From: The Anime Encyclopedia 2001

1999
Japanese Name: Digimon Adventure
English Name: Digimon
AKA: Digital Monsters
Director: Mamoru Hosoda, Hiroyuki Kadono, Takashi Imamura, Tetsuo Imazawa
Script: Satoru Nishizono, Hiro Masaki
Design: Kappei Nakatsuru
Lead Animation: Hiroki Shibata
Music: Takanori Arisawa
Production: Toei
Length: 20 mins. x 54 eps. (01), 2 x 25 mins. (movies), 20 mins. x 50 eps. (02)

Goggle-wearing hero Taichi (Tai) and friends Izzy, Joe, Matt, Mimi, and Sora are at summer camp like no other, where snow can fall in June and the Northern Lights appear far from the Arctic. The pals fall through a magic portal into the very different world on the pink sandy beaches of File Island, where they become embroiled in a battle between strange creatures. The kindly "digi[tal] mon[sters]" that inhabit the parallel world are being corrupted by an evil force, who inserts Black Gears into good digimon to turn them bad. As the children try to solve the mystery, their digimon companions "digivolve" into better and stronger fighters.

After a handover engineered one of the three holiday special minifeatures (2000, cut together for U.S. release as the Digimon Movie), a second season followed, rebranded as Digimon 02 and set three years later, with the return of the evil Devilmon in control of a powerful new energy source. Our heroes, who attend the same soccer club with the gang from the first series, team up with a new digital monster, the blue Buimon, to fight back. A third series renamed Digimon Tamers, began in April 2001, moving the action into the "near-future" year of 200X.

Optioned for U.S. release in the post-Pokemon gold rush, Digimon was inadvertently one of the most faithful translations of TV anime; the U.S. and Japanese schedules were so close together that there was little opportunity to do much rewriting or cutting. Technically speaking, as the descendants of the original virtual pets featured in Tamagotchi Video Adventure, Digimon have a better pedigree than Pokemon, despite only achieving approximately half the latter's ratings. The series was also dogged by legal wranglers in the U.S., when the Screen Actors Guild challenged production company Saban over the rights to residuals for the Digimon movie. The irony was not in SAG's claim that voice acting was a creative and skilled task that warranted better conditions, but that they had never bright it up before.

Note From Webmistress: Yes, the article forgot to mention TK as one of the seven kids.

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