The landscape of anime streaming has grown prodigiously over the last 20 years. Where anime was once only available outside of Japan through swapped Betamax and bootlegged VHS tapes at niche conventions and backrooms, it has now skyrocketed into home video and streaming on demand. For the right money (or even in some cases FREE), you can get it dang near anywhere and stream it on dang near anything. While quite a few anime fans might be able to navigate the anime digital divide with aplomb, for some fans, especially those new to the genre, it can be confusing to figure out how best to consume the media. Some services offer a vast catalog of selections, while some are geared to specific niches, and even more offer anime merely as an afterthought, throwing some random shows on their service to check a box.

While you could opt to make like Ash and catch ’em all, and if you’re able to do so, more power to ya, if, instead, you are more fiscally cautious, allow me, your Cajun Samurai Uncle Josh, to give you a detailed (read: Long Winded) profile of some of the more major services in the series I’m calling “Samurai’s Streaming Survey”. We’ll be looking at some of the major and minor streaming services that provide anime, giving you a breakdown of their history and going in-depth to see what makes them tick, how much they cost, and if it’s worth investing in.

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For our third post, we’re going to be looking at a boutique anime streaming service. A service that offers something for those who want to know the history of some of their favorite shows, or for those Oldtaku who want to relive the old glory days…all for five bucks a month: RetroCrush

Service Overview:

If Crunchyroll is the Walmart of anime streaming services, and HIDIVE is the Fresh Market of anime streaming services, then where does that put our young upstart RetroCrush? It has to be the Goodwill of anime streaming. While that might not sound very appealing to some, unless you have a propensity for thrifting and woodgrain, Goodwill is full of old and formerly loved items ready and waiting for someone to discover them, all for a handsome price. A branch of media company Cineverse, which specializes in…well… specialty streaming services and apps, RetroCrush’s claim to fame is being a home for older anime shows and movies, as well as some shows that don’t have a home anywhere else and would typically fall into the ether. You don’t come here to see if Alma-Chan learns more about humanity, or a questionable relationship between a girl and a beastfolk dog. You come to RetroCrush to watch the adventures of a young mechanical boy, the good ship Nautlius and Captain Nemo, a Great Teacher, and a particularly infamous anime about ghosts at school with an even more infamous English dub.

Though RetroCrush’s catalog is one of the smallest in the industry today, the shows that it does have are fan favorites that will no doubt tickle the fancies of Oldtaku looking for a trip back in time to “the good old days” and Newtaku who wanna find out the history of their new addiction alike. And with a relatively clean record and no major outages or scandals, RetroCrush offers users a more fan-centric experience at a pocket-friendly price.

Site Layout:

Like its competitors, RetroCrush opts for a Netflix-esque sliding layout on its landing page, using the customary sliding panels. Semes like this are the standard for all streaming services nowadays. We also get a big area at the top of the page where different top-level shows get a moment to shine. The site also features quite a few front-page categories like “Anime For Baddies”, “After School Anime”, “Cozy Anime”, “Palate Cleansers”, and “Watch Every Episode Trust Me”. I’m not sure who exactly “me” is, but hey, if you wanna trust them, then you have that option. Up at the top, you have easy access to the “Live TV” option, Movies, Shows, Genres, and Watchlists. While I’m still not a fan of the small horizontal icons —they seem bigger than the ones on HIDIVE —and they use the official vertical ones as you scroll through different sections. I do like that, even though we have a mostly black website, there’s also a lot of color here. The site feels inviting to scroll through.

There is one proverbial fly in the proverbial ointment, however. Much like HIDIVE, RetroCrush insists on using two different entries for subbed and dubbed anime. But for some of the shows, there is NO WAY to tell which is subbed or dubbed on the menus until you actually click them, or are on a category entry that explicitly annotates SUB or DUB. Admittedly, some have little notations on the art that say “Original Japanese” or “Dubbed Version”, but not all of them do.

Here’s an example. Here we see Hayao Miyazaki’s first directorial project, Future Boy Conan, one of RetroCrush’s headline series that they recently acquired. Which one is the Dub? Which one is the Sub? Take a minute. Take an hour…take a DAY. Give up? It’s then one on the RIGHT.

Let’s check out one more: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. Okay… so we have similar icons again… no way to tell which is which… let’s click on it here and… yeah… unless Yoshino Takamori traveled from Japan to the US and learned fluent English, I don’t think they’re in this English dub. It’s the other one.

You get my point? We shouldn’t have to click around and play a hearty game of Blue’s Clues to figure out if I’m watching a sub or a dub. And for those who do have the mark, it’s so subtile it would be easy to miss. Either clearly mark subbed or dubbed anime on the series poster for all dual language shows, integrate both shows into one entry, and mark which is (DUB) or (SUB), or give us the option to select the language on the player. It shouldn’t be that hard, guys. Other than that, RetroCrush presents its product very nicely—better than HIDIVE, but it could use a polish.

Service Offerings:

Looking for the latest shows and movies from Japan? Well, you ain’t finding that here. Not at all. What you’re getting here is old school anime, my friends. Shows and movies from the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the early 2000s of various genres. While the catalog isn’t massive (Between 160 and 170 at last count) RetroCrush offers a historical look at the world of anime, giving samples of what was hot and awesome at the time, and in many cases acting as the sole place to stream these old and often forgotten shows and movies like Kimagure Orange Road, Cromartie High School, Gravitation, Project A-KO, and Barefoot Gen along with it’s sequel movie. Truth be told, this is one of the few places I know of where you can find the 1983 movie about the bombing of Hiroshima and its follow-up. Speaking of barefoot, this is the only place where you can stream the aforementioned Future Boy Conan absolutely free.

In addition to anime, RetroCrush also offers live-action films and documentaries. Heck, even as I write this, I discovered a documentary about Hideaki Anno’s work on the last couple of Evangelion movies. I’ll have to check this out later on…Maybe I can get an idea of what, in the name of all that is good and holy, went on in this man’s head when he made this movie series. I tend to subscribe to Amanda Winn-Lee’s theory that Anno was not breastfed as a child. But I digress…

Presentation:

What you see is what you get. Old school anime and a few (somewhat) recent titles. No Simulcasts here. No Dubcasts either. You get the show as it was broadcast in Japan all those many years ago, or, in some cases, as it was released on DVD all those many years ago. Since these shows are sourced from across the digital divide, from multiple sources and former licensors, there’s little to no uniformity in subtitles. Some are small white font, and others are that old, familiar, larger yellow font that old ADV fans will instantly recognize. As this platform doesn’t specialize in Simulcasting, users should have no problem getting in to watch their heart’s desire. RetroCrush’s servers stay humming and open to all with no reported downtimes or notable outages. The player is very nice with options to turn on Closed Captioning for the English Dubs and access rudimentary information about the cast and production staff. Visually, the shows look like the product of their respective times and available media. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of these shows were transferred from their original VHS tapes. Thankfully, the shows I’ve seen look good. There are some shows, like Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Future Boy Conan, that look crystal clear. It should be noted that both of these shows recently received Blu-Ray releases and upscaling, and I would imagine RetroCrush had the chance to use the new masters. Props to them if that’s the case.

The “Live TV” option, available to everyone with or without a subscription, offers a simplified anime viewing experience. You just click and watch pre-scheduled shows with commercials just as if you were watching a regular TV channel. There is a scrollable schedule grid at the bottom which shows what’s coming up, and what’s already aired. While you can’t rewind or fast-forward, you can PAUSE the stream and resume where you left off within that time block. An excellent idea for those days when you just wanna let the shows come to you instead of going to the shows, and it also serves as a great way to preview some of the offerings without committing to an account or a subscription. However, it should be noted that if you’re watching shows that have a high swearing content (like the English Dub of Ghost Stories, which gets notoriously R-rated in the last couple of episodes), certain words are bleeped out just as if they were on network TV.

In short, while the layout is inconvenient, it still offers the option for those who want to watch Subs or enjoy dubbed anime. Because, as I’ve said COUNTLESS times before…the existence of Dubbed Anime does not cause the subtitled iteration to somehow disappear in the ether. You can enjoy anime as you wish in whatever language you want.

Subscription Prices and Features:

Okay, now things get interesting in the Samurai Streaming Survey! Unlike Crunchyroll or HIDIVE, RetroCrush offers a FREE option for viewing. However, this free option only gives you access to SOME of the series in the library and to the “Live TV” option. All of them are ad-supported…meaning you’ll be watching a commercial or three. Shows and movies included in the paid subscription plan have a small yellow crown icon on their posters. Much like HIDIVE, RetroCrush offers only one premium subscription option, billed monthly ($4.99) or yearly ($49.99). This gives you access to the full library, with occasional promos at the beginning of shows or movies. Honestly, that’s a very fair price considering the cost of the other platforms and what you get for the money, and I don’t mind a quick promo for the service at the beginning.

Samurai Suggestion:

So, with all that, should you subscribe to RetroCrush? Well, I would say yes! You really can’t beat $4.99 per month for some of the best old-school anime, all in one place at your fingertips, and this makes a great accompaniment to a Simulcast streaming service like Netflix or Crunchyroll.

Even if you don’t want to spend the money, the free ad-supported shows and movies plus the “Live TV” option make RetroCrush a site to keep bookmarked in your browser, and an app to keep loaded on your smart device. For me and my house, five bucks a month is a small price to pay to enjoy a commercial-free journey back to a simpler time in anime history, when the lines were drawn a little freehanded, the dubs were a little rougher, and the stories were a lot more unique. RetroCrush offers viewers a chance to see what anime was like before it became ANIME, and it does it dang-near prodigiously.

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And that’s it for the third entry in the “Samurai Streaming Survey” Series! Next time, we’re gonna get a little…frisky. A little…spicy, some might say. We’ve gone to Walmart, Fresh Market, and Goodwill…now it’s time to head further into the anime streaming shopping center and go into that store our moms didn’t want us to—the Spencer’s Gifts of anime streaming…OceanVeil.

See you then!