Watch Anime "Detective Conan"

Shinichi Kudo, a seventeen year old master detective, had it all. He could solve any case brought to his attention and in record time. His girlfriend, Ran, is a karate expert, and her father is a bumbling P.I. who is driven crazy by the fact that Shinichi gets all of the great cases. One day, while Shinichi and Ran are at an amusement park, the pair become separated. Shinichi catches wind of a dirty deal going down, and spies on a pair of men in dark trenchcoats. He's caught and the men use an experimental poison on him, intending to kill him. However, things don't work exactly as planned. When Shinichi comes to, he finds he's shrunken down to the size of a fourth grader. He goes to the goofball inventor that lives next door to him for help, and the inventor agrees to give him a hand. When Ran comes looking for Shinichi, he and the inventor come up with a story saying that Shinichi is a child named Conan Edogawa (Conan as in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Ran offers to let "Conan" live with her family while his "family" is away. Shinichi then makes it his mission to one day find the men who poisoned him and get the antidote. Thus concludes the backstory to the series. In each episode, Conan solves a different case in the style of all good detective shows, giving hints to help the viewer try to guess who the villain is, while trying to keep his true identity a secret.

I had read about "Detective Conan" about a year prior to the show being released in the United States, and so when "Case Closed" began airing in May of 2004 I jumped at the opportunity to see this show. I was not disappointed.

This show is a welcome relief from the Scooby-Doo inspired cartoons (not to mention Scooby-Doo itself) that presented a "mystery" that a tree slug could solve in two minutes. The stories are well thought out, the solutions are NOT obvious but can be put together by an observant (and thinking) viewer, just as Conan does, and best of all the series does not insult the intelligence of its viewers: the show is entertaining without padding 3/4 or the episode with slapstick routines and mindless running from a person in a Halloween costume.

The show's premise is that little six-year-old Conan Edogawa is actually a 16-year-old detective prodigy. He was reduced to a grade school child when a mysterious would-be assassin gave him an experimental poison that (unknown to the poisoner) regressed the detective rather than killing him. In a bit of angst reminiscent of the early adventures of "Spider-Man", Conan makes a hard discovery: You can have the most brilliant detective mind in the world, but if you're six years old, all the police are going to tell you is, "BEAT IT, KID!" In spite of this hardship, little Conan finds ways of bringing the guilty parties to justice -- although all too often, someone else takes the credit for his deductions.

HIGHLY recommended.

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