Evangelion streams free on ABEMA for its first-broadcast anniversary

ABEMA will mark the anniversary of Neon Genesis Evangelion's first broadcast by streaming all 26 episodes of the television series free of charge. The marathon is timed to 4 October, the date the show first aired in 1995.

Two days, all 26 episodes

The run begins at 12:00 JST on Sunday 4 October and continues to 25:00, then repeats from 11:00 on Monday 5 October until 24:00. Both marathons screen on ABEMA's Anime Special channel from the first episode to the last, and every episode stays free to watch for a week after the broadcast.

Thirty years of influence

Directed by Hideaki Anno, Neon Genesis Evangelion follows three teenagers who pilot the humanoid Evangelion units against enigmatic enemies known as Angels, and who carry the weight of that duty in very different ways. Its imagery, its refusal of a tidy ending and its psychological turn became a social phenomenon in Japan at the time of broadcast, and the series is still treated as one of the works that reshaped what television anime could be.

Our opinion

An anniversary re-run is the cheapest kind of tribute, and it is also the one that ages best. Evangelion is a series people argue about in public, and a free, timed marathon turns private arguments into a shared event for a weekend, which is closer to how the show was first consumed than any box set. The scheduling says something too: a midnight finish followed by an 11am restart invites the kind of binge that the original 1995 broadcast, spread over months, deliberately denied. Watch two episodes and you understand the characters; watch them back to back and the series' exhaustion becomes the point.