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The Anime Credits Thread - The OP-ED Section

Johnny Unusual

(He/Him)
OK, dorks, post some anime openings and endings here. I will probably start a thread for general TV openings and endings too, but I want this gallery to be its own thing.

Where to start.

There is no bad Jojo opening or ending, but they never topped Great Days.


Obviously, there's the "alt-version" switch in the penultimate arc, but one of the things I love is all the clever touches, like dead characters hanging out in heaven, or the Jojo heart that was destroyed in the previous intro being restored by Josuke.
 

q 3

here to eat fish and erase the universe
(they/them)

The world was not ready for Gal & Dino.
 
Gundam Build Divers Re:Rise is the best Gundam show in years, maybe decades. And it has some banger OP/EDs that put the show in good company along with the rest of the Gundam pantheon's illustrious history of amazing OPs/EDs. Season 2's songs really know how to get me going.

OP2: "Hatena" by Penguin Research - classic hot blooded, upbeat, fun, action Gundam opening.


ED2: "Twinkle" by Spira Spica - I just really like the song and how it ties in with the visuals for this one. It's kind of a perfect little encapsulation of the main character's growth arc through the show distilled into a mildly abstract, 1.5min video. There's just something kinda perfect about Hiroto barely limping along, and then when the chorus hits he breaks into a sprint.


Mild rant incomming: I hate YouTube. I think anyone contributing to this thread and its predecessor knows and shares my frustrations -- trying to find anime openings and endings that aren't slightly off pitch, or slightly sped up, or have the video/audio compressed to hell and back, or is covered in watermarks in order to avoid Google's antipiracy algorithms. And their search algorithm is just abysmal when the first few pages of hits are always some kid playing an instrumental version of an anime song on their keyboard, versus finding a properly licensed video off of Crunchyroll or Funimation when available. It's the worst. I wish I could embed webms here, because there's a neat little repository for OPs/EDs that I've taken a liking to recently: AnimeThemes.moe

They don't have everything, but they keep up to date with everything new, and constantly update older shows, as well as uploading better versions of the same videos once higher resolution/quality versions come out (e.g. Blu-Ray). So compare the videos above, with how they look here, and it's night and day:

OP2: "Hatena"

ED2: "Twinkle"

Isn't it nice to see remuxed video from the source instead of whatever obscene compression YT lays down? This site is also incredibly thorough too. They'll upload multiple versions of the same OP for easy differentiation and tell you which episodes they showed up in, whenever there's slight edits or whatnot. So a few posts ago Johnny posted OP4v1 for JoJo Part 4; you can find v2 and v3 just a few clicks away. Or for shows like say, "Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096" - distinct from the OVA version of Unicorn and really hard to find differentiating videos for on youtube - it's really easy to find say, OP2 "RE:I AM" which only played for one episode. Or ED3 "bL∞dy f8 -eUC-"
 

Nich

stuck in baby prison
(he/him)
If it's time for this thread again, it's time for this OP again.


Can't wait for the Blu-rays to come out next month. It's about time this saw a rerelease.
 

Kishi

Little Waves
(They/Them)
Staff member
Moderator
The Lodoss War OPs are the best ever, but it is impossible for any decent upload of them to remain on YouTube for long.

Record of Lodoss War (1990 OVA) OP - "Adèsso e Fortuna ~Flames and Eternity~" (Akino Arai)
Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight (1998 TV) OP - "Ocean of Miracles" (Maaya Sakamoto)

Chronicles of the Heroic Knight infamously turns into a slide show at times, and the go-to joke is that they must have dropped their entire budget on that OP.

Second place goes to Ro-Ro-Ro-Roshian:


 

SpoonyBard

Threat Rhyme
(He/Him)
Still a stone cold classic.:

And this one remains one of my all-time favs:

Also pretend I linked, like, the first five or six One Piece openings, I don't want to spam the thread.
 

Daikaiju

Rated Ages 6+
(He, Him)
Slayers is always a win. First appearances of Lina's sister and the Lord Of Chaos in that OP

I'm fond of the Polar Bear Cafe opening
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Despite having become aware of so much great stuff in recent years, this is a topic where I do have a solid, absolute favourite, and it is this:


Dezaki!

Some other all-timers:

Legend of the Galactic Heroes (1988) ED - Hikari no Hashi wo koete
Treasure Island (1978) OP - Takarajima
Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon Sailor Stars (1996) OP - Sailor Stars Song
Mama wa Shōgaku 4 Nensei (1992) OP - Ai o PLUS ONE
Glass Mask (1984) OP - Glass no Kamen
Maison Ikkoku (1986) OP - Alone Again (Naturally)
Anne of Green Gables (1979) OP - Kikoeru Kashira
Princess Nine (1998) OP - Princess Nine (the sound effects are essential)
Ashita no Nadja (2003) OP - Nadja!!

Thanks for bringing up this archive, Wisteria--video quality concerns are one thing, but in the last iteration of this thread a bunch of my links eventually fell victim to TMS in particular. This seems like a good repository to lean on in those cases.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
I see your Dirty Pair opening and raise you a Dirty Pair OAV opening.


Seriously, this aesthetic and art style are just manna for me. I haven't delved too deep into 80s movies or shows similar to DP, but if there's any more "abstract sci-fi vaporware visuals" animation out there, please send it this way.

Also, obligatory classic:


Fun fact: King Entertainment uploaded their own, official version just a few weeks ago. It may have credits, but it's just so crisp!

Also, obligatory modern:


And this one remains one of my all-time favs:

I vastly prefer Try's song, "Breeze", and the first season's "Get Along" may be the iconic original one, but yeah, "Give A Reason" is the fundamental Slayers OP.
 
Thanks for this. Its great.
If you think that's great, have I got a game for you.

It's called... wait for it.

Anime Music Quiz


This is the greatest weeb game of all time. It's a web game where you can play by yourself or with friends (it's a lot of fun with friends) where the website plays just the audio of an anime song (it can be the OP, the ED, an insert song, etc) from a random point in the song, and you have ~30 seconds to guess which show just based on the music which show/movie/ova/whatever it comes from. You typically play through several songs, and whoever guesses right the most wins. It's really simple. So if you hear "♪♪Cha-la, head cha-la♪♪" and type in "Dragon Ball Z" or "DBZ" you get a point! And if you hear "♪♪Ru-Ru-Ru-Ru-Russian, Russian♪♪" and type "Space Dandy" may god have mercy on your soul. After the guessing period, the game shows you the correct answer by replaying the song with the accompanying video. (Which is entirely skippable if it's an annoying song or has questionable visuals.)

The songs that come up are all completely adjustable. So if you want a challenge, you can have AMQ throw a bunch of random songs, or only insert songs, or only songs from anime from 1950-1970, etc. Or you can play filtering via genre tags. So you can tell AMQ to only play a random selection of openings from the "Mecha" genre, or maybe only shows that fit the "sci-fi" and "western" genre tags, or maybe exclude all shows with the "isekai" or "ecchi" tags. What I usually do though when I play, is quiz based only on shows I and/or my friends I'm playing with have seen. You can link your MyAnimeList accounts, or Anilist accounts to the game, and you can tell it to only pull shows from your lists, or say 50:50 from your lists and random other songs, etc. (I've got almost 1k entries on my MAL page, so playing with me always ends up with a diverse range of shows.)

It's a lot of fun to play with friends remotely via voice/video chat, especially in these COVID times. I bet some of you guys who hangout on the TT discord would have a blast playing it a few times. It might take a few mins to set up accounts, but once you get going it's a lot of fun. I highly recommend it. There's a whole bunch of different game modes now too, like one that's a time attack (fastest person to answer correctly gets more points than people who answer slowly) or another that's "battle royale" (all the players get dropped into a grid with anime titles scattered on the ground, and you have a set period of time to collect show names. And once the collecting period is over, the collected titles become the pool of songs. Every time you guess wrong and someone else guesses right, you lose a life. And the last one alive at the end wins.)

Even if you don't want to or can't play with friends, it's fun to play by yourself too. The website doesn't have everything, but it has a pretty broad selection of anime songs uploaded by the community. AMQ also scrapes AnimeThemes.moe as well for video mirrors. So there's plenty of old shows for you old heads out there too who don't keep up with the new seasonal stuff. I highly recommend it. At the very least, it can be a fun trip through memory lane for a while a couple of evenings. I probably should have made my own thread, but it felt pretty relevant to this thread too.
 

Kishi

Little Waves
(They/Them)
Staff member
Moderator
Seriously, this aesthetic and art style are just manna for me. I haven't delved too deep into 80s movies or shows similar to DP, but if there's any more "abstract sci-fi vaporware visuals" animation out there, please send it this way.

Urashiman (1983) springs to mind.


I know everyone's seen it, but it really is something else: Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) OP - "A Cruel Angel's Thesis" (Yōko Takahashi)

And a far less-seen Gainax classic: Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water (1990) OP - "Blue Water" (Miho Morikawa)

 

Yaara

the member formerly known as Alpha Werewolf
(She/Her)
Anime Music Quiz
I would Very Much like to get some AMQ going thru discord as well. Been playing that, and sporcles with my friends, for a while; Used to do sporcles with my flatmate and his gf a few years back actually.

As for OPs, well, since they haven't been posted here yet may I just bring up the audiovisual treat that is the Mob Psycho OPs:



My personal visual taste seems to be "if your op is grayscale with sparse use of colour I'll love it". This includes good shows like Noragami's second season's OP:


and also horrible generic weak-person-in-magic-academy-is-actually-strongest haremish stuff such as:


Although the strong brass in this one certainly helps. I actually liked it enough to cover it a few years back oops
 

Hilene

Loves "Friendly Girls"
(She/Her)



Listen, I really like Bookworm.


Speaking of the Build Divers Re:Rise second ending sequence, it reminds me just so much of the Asemu generation ending in Gundam Age.




Also, did you know that there's more to Area 88/UN Squadron then just a really rad shmup?


Now you do!



And now just for a collection of a few of my faves just off of the top of my head.







 

ThornGhost

lofi posts to relax/study to
(he/him)
OK nerds I'm gonna hold myself to three here.

I also recommend the full version/music video of this one but the OP is a great piece of work too


Let's also go with a bit of classic that manages to squeeze a musical drop out of a friggin harp


And we cannot forget the opening that helped to inspire a whole subgenre of music. RIP nujabes 4eva

 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
While I do enjoy most of the Ranma anime OPs, I'm far more partial to the ending themes:


"Friends", "Hinageshi", and "Positive" (6th, 7th, and 8th, respectively) are my favorites.

Ooooh, found a nice HD version of "Hinageshi."

 
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Erilex

hourglass figure
I really like the Kamisama Dolls opening. It doesn't have much in the way of actual animation, but it looks pretty stylish regardless (the song is very good also).


So is Kamisama Dolls any good? Dunno, I can barely remember anything that happened in it. It probably wasn't offensively bad.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Cool, but links are a very deliberate preference over embeds for me, as before and as now, especially as I tend to share these things en masse.
 
If you're gonna dump a big list, sure. But if you're just posting one or two videos or doing an effort post, an embed is best I think, since the convenience of seeing things right there instantly is going to entice more views IMO, but I could be wrong.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
The show itself may be... mediocre, especially as an adaptation, but its OPs (the ones that aren't lazy clipshows, at any rate) are quite spiffy:

 
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