If you like food and anime, you should check out the series that combines both into a tasty monster tamer: Fighting Foodons! Or at least that’s what we would suggest if it were available by regular streaming means. As much as this show has been ragged on for its typical controversial 4Kids’ dub and quirky combative culinary creature collecting copy-cat Pokémon-like concept, Fighting Foodons is actually a pretty funny and entertaining watch. If you can find it, that is.
Unfortunately, Fighting Foodons faces an imminent fate of being buried among the inordinate amount of lost media. Once available on streaming platforms like Tubi, that’s no longer the case. Not only that, but even finding physical media for this series can be hard to come by. Although all too easily written off as an odd monster collector ripoff, Fighting Foodons is an eccentric action-gourmet twist making for a unique anime fusion that deserves to be preserved.
Don’t Knock Fighting Foodons as a Simple Knockoff, It’s the Food With Attitude!
In this world, battles are determined by fighting Foodons, strange monsters with unique abilities created by chefs using magical cards called Meal Tickets on food recipes. With everyone being terrorized by King Gorge, his evil empire of Glutton Gormandizers, and evil Glutton Clawdia, 11-year-old Chase seeks to fight back and become a master Foodon chef. Along with his younger sister Kayla and fellow chef Pie Tin, the friends team up to prevent the Gluttons from kidnapping chefs and forcing them to create powerful, evil Foodons.
If you’ve seen other prominent monster collector anime, you’ll notice some familiarities in Fighting Foodons. For instance, some of the voices may be recognizable such as the voice of Clawdia, Veronica Taylor, best known for her role as Ash Ketchum in Pokémon or Maddie Blaustein, providing the voice of Chase’s mentor Oslo the Grub Guru, is known for roles like Meowth in Pokémon and Solomon Muto in Yu-Gi-Oh!. Fighting Foodons also features concepts like the use of cards similar to Yu-Gi-Oh! and much of the food creature cast repeats their name as if they were food-based pocket monsters. Although other anime may have their own buffs like Digivolutions in Digimon or Power-Ups in Yu-Gi-Oh!, elevating Foodons is as easy as adding toppings and ingredients.
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The Scrumptious Series That Deserves to be Preserved, Not Discarded
Although Fighting Foodons may be looked down upon as though it’s a knockoff of other more well-known monster collector anime, it actually has its own charm if thought of more as a comedic parody, akin to having gags and quirks like that of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo. Not only is this series an interesting action-packed take by adding literal kicks to spice up the gourmet genre, but, as the silly satire it is, it turns up the heat by not only playing with food, but fighting with it. With non-stop culinary wordplay and puns, Fighting Foodons is a great little 26-episode watch. Or at least it would be if you can find it.
Even though Fighting Foodons has ties with widely-known 4Kids Entertainment (formerly known as FoxBox), distribution nowadays is all but obsolete. As popular as streaming platforms are for all movie, show, and media needs, although once available on Prime and Tubi, Fighting Foodons is nowhere to be found. Even though known for having any and all needs met at the click of a button, not even Amazon has this show available for either streaming or purchasing a physical copy. Even Discotek Media, the distributor for physical discs, has zero availability for this series as it’s out of print.
And so, with both digital and physical copies of this fun little show reduced to a few niche corners of the internet which doesn’t bode well in the long run for its preservation, Fighting Foodons is fighting more than just food monsters, but for its very existence. Thankfully, you can find this series in its entirety on YouTube and Internet Archive. Even so, the threat to this gem of an anime’s existence is a crying shame and, frankly, a crime upon anime preservation as a whole. Fighting Foodons may not be among the absolute best anime of all time, but it’s definitely a family-friendly side dish that deserves its preservation to be vacuum sealed for posterity, not to be canned from anime history.
Did you watch Fighting Foodons growing up on FoxBox? Let us know in the comments if you think this combative cuisine comedy is deserving to be conserved as a precious piece of anime history or is destined to be trashed as outdated media.
The post This Food Fighting Pokémon Parody From the FoxBox Days Is Nearly Lost Media appeared first on ComicBook.com.
