Bleach Revisited

During my college years and for some time afterwards there was an anime I used to watch called Bleach. I stopped watching Bleach when I stopped paying for cable TV several years ago, but last week I opened up Netflix and saw that the first three seasons of Bleach were available for streaming (full disclosure: it was the English dub version of Bleach). Feeling a little nostalgic, I watched a few segments of episodes and two or three full episodes before going to bed, but revisiting Bleach also got me thinking about the show in general. In those episodes I was reminded both of what I loved and hated about Bleach. The show has some great action sequences, characters with interesting stories, and its first season has what might be my favorite opening theme in any anime series that I’ve watched, but it suffers many of the same problems afflicting other anime with an outrageous number of episodes, namely filler material and what I refer to as DBZ Syndrome. Not all of the humor works either, but that’s probably just cultural differences between Japanese and Western-style comedy. Still, even with these issues it was nice to spend an hour watching Bleach again for the first time in years and I went to bed feeling it had been time well spent.