Toei Animation Tried To Cancel Its Yu-Gi-Oh! Anime, So Weekly Shonen Jump Threatened To Pull Its Dragon Ball License

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.