Oh, Hey, Steel Ball Run Still Exists
Oh, Hey, Steel Ball Run Still Exists
JoJo’s finally coming back from a bizarre break in his adventure.
Steel Ball Run, the sixth chapter in the ongoing saga of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure (or seventh, depending on how you count), made its animation debut earlier this year. Barely. In one of the strangest scheduling and production schemes ever seen, Netflix published a single double-length episode of Steel Ball Run in March, and then… nothing else, besides vague teasers about a continuation later in the year. It was only recently that they confirmed Steel Ball Run’s return on August 25 of this year: a month from today, and more than half a year after that single first episode debuted.
If Netflix took this approach with any series besides JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, it would be a disaster. The streamer is clearly counting on the built-in loyalty of the JoJo fanbase to carry hype for the show across the baffling six-month gap between episodes 1 and 2. And even then, it still comes off as playing with fire. The first episode of Steel Ball Run covers the first chapter of the original manga, a prologue of sorts… but not a particularly compelling jumping-on point for new viewers. Or even old ones!
Set in the American West of the late 19th Century, Steel Ball Run acts as a relaunch of the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure saga following its apocalyptic reset at the end of the previous storyline, Stone Ocean. Steel Ball Run reaches back in time to once again tell the story of Jonathan “Johnny” Joestar, the protagonist of the very first storyline that kicked off the franchise back in the 1980s and the very first “JoJo.” Although Johnny has very little in common with Jonathan: The latter was an athletic sports hero with a pure heart, while Johnny lost the use of his legs in an accident resulting from his own petty-minded cruelty. Lacking much in the way of positive traits beyond a desire to win a cross-country horse race—the Steel Ball Run in question, definitely not to be mistaken for the Cannonball Run—Johnny is a tough protagonist to get behind in the opening chapter. And, at first glance, the universe’s hard reset appears to have done away with JoJo’s iconic Stand spirits, the Persona-like beings who manifest as strange superpowers for the heroes and villains alike.
Dropping a single episode of a story that seems almost completely disconnected from the franchise whose name it bears, featuring an unpleasant main character and very little of the over-the-top supernatural weirdness of the JoJo series, is a rough beginning. Thankfully, Steel Ball Run will settle in for the duration once it returns, with 11 weekly episodes covering the race’s second and third stages (out of nine total). Netflix’s handling of Stone Ocean was widely derided for launching entire seasons in a single drop, which undermined the fan culture that had helped propel the saga to cult-favorite status in America as viewers gathered online after each weekly episode of the earlier sagas to enthuse and speculate about the twisty narrative. Steel Ball Run’s return to that release schedule comes as a welcome return to form, and a well-timed one: Most die-hard fans consider Steel Ball Run as good as (or even better than) the popular Starlight Crusaders arc that turned JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure into an international phenomenon in the first place.
Well-timed, that is, if you don’t count that baffling six-month gap after the first episode.