Heiji Hattori

Detective Conan is one of the longest-running anime shows ever made. It began on Japanese TV on January 8, 1996, and it is still going today, with more than 1,200 episodes. The studio TMS Entertainment makes it together with Yomiuri Telecasting. The show is based on a manga (a Japanese comic) by Gosho Aoyama. His comic started in the magazine Weekly Shonen Sunday in January 1994. In some English releases, the show is called Case Closed. This new name was used because of legal problems with the name Detective Conan. The hero is Shinichi Kudo. He is a teenager, but he is already famous. He helps the police solve hard crimes, and newspapers love him. He is smart, a little proud, and he loves Sherlock Holmes stories. One evening, he goes to an amusement park with his close friend Ran Mori. There, he sees two men in black clothes doing something secret and against the law. He follows them, but one of the men hits him from behind. Then they make him swallow a poison. The poison does not kill him. Instead, his body becomes the body of a small child. Now Shinichi has a big problem. If the men in black learn that he is alive, they may come back to finish the job. They may also hurt the people close to him. So he hides who he really is. He takes a new name, Conan Edogawa. He makes this name from two famous mystery writers: Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa Ranpo. He goes to live with Ran and her father, Kogoro Mori. Kogoro is a private detective, but he is not very good at his job. He is lazy, and he often gets the answer wrong. Conan hopes that living in a detective office will help him find clues about the men in black. This leads to the show's most famous joke. Conan solves case after case, but nobody listens to a little kid. So he uses small tools made by his old neighbor, the inventor Dr. Agasa. One tool is a watch that shoots a sleeping dart. Another is a bow tie that can change his voice. Conan puts Kogoro to sleep, hides nearby, and explains the answer in Kogoro's voice. Soon, people call Kogoro 'Sleeping Kogoro', a great detective, and he has no idea why. Conan also joins a group of elementary school friends called the Detective Boys. Later, a quiet girl named Ai Haibara joins his class. She once worked with the dark group, called the Black Organization, and she knows about the poison. Most episodes tell one mystery. A case may last one episode or a few. There is a crime, often a murder. Conan looks for clues and talks to the people who were there. At the end, he explains step by step how the crime happened and who did it. The explanations are clear, so viewers can try to solve the case too. Between these stand-alone mysteries, the main story moves forward slowly, as Conan gets closer to the Black Organization. The show also has comedy and a sweet, slow love story. Ran misses Shinichi very much, and she has no idea that he is the small boy living in her home. The manga is one of the best-selling comics of all time. By January 2023, it had more than 270 million copies in print around the world. The franchise also has many movies. Since 1997, a new film has come out almost every year, and there are now 29 of them. For people who love puzzles, clever tricks, and a hero who never gives up, Detective Conan is a classic worth knowing.