What is Digimon?
If you've found this place by accident, you may be wondering what exactly Digimon is. The Digimon franchise started back in 1997 with the introduction of Bandai's Digimon V-Pet (Virtual Pet). It was a small electronic device that allowed you to train and battle your digimon, creatures from another world, and link up to a friend's V-Pet to battle their own digimon.
As a brand, Digimon was invented by Akiyoshi Hongo, although it is rumoured that this is simply an alias for Bandai. After the giant success of he V-Pets, more merchandise was released, like video games such as the Wonderswan games or the Digimon World RPG series. Action figures and toys were also advertised along with the anime TV series produced by Toei Animation. Manga such as C'Mon Digimon and V-Tamer also proved popular among the Japanese taget audience, as well as the various incarnations of the card games, like Hyper Coliseum.
Arguably, the most successful branch of the franchise was the anime TV series, as after production it spread worldwide. It was created by the same company who had produced Sailor Moon and Dragonball Z. The first series, first aired in 1999 in Japan was called Digimon Adventure. It focused on a group of seven kids sucked into an alternate dimension called the Digital World, the origin of the digimon. There they met their digimon partners, powerful creatures who could digivolve, become stronger and defeat the growing threat in the Digital World.
The first series of the anime proved so popular that it spawned more. Digimon Adventure Zero 2, the second series, was a direct continuation of the first with a new generation of digidestined and digimon. Digimn Tamers was a new series set in a different continuity that featured the life and times of Takato, his friends from West Shinjuku and their newly found digimon partners who helped them to defeat "bio-emerged" digimon who were breaching the barrier between the Digital and real worlds. Digimon Frontier was set in a new continuity again and followed the adventures of five chosen children and their newly acquited powers to transform into powerful hybrid digimon.
While Digimon experienced some downtime after the end of Digimon Frontier, things started to happen again, like the feature length CGI movie Digimon X-Evolution airing in 2004 in Japan, the dubbing of the original Japanese movies into English for the western market and most recently, the release of the new anime TV season, Digimon Savers and the new manga, Digimon Next. Although the franchise has existed for nearly ten years, it has no intention of dying out yet.