-The audio CD compilation mentioned above will be titled "Slayers Megamix" and will consist entirely of Megumi songs

 

Oh man, is Megumi still doing seiyuu work? Man, I haven't heard her stuff in a very long while!

...Who's going to do Lina!?

 

Megumi, 'natch. It's confirmed (listed and linked in post #1 of this thread).

...I wouldn't hold your breath on Naga, though.

 

Reading > Me.

 

Information summary update from QP's site (again, linked above)!

-Xellos is now confirmed as an appearing character (it was not official before)
-The Revolution manga has begun appearing in Dragon Age. QP has a workable summary here/
-On May 24th, an expansion for the existing card game "Project Revolution" will be released, featuring the new Slayers series. It was earlier opinionated that the season's title was specifically chosen because of the easy marketing tie-in with the game. Project Revolutions website is here.
-The opening song (with the now-known title of "Plenty of Grit") will be released a single on July 23rd. The ending song is simply titled "Revolution". Masami Okui returns, and performs the chorus of the opening.

 

Excited over my second favorite anime of all time getting another series? Naw, never.

July seems such an awful way off...

Edit (to add a small bit of info): Official first episode air date is July 2nd at 25:20 ( in other words, 1:20am on July 3rd) on TV Tokyo.

 

Some new interesting tidbits from QP:
-The new character previously mentioned is "Pocota", the small animal that appeared in the recent Manga teaser. It knew the incantation fro Dragon Slave, and also held something in resemblance to Gorunova, the sword of light.
-Zuuma, the assassin from original novels will make his anime debut in Revolution. There is a high possibility it will also feature his origin story, which was realized by Kanzaka but never published due to it feeling out of place (The Slayers novels are all written in first person from Lina's perspective, and Zuuma isn't the kind of character who would just recite his life story to her). Kanzaka mentioned handing over this origin story to the anime team in the new afterward in the newly republished 3rd novel.

 

Episode 1 has aired, and now guess who's salivating for the fansub release?

Until then, here's the new series opening and ending sequences!

OP - Plenty of Grit
[youtube]X3P-2DLm-_s[/youtube]

ED
[youtube]m-bF_4SIeks[/youtube]

 

On that note, "Slayers Evolution-R" started up earlier this week. It's basically the second half of the plot that started with Revolution and currently set to run until early April.

Zuuma was by far the highlight of Revolution for me, and I'm stoked to see more of him in action. We're also waiting for the revelation of whatever it is Xelloss is up to this time around.

 

This series has been licensed by FUNimation. The digital episodes are supposed to be available sometime this year, with the full DVD collection (All 26 episodes, so Revolution and Evolution-R) releasing in 2010. If I'm following this correctly, they're going straight to the box set format, which is more than welcome.

The original english cast of four (Ortiz,Freeman,Taylor, and Stuart) are on board for the dub. Still unknown if they've got David Moo back for Xellos. This is good news, since it means I can run crazy weekend marathons 104 episodes long in BOTH english and Japanese if I preferred without any jarring voice changes.

And yes, that would mean about 40 hours of straight Slayers. Your head asplode!