Kochikame turns 50, and twelve episodes of the anime are free here

A new one-shot of the Kochikame manga has been drawn to mark the title's 50th anniversary, as reported by Anime News Network. The manga finished its run in 2016. The anime shelf here is short, and it is worth saying exactly how short.

Twelve episodes, then a stop

Our index holds KochiKame, the television series that first aired in 1996, with 344 episodes recorded against it and tags for Comedy and Slice of Life. The live page on animesphere.app states that free episodes end at 12, and that episodes 13 to 344 are streaming on YouTube. A reader in Canada or the United States can play episodes 1 through 12 without paying, and then the free run is over. Why it stops at twelve is not something our data tells us, so we will not speculate.

All twelve come from one channel, "It's Anime powered by REMOW", which does not carry a YouTube verified badge. Each of the twelve was checked today against the upload it points at. Twelve of twelve resolved, with no fetch failures. The upload titles run from "Full Episode 01" to "Full Episode 12", and every one matches the episode number we store. There are no duplicate episode identities in the set, and no case of a single video being filed against two separate episodes.

Japanese audio, English subtitles

All twelve upload titles carry an English subtitle label of their own. The watch pages for episodes 1, 6 and 12 each report an authored English subtitle track alongside an automatic Japanese caption track. That combination means Japanese audio with real English subtitles. It is not an English dub. Each of those three episodes runs 1,551 seconds against a recorded episode length of 26 minutes, so these are full episodes rather than clips.

A twelve that is the whole show

The same channel carries a title whose free run reaches the end. True Cooking Master Boy is free here at 12 of 12 episodes, and 12 is the complete series. Its live page reads "Watch True Cooking Master Boy Free Online" and carries no prompt about free episodes running out, measured against a recorded total of 12.

The check today came back the same way: twelve of twelve resolved, no fetch failures, upload titles "S1:E1" through "S1:E12" matching our stored numbers exactly, no duplicate episode identities, and no ambiguous mapping between a video and an episode. All twelve of those titles carry an English subtitle label as well, and the one watch page we opened, for episode 12, reports the same pairing of an authored English track and an automatic Japanese caption track. That episode runs 1,448 seconds, and the country allow-list is Canada and the United States.

Twelve episodes of KochiKame is a small part of the 344 we have recorded against it. Twelve episodes of True Cooking Master Boy is the series.