15 June 2021: There are more than a thousand episodes of Detective Conan now
I wonder if Conan has ever accidentally put that thing through the wash.
Meitantei Conan crossed the 1000-episode threshold during the Winter 2021 anime season. Not counting the season it skipped due to Covid, Detective Conan churns out about nine or 10 new episodes each cours. Predicated on the assumption that the quality of these episodes remains basically constant, I have been using the series as a sort of control against which I measure my subjective impressions of the relative quality of seasonal anime. Theoretically, this will allow me to determine whether I am getting more jaded over time (or softer, as it were).
I do think it's odd when anime kids are drawn the size of literal babies.
In practice, I'm not sure this has worked out. This is not to say that the quality of Detective Conan episodes have declined necessarily, but the anime-original ones do seem less clever than I remember. And I think there are proportionally more anime-original episodes now. (I haven't actually compared seasons to see for sure.) I guess it ain't easy constantly coming up with new mysteries. The standalone cases based on the manga still seem fine, though.
What happens to the darts? I've never seen Conan retrieve one.
Incidentally, the various actual plot lines of the franchise have made some progress, but they advance slowly, as you might expect of such a long-running series. I don't have any issue with the pace, to tell you the truth, but I do wish the series was willing to explore new gimmicks instead of relying on the exact same ones from a thousand episodes ago. Being drugged so often surely can't be good for Kogorou or Sonoko. For that matter, does Conan use the exact same tranquilizer darts on a teenage girl that he uses on an alcoholic middle-aged man? It seems as if the doses required would be dissimilar. Detective Conan is going to end with Shinichi in prison.
