Episode 60

EPISODE 60

怒り爆発！桑原の反撃 (Ikari Bakuhatsu! Kuwabara no Hangeki)

Explosion of Anger! Kuwabara’s Counterattack

First Broadcast: December 11, 1993

Equivalent Manga Chapter(s): second half of chapter 101 (WSJ #2 1993, published December 28, 1992), chapter 102 (WSJ #3-4, 1993, January 4)

Summary: Kuwabara recovers his sword and slashes Elder Toguro to pieces. But Elder Toguro keeps regenerating, so Kuwabara blows him to smithereens. He then confronts Yusuke for keeping Genkai’s death secret. With the score now 2-1, Sakyo and Koenma bet their lives on the outcome of Yusuke and Younger Toguro’s match. Before the fight can start, Elder Toguro reappears to aid his brother, who instead sends him flying off the island.

Anime/manga differences after the jump.

Differences from the Manga

(What's all this about?  Read here)

• There’s a bit of filler at the start of the episode as Elder Toguro explains again how he can freely move his vital organs around to avoid fatal injuries.  To demonstrate this he distorts his body some more.

• Kuwabara gets up after the count of 8 in the manga, while it’s the count of 9 in the anime.

• As Yusuke explains to Kuwabara about how Genkai died before his eyes, in the anime there’s a flashback to this event.

• Yusuke says that he didn’t tell anyone about Genkai’s death because he kept feeling like she’d somehow come back, and if he admitted her death, she wouldn’t.  In the manga Kuwabara says Yusuke should have just told him that earlier, and Kurama points out that Yusuke just said why he didn’t.  This gets left out in the anime.

• When Sakyo goes up to make his announcement, in the anime Keiko wonders if he’s going to fight with Yusuke.  In the manga a random demon in the crowd says this.  Then after Sakyo and Koenma bet their lives on the outcome of Yusuke and Toguro’s match, in the anime Keiko and co say that now the tournament higher-ups just have to approve this arrangement, which was likewise something said by random crowd members in the manga.

• Koto announces that there will be a 10 minutes recess so that the tournament higher-up can decide whether or not to allow Sakyo and Koenma’s bet (Sakyo explains that this was really just an act, since all the higher-ups besides Sakyo himself are dead).  In the manga, Sakyo then tells Younger Toguro his life story while they stand by the ring.  In the anime Sakyo and Younger Toguro go off to a stadium balcony to talk, and Shizuru leaves to follow them, telling the others she has to go to the restroom.  Out on the balcony, Sakyo gives Toguro his life story, while Shizuru overhears it all. 

• During his mini-autobiography, Sakyo notes that he’s often bet his life, but most of the time everyone else quit when they realized he was serious, so he’s only officially gone through with such a bet 4 times.  He explains that during these 4 times, the people who actually accepted such a mad bet were all people like him, with diseased minds.  In the manga he identifies these people as the Black Book Club, while this reference is left out in the anime.  In the anime, at the end of the speech Toguro asks why Sakyo’s telling him all this.  Sakyo doesn’t really know.

• When Elder Toguro makes his reappearance, regenerated but still roughed up from his fight with Kuwabara, he looks rather different in the anime.  The manga shows him as covered in blood, with no shirt and huge veins all over his arms and chest (presumably a sign of him still regenerating).  In the anime, he still has his shirt on and is not covered in blood, but his left arm is completely missing (though with some small wiggling tentacles where it used to be), his right eye apparently no longer has eyelids, and patches of his clothes are torn off.  Also in the anime, he starts off his little rant by noting that it took him a long time to piece himself back together; the manga leaves this implied but unsaid.

• In the manga Elder Toguro notes that when Genkai was young, she was such a fine woman that he thought countless times of “assaulting” her.  The anime changes this to him thinking many times of making her his woman.  During this point the anime also inserts images of Genkai to illustrate Elder Toguro’s speech.

• When Younger Toguro punches his big brother, in the manga we see bone fragments, bits of brain, an eyeball, and other debris flying away.  In the anime Elder Toguro’s face just fades to white and then we see a generic streak of blood in the air.

• A small but important omission: after Elder Toguro’s shattered remains gets punched out of the stadium, the manga has a little diagram showing that he landed in the ocean surrounding the island.  The anime leaves this out, and rather than Elder Toguro getting knocked from the ring, it looks more like his remains simply vanish into nothingness.  The next big story arc is set in motion by Elder Toguro’s remains washing ashore and summoning Sensui, so the fact that the anime doesn’t make it clear he fell into the ocean makes this rather confusing.