Good news for US fans of the original 4 Saint Seiya anime OVAs

For U.S. fans of the classic shonen anime Saint Seiya, finding legal ways to watch all the content available is not as easy as it is for other countries where the series is more popular.

While in the US Netflix is currently streaming the original TV series with both English subtitles and dub, the Lost Canvas spinoff, and even their original CG series adaptation of the manga by Masami Kurumada, they never uploaded the original four OVAs that were part of the classic series’ original run.

But this is where RetroCrush comes in.

RetroCrush is one of the newer digital streaming services available to the United States and Canada. They’re devoted to streaming classic anime TV and movies focus on classic anime from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. While the initial version was (and still is) “freemium” (as in ad-supported), and they recently introduced a premium version. They have apps on iTunes, Google Play, Apple TV, Android TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV, and through their website for PC users.

They’ve uploaded clips the original video animations over the last week to their YouTube channel.

As of this moment, they have only English subtitles, and it doesn’t seem to be any plan to have them dubbed. IMHO Netflix’s English dub wasn’t terrible, in fact it was pretty decent, so I’d like to see the movies and OVAs eventually dubbed just because we can. It would also be nice to have the option for, let’s say, the Mexican Spanish dub.

Saint Seiya follows the adventures of a group of warriors trained in the arts of combat to protect the reincarnated goddess Athena. It’s one of those underrated classic shonen series that had its ups and downs, but was a lot of fun to watch. It’s too bad the Americanized version known as “Knights of the Zodiac” shown many years ago on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block was horribly botched, to the point of being unwatchable, and cancelled way too soon.

As a side note, it’s too bad the pandemic ruined the sale of the Saint Seiya Funko Pop figurines. When they finally showed up, scalpers bought all they could to resell at ridiculous prices.

Now, I’m not completely sure all of them have been released in the US, but going by the prices at some some stores, I think they were supposed to be like $10 each, but now they go for no less than $15 to $30 each at some retailers like Amazon. The entire set of 6 (including Seiya with the Sagittarius cloth) costs no less than $100 on eBay, which is a little steep at this time.