On February 8th, animation studio TMS announced via their official English-language Twitter account that Case Closed had arrived on the streaming service TUBI with a brand-new English dub. They premiered 10 episodes on the service. One week later, on February 15th, another 10 episodes were added, bringing the total episode count to 20.

Case Closed, otherwise known as Detective Conan outside of the United States, is a manga series created by Gosho Aoyoma that has been serialized in the Japanese Weekly Shonen Sunday magazine since January 1994. To date, the series has been collected in 102 tankobon volumes. The plot of the series concerns Shinichi Kudo, a high schooler/detective who observes a shady deal orchestrated by members of the Black Organization. When he is discovered, Kudo is administered an experimental poison meant to kill him, but he manages to survive thanks to an unintended side effect – his body shrinks giving him the appearance of a 7-year old. Realizing he has to keep his identity a secret to protect those closest to him, Shinichi adopts the persona of Conan Edogawa, and assists in solving cases whenever he can. The series is essentially Japan’s answer to Murder, She Wrote; Columbo; Monk; or any popular mystery show. The series owes its broad appeal worldwide due to being a successful blend of both Eastern and Western sensibilities.

In 1996, an anime adaptation of the series began airing in Japan. There are close to 1100 episodes of this series, which is still ongoing. In 1997, the first Detective Conan movie, The Time Bombed Skyscraper, was released and began a film series with 25 further installments, essentially releasing a new film every year. The franchise is extremely popular in Japan and in various places around the world, such as Germany, where approximately half of the series has been dubbed into German, but the franchise has never really had a strong foothold in North America, especially the United States.

The American entertainment company Funimation brought the Detective Conan anime to the west in 2003. The series was renamed at the behest of the Japanese export marketers to Case Closed and numerous characters were renamed to reflect more American origins (For example, one of the lead characters, Kogoro Mouri, was renamed to Richard Moore). This Funimation dub originally aired on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim but was discontinued due to low ratings. Newly dubbed episodes were still released on home video through 2010. All in all, Funimation dubbed the first 130 half-hours of the series, as well as the first six films in the series.

Additionally, publishing company VIZ has been publishing the Case Closed manga since 2004, retaining the lead characters’ Americanized names. As of this writing, they have translated and published the first 85 volumes of the series. They publish four new volumes a year, with Volume 86 being released this coming April.

It wasn’t until 10 years had passed that we saw the release of any new Case Closed-related material in the English language. 2020 saw the Blu-ray release of the “Episode One” television special in North America, which originally aired back in 2016 on Japanese television. Bang Zoom Entertainment produced this English dub and has subsequently produced more dubs for five of the Case Closed films, specifically films 19-23. These dubs are more faithful to the original series, disregarding the Americanized names in favor of their original Japanese monikers.

This past week saw the release of twenty newly dubbed episodes of the Case Closed anime series, making this the first time episodes of the TV series have been dubbed into English in 13 years. Purportedly, Bang Zoom is handling this new dub with the same cast they use for the movies, but this is unverified at the moment. The episodes available do not continue from where Funimation left off in 2010, at episode 130. Rather, the episodes start at #965, from the show’s thirtieth season. This may seem like an arbitrary starting point for a new dub, but it was the first episode to air in the calendar year 2020. This seems like as good a place to start as any considering there are over 800 episodes to pick from. These historic, boundary-crossing episodes are free to watch on TUBI with limited ad-breaks throughout.

It is unclear at this point how many episodes of this newly dubbed iteration will go on for or even if they will continue to be released weekly. In fact, not much information is known about this new release at all. I can’t even confirm if this new dub is provided by Bang Zoom. It’s all up in the air right now and very exciting. As a fan of this franchise, I’m excited to see what happens next. Will new episodes be released indefinitely? Will they at any point fill in the backlog of episodes between 130 and 965 that have not seen an English-language dub? Will there be an eventual physical release on home video? Only time will tell.