What Happened to World Trigger's English Dub? | The Shelf

On June 23, 2014, Shueisha announced that an anime adaptation of Daisuke Ashihara’s manga, World Trigger, would be released in October. In August, that year’s 40th issue of Shonen Jump revealed the series’ main cast and its upcoming release date: October 5th. On December 14th, while the series was airing, people spotted something on Toei Animation Europe's website. The webpage revealed that Crunchyroll had acquired the rights to World Trigger, and 50 episodes would be available for streaming. An

d here’s where things start to get interesting. Based on the Crunchyroll announcement, it looks like World Trigger was originally going to run for only 50 episodes but it ended up with 73. On July 22, 2015, just a few days after episode 38 had aired, the World Trigger Summer Festival 2015 was held in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo. During the festival, they revealed that a new anime based on World Trigger would begin airing in October. This anime would feature an original story not found in the manga, an

d was given the working title of Fugitives From Another World. But several fans of the series weren’t buying it, or, at least, weren’t buying the way that this was being framed. Episode 38 adapted material from chapters 85 and 86 of the manga, and the latest chapter, 109, was released just a couple of days before the announcement on July 20, 2015. Daisuke Ashihara had already put the manga on hiatus twice that year due to health concerns, which came on the heels of two separate health related hi

atuses that he had in 2014. Since they were running low on source material, people suspected that this wasn’t a brand new series with an original story, but a filler arc to the already airing anime. This would turn out to be correct, and on October 11, 2015, episode 49 aired and marked the start of the Fugitive Arc, which would last until episode 63. Side Note: Although it’s not a part of the Fugitive Arc arc, episode 48, which aired on October 4, was filler as well. Jumping back to earlier in t

he year, Toei made a surprising announcement. On July 2, 2015, at Anime Expo, they invited people to come to their booth to watch the premiere of World Trigger’s English dub. They would screen the dub’s first three episodes, but didn’t have any plans to screen them, or any additional episodes, anywhere else. Also, Toei didn’t partner with anyone in order to produce the dub. Instead of licensing the series to companies like Cruncyroll or Funimation, they decided to handle the dub of the first six

or seven episodes themselves. Those who didn’t attend the expo would get a preview on August 19, when Toei released an English promo. Things went quiet until April 21 of the following year, when Toei revealed the English cast for the main characters. This is where things take another strange turn. Instead of releasing the series’ dub to any number of streaming platforms, it would be aired exclusively on cable television. It would air on Comcast’s Primo TV, a channel targeting bilingual spanish

speaking kids and teens, on January 16, 2017. If you’ve never heard of Primo TV, that’s not surprising because it’s not very widely distributed and available exclusively through Comcast. New episodes were released every weekday, with reruns airing on Saturdays and Sundays. This continued until episode 48, and the beginning of the filler arc, which was skipped in its entirety. And the series would resume at episode 64, before finishing its run on the network. But it wouldn’t stick around for very

long. Shortly after its run was finished, Primo TV stopped airing reruns of World Trigger. And since it wasn’t available anywhere else, there was no official way to watch the series' dub. For a long time, that was where things stood. Even after a second season was confirmed at the end of 2019, there was still no news about the English dub. Until, three years later, on February 11, 2020, Crunchyroll announced that they would be releasing the first 48 episodes of the English dub later that day. T

he article was later updated with additional information that confirmed what fans had suspected: dubs were only produced for episodes 1-48 and 64-73, leaving out the Fugitive Arc. Fans of the series would receive more exciting news later in the year. In September, at the Virtual Crunchyroll Expo, Crunchyroll announced that it would be partnering with Sentai Filmworks to produce home video releases. And one of the titles that they announced as a part of this agreement was World Trigger. The first

season would be released on Blu-ray the next year, on June 8, 2021, after the third season of World Trigger was announced in 2020. On October 8, 2021, at New York Comic Con, Toei Animation released two trailers. One was a new trailer for season three of World Trigger, and the other was a trailer for the English dub of season two. The Comic Con panel also announced that they expected the dub to be finished by the end of the year. And then the end of the year came, and nothing happened. While you

could watch the second and third seasons with subtitles on Crunchyroll, there was no news about the second season’s dub. The silence was broken on September 23, 2022, when Toei Animation released a video to their YouTube channel. This video announced that “A brand new dub for World Trigger 2nd & 3rd Season is coming soon to Digital. Stay tuned.” And here’s where things get weird again. A few days later, on September 27, Teoi announced that the new dubs would be available on digital platforms on

October 4th. On September 30, Toei released another clip from season two, and stated that the dub would be released on four digital storefronts: Amazon Prime, Hoopla, VUDU, and the Microsoft store. Then on October 4th, 2022, people were finally able to see the last two seasons of World Trigger dubbed, after all these years… but only the Microsoft Store and VUDU. Both seasons would eventually make their way onto Hoopla in 2023, but despite what they said previously, the new dub wasn’t–and still

hasn’t been–released on Amazon. If you don’t have access to Hoopla, the only official way to watch the series is to buy it from the two previously mentioned storefronts. Both VUDU and the Microsoft Store have divided each season into two parts, and have options to purchase the series in both standard and high definition. If you wanted to purchase both seasons in HD, it would cost you about $70. As of the publishing of this video, there’s been no news about another home video release, or an offic

ial announcement of a fourth season. However, if the series hasn’t taught World Trigger fans anything else, one trait that they would’ve learned out of necessity is patience.