Inuyasha
The half-demon with the dog ears, the schoolgirl who fell down a well into 1546, and the jewel shards they chased for 167 episodes. Inuyasha premiered on Adult Swim on August 31, 2002, and ran there through 2006, the gateway anime for a generation of American teenagers up late on Saturday nights.
Rumiko Takahashi's manga ran in Weekly Shōnen Sunday from November 13, 1996, to June 18, 2008, 558 chapters across 56 volumes, won the Shogakukan Manga Award in 2002, and had more than 50 million copies in circulation by 2020. The premise: Kagome Higurashi, a fifteen-year-old from modern Tokyo, falls into the Bone-Eater's Well on her birthday and lands in the Sengoku period, in 1546, where she accidentally shatters the Shikon Jewel into shards that scatter across Japan. Collecting them means traveling with Inuyasha, the half-demon who had betrayed and been betrayed by the priestess Kikyo fifty years earlier, alongside Miroku, Sango, and Shippō, with Inuyasha's older half-brother Sesshomaru and the spider half-demon Naraku in their way.
Sunrise's anime ran 167 episodes on Yomiuri TV and Nippon TV from October 16, 2000, to September 13, 2004, opening with V6's "Change the World." Viz Media licensed the English dub, with Richard Ian Cox as Inuyasha, Moneca Stori as Kagome, Kirby Morrow as Miroku, Kelly Sheridan as Sango, and David Kaye as Sesshomaru, and Adult Swim premiered it August 31, 2002, six months after launching its Saturday-night anime block. New episodes ran through October 27, 2006, reruns continued to 2014 with a Toonami stint from 2012 to 2014, and in Canada it aired on YTV from 2003 to 2006.
It sold. English DVDs had passed a million copies by November 2004, Viz had moved more than two million home-video units by 2016, and ICv2 named it anime Property of the Year in both 2004 and 2005. Four films arrived each December from 2001 to 2004 and earned more than $20 million combined in Japan. The real ending waited: Inuyasha: The Final Act, 26 episodes covering the manga's last volumes, aired in Japan from October 2009 to March 2010 and reached Toonami in November 2014, and the sequel Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon premiered in October 2020.
Similar items
![Video thumbnail — [Adult Swim] 2001 Pool Bumps](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hoWcIE8VRMI/hqdefault.jpg)
Adult Swim
Cartoon Network's late-night block launched in 2001 as a joke about pool rules — and became a proving ground for surreal, irreverent animation that refused to fit anywhere else. Deadpan bumpers over footage of elderly swimmers announced shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Harvey Birdman to an audience that had grown up with the network and wasn't ready to turn in.
Toonami
Cartoon Network's action block where a generation of American kids met anime. Hosted first by Moltar, then by TOM — the robot captain of the Absolution — it made Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon after-school rituals and treated its young audience like the stories mattered.
Naruto
A young ninja in an orange jumpsuit, ostracized by his village, dreams of becoming Hokage. Naruto Uzumaki's long-running shonen saga about friendship and determination became the hook that pulled American kids into anime culture.
Dragon Ball Z
The after-school anime that taught a generation of American kids the words "Super Saiyan." Adapted from Akira Toriyama's manga and animated by Toei, Dragon Ball Z turned multi-episode power-ups, screaming energy charges, and glowing gold hair into appointment television — most of all on Cartoon Network's Toonami block.