In 2000, animation studios Pierrot and Aniplex created a TV anime series called Ghost Stories (Gakkou no Kaidan), which was directed by Noriyuki Abe and loosely based on a book series by Toru Tsunemitsu. The story is rather basic: A young girl moves to a new town, befriends some of the local students, and then finds out that pretty much the entire town has ghosts roaming throughout. Yes, there are more details to connect all the dots but that’s the gist of it.
Anyways, the anime pretty much failed miserably, which is why there was only one season that featured 20 episodes. According to TVTropes.org, Pierrot sold the rights to the show in a desperate attempt to avoid bankruptcy back in 2005. When ADV asked what conditions there were for the series, supposedly they only got these three rules:
1. The overall story should be intact.
2. It had to be lip synced correctly.
3. No names could be changed. [Source]
ADV took this as an opportunity to create something wildly different and, in my personal opinion, absolutely fantastic. It was something that I don’t think anyone anticipated, nor could they have. What they did was turn the story into one gigantic running gag line, making things up as they went along. Rather than follow the story perfectly, they kept the overall concepts but then radically changed the characters and their lines simply because they thought it’d be funny. Hell, there are even rumors that the first person in the office on any given day was the person who got to call the shots!
I have to warn you that some of the jokes are not “politically correct”, so keep that firmly in mind if you watch the below compilation. There’s a great description of what happened from voice actor Monica Rial that you can watch on YouTube where she even states that they wanted to be, “…equal opportunity offenders“.
Also, you can watch the first episode of Ghost Stories over at Crunchy Roll.
