It might be hard to believe now, but there was a time when Yu-Gi-Oh! wasn’t doing too well. When Kazuki Takahashi’s Yu-Gi-Oh! manga was first serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1996, readership was sizeable enough to earn itself an anime adaptation in 1998, but certainly nothing record-breaking.

And that 1998 anime, a 27-episode season produced by TV Asahi and Toei Animation, kinda bombed. I couldn’t find concrete viewership numbers, but things were apparently bad enough that Toei Animation cancelled the anime outright.

The thing is, while the anime wasn’t a hit in Japan, the manga had just started hitting its stride. In fact, readership was so good that Weekly Shonen Jump’s publisher, Shueisha, desperately wanted to greenlight a second season of the anime.

At least, that’s according to Yoshiro Kataoka, the production planner behind anime such as Hunter x Hunter and Gunslinger Girl. Kataoka recently sat down with Kaishi Professional University for a multi-part interview (translated by Otaku Mantra), during which he recalled the time when Kazuhiko Torishima, the editor-in-chief at Weekly Shonen Jump, outright threatened to revoke Toei Animation’s secondary usage rights for Dragon Ball in return for Toei holding Yu-Gi-Oh!’s anime rights hostage.

The funny thing is that, even though Toei Animation didn’t want to produce a second season of Yu-Gi-Oh! , it also didn’t want to hand the rights back so that another company could do so. Kataoka says that during a meeting in 1999, Toei made clear it had no intention of handing over the rights, prompting Torishima to pull out the big guns.

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