'Yu-Gi-Oh!' Twitch Channel Adds 'Bonds Beyond Time' Movie & '5D’s' Series
Get your watch on in hyperdrive for the King of Games
Just a few weeks ago, an official, continuously running Yu-Gi-Oh! Twitch channel launched for its various anime series. It comes from Konami, the current franchise owners, and Cinedigm, who have had the home media rights since 2013. The channel started with three seasons of Duel Monsters and the first season of GX, which run through the reflections on the Battle City Tournament and Zane’s graduation duel. It was only in the last week+ (I think) that it was then expanded to the full five seasons of Duel Monsters and three dubbed seasons of GX. It was about 6 PM Eastern Sunday night as ~1500+ people watched the another GX cycle reach its frankly awkward end and then were met by a very pleasant surprise.
Duel Monsters’s very opening narration was starting up again, but it quickly switched to the logos that open Yu-Gi-Oh! Bonds Beyond Time, the 2009 “film” that brought the three series protagonists together, Duel Monsters’s Yugi Moto, GX’s Jaden Yuki, and 5D’s’s Yusei Fudo, to stop a time traveler intent on destroying Duel Monsters in a way that would massively screw up the timeline. Promptly, the channel revealed that 5D’s would make its channel premiere immediately after, and Bonds Beyond Time is basically the length of a two-part special, not a three or four so 5D’s quickly began.
The incorporation of Bonds Beyond Time was surprising, as to this point, the two other movies had yet to get the same treatment. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie had never played between seasons 3 and 4 of the original series, and Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions had never played after the original series finale and the GX premiere. Yu-Gi-Oh 5D’s is infamous for setting its Duel Monsters matches on motorcycles in the futuristic New Domino City, which has an oppressive class system. The series features Synchro Monsters, and A new dueling method featuring motorcycle-like vehicles called Duel Runners where Turbo Duels are held. Here, five “Signers” are embodied with a mark of one of the legendary Five Dragons who serve an ancient deity called the Crimson Dragon, engage in conflict with the Dark Signers, and the Three Emperors of Iliaster. They will reveal the dragons’ secret and the legends of the “People of the Stars”. Like with GX, which didn’t have its fourth season dubbed purportedly to get 5D’s going, watching the dub of 5D’s is an incomplete experience, as only half of the final 62 episodes were actually dubbed. The closing 18 were left undubbed. Still, that’s 123 of 154 episodes to add to the rotation, amounting to nearly 42 hours with Bonds of Time.
To Cinedigm’s credit, the entire Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise is very well distributed in terms of streaming. The Pluto channel tends to air blocks of episodes of each series together in marathon form. Unlike with Pokémon, whose Pluto channel is formatted much like Yu-Gi-Oh!’s Twitch, the latter keeps all of its series, or at least most of them together. Whether it’s Tubi, Prime Video (where GX is still technically under Freevee), Hulu or Disney+, the series and movies all tend to be together. The latest series to be dubbed, Sevens, is exclusive to the Hulu-Disney+ ecosystem under Disney XD branding. The current anime in Japan is Yu-Gi-Oh! Go Rush!! which has aired 137 episodes since April 2022. The dub fell behind by entire series a long time ago. Sure, Pokémon Horizons is 30+ episodes behind Japan due to the Netflix release model they chose, but at least it’s the same track being ridden.
