Evangelion Is Coming to the Criterion Channel. Here Is What 1995 Looks Like on Our Free Shelf

The Criterion Channel is adding the Neon Genesis Evangelion television anime and the films Evangelion: Death (True)² and The End of Evangelion on September 1. GKIDS licensed the 1995 TV anime and both of those films, according to Anime News Network.

A 1995 television series arriving on the Criterion Channel is a fair prompt for a question we can answer with our own data: what does 1995 look like when you count only anime that is free and legal to watch? On ours, it looks thin, and it starts with Evangelion itself.

Evangelion holds no free episodes here

We index 13 Evangelion entries. Twelve of them hold zero episode rows of any kind. That includes the 1995 TV series, Death & Rebirth, The End of Evangelion, and all four Rebuild films. There is nothing on those pages for a reader to press play on.

The thirteenth entry is the listing for the Evangelion 30th Anniversary Special Screening, and it holds exactly one row: an 866-second video, or 14 minutes and 26 seconds, posted on khara inc.'s own channel, @khara_official. The video is in Japanese. Its only caption track is machine-generated Japanese, with no English caption track. It is not an episode of the series.

1995 is close to bare on a free catalogue

Widening the question does not improve the picture. We index 133 entries carrying a 1995 season year. Four of them hold at least one free episode a viewer in the United States can play. Of those four, exactly one is a complete television run.

The surrounding decade is not much fuller. Across the 1,457 entries we index from 1990 through 1999, twenty-four hold at least one US-reachable free episode, and nine of those twenty-four are complete runs. Anyone treating a free catalogue as a route into the era should expect gaps rather than a shelf.

The 1995 run you can watch end to end

That single complete 1995 run is Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, with 49 of 49 episodes free to watch. The episodes come from GUNDAM CHANNEL INTL, the @GundamInfo channel, and the region field on them is unrestricted. The audio is Japanese, carried by an authored English subtitle track, and we confirmed that track at three points spread across the run. Individual episodes run roughly 1,437 to 1,467 seconds.

We re-checked all 49 video IDs today. That pass returned no fetch failures, no numbering mismatches, and no duplicate episode identities, which is the state you want before telling somebody to start a 49-episode show.

So the honest summary is a split one. The Evangelion news is not something our catalogue can act on, and 1995 here is four entries with any US-reachable free episode at all. But one of those five is whole, subtitled, and playable from the United States today, and it happens to be 49 episodes long.