Early Installment Weirdness/Anime and Manga


 * In the first five or so volumes of Oh My Goddess!, Keiichi wasn't as shy around women (though he was still squeamish), seemed like more of a plain Unlucky Everydude than a mistreated Nice Guy, and Belldandy seemed to know more about Earth than her anime adaptations, was quick-witted, and dressed in an elaborate Oriental-style robe. The series began as basically a college-student drama with a goddess in it (later two, when Urd showed up, and three, when Skuld appeared). After the Lord of Terror Arc, and began to resemble more of a cross between a Dom Com and a Fantastic Comedy.
 * The first few volumes (and episodes) of Bleach were primarily a Monster of the Week storyline. Then the Soul Reapers got introduced, and the plot shifted gears, eventually leading to an all out war.
 * For its first story arc, Dragon Ball was an updated retelling of Journey to the West with a few vague science-fiction elements. When it came to the Tenkaichi Budoukai story arc immediately thereafter, it jumped feet-first into martial arts action, and when the Red Ribbon Army was introduced immediately after THAT, the world became openly, and proudly, Fantasy Kitchen Sink for the rest of the series's run.
 * If one considers the entirety of the continuum, Dragon Ball acts as a series long Weirdness to Dragon Ball Z. The moment Raditz showed up and opened Earth to the galaxy was the point when the theme and story shifted heavily. It's no wonder the anime made them separate series.
 * The Hellsing manga started with more of a Black Comedy feel, with Alucard being as much an eccentric as an Eldritch Abomination. The comedy faded quickly.
 * The first English dubbed episode of Inuyasha involved a fair amount of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe from villagers and Kaede. This was especially odd considering that the show takes place in feudal JAPAN, which did not speak ANY form of English, much less the Ye Olde Butchered kind. By the following episode, it was entirely absent aside from Kaede's "ye". Considering how horribly forced one villager's reading of a particularly convoluted line was, this was a blessing.
 * JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. It had absolutely no Stands until the third part, despite Stands being the best known feature of the series. Instead, the first two parts focused on the Ripple, a.k.a. Hamon, a martial art used to hunt vampires. Stands were introduced in Part 3 for a change of pace --Araki says that he wanted to represent Psychic Powers with more interesting visuals-- and things started getting really weird from there.
 * Kinnikuman was originally an Affectionate Parody of superheroes before it started focusing exclusively on wrestling.
 * The first season of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, particularly its first episodes. Even ignoring the constant Genre Shift of the franchise, there are several elements that are out of place now that the series has several rules set. For example, Devices apparently needed a long incantation to unlock (Nanoha being able to do it with a simple "Please" was shown to be special) and they were apparently shapeshifting weapons that could become whatever its owner imagined them to be. These two features were quietly discarded after the first three episodes and never mentioned again.
 * Heck, Yuuno's mere existence is one, being a mage who isn't a Familiar that became a ferret when his Mana was low, a trait unique to him in the setting after four/five seasons. The latest explanation at the start of Sequence 1-1 (i.e. Chapter 5) of The Movie Manga was that earth's magical field was incompatible with him, turning him into a ferret after he ran out of energy.
 * Mahou Sensei Negima was originally a Harem Series... for all of two volumes. After that, more and more shounen elements were added, to the point that other than having some of the same characters, some of the most recent chapters look like they're from a completely different series. Pretty much everything from volume 10 or so onward is a straight action manga with comedic elements. A rare example of this being done intentionally: The author wanted to write an action manga, but was forced to write a harem manga... and found a way around it.
 * Sakura's "Inner Sakura" in Naruto, a personality which was usually treated like a variation on Good Angel, Bad Angel, but which was shown to have real in-story existence when Sakura used it to prevent being taken over in a fight with Ino. It then never showed up again.
 * Some people suggest it was just a manifestation of her (mostly) repressed aggressive side. By Shippuden, she'd learned to express herself... with earthquakes.
 * Early volumes of Naruto had a considerably different feel from later ones. Also, unlike now the series featured Naruto's quest To Be a Master rather than his quest to find Sasuke.
 * The Land of Waves Arc has much more realistic and 'gritty' feel than the main plot, the Big Bad being a sharp suited drug baron trying to control shipping lanes, and the ninjas being mercenaries doing a job - in fact, it is the only storyline where the ninjas' role as assassins is given any narrative import . The technology base also seems to be closer to our world - there is a caterpillar-tracked crane shown in the building scenes, and one panel even shows a gun behind a shop counter.
 * When the Rookie 9 teams first meet up at the Chunin Exam, Chouji thinks to himself that Akamaru looks tasty, which is a very weird thought for someone who was in the same class as Kiba. Plus, Kiba's clan's ninja dogs are famous in the village, and Akamaru is generally treated like a person thereafter.
 * Related weirdness. None of Team 8's or Team 10's members are in the same class as Team 7 in the first few chapters of the manga, and none of the students who do show up there show up at any later point in either adaptation.
 * Might Guy summons Ningame, a ninja turtle, in his first appearance. This is odd because he'd previously forsworn ninjutsu and genjutsu in solidarity with his student Lee who has no talent for them. (He does get summoned once again years later in a rather funny scene that lampshades the whole bit.)
 * The Pokémon anime was quite bizarre in the beginning, containing such things as guns (in one episode, but still), New Rules as the Plot Demands that reached memetic levels and one mon-of-the-week being a Gastly that was easily more powerful than any legendary Pokémon... Not to mention Sabrina's Living Toys- also, later seasons have considerably fewer non-Pokémon animals other than humans.
 * The 9th episode, The School of Hard Knocks has two good ideas that were dropped right afterwards. It was the only episode to reference some numbered Character Level (as in the RPG game mechanics) and it was the only one where Ash showed a big crush on a female character (despite now being the ultimate Chaste Hero). Some fans still assume that these elements were still true- despite being made nearly 14 years ago and not mentioned since.
 * Early chapters of Pokémon Special has some of this, likely by the mangaka trying to figure which game elements he wanted to use in his stories. In the RGB arc, there was no Ground immunity to Electric, it was claimed that there were only 150 Pokémon (and Mew), there was one instance of non-Pokemon animals, and HMs and TMs existed. Things got smoothed out a bit in later arcs.
 * Early Pokémon manga in general. Nowadays they're almost always Shonen based directly on the games, or sometimes with original characters. Older ones had more variety. They included Gross Out Shows, 4Koma with odd jokes, Slice of Life, and series that ventured away from the typical "Battle Pokémon, Win Badges, Be a Hot-Blooded Kid" outline so common within the franchise.
 * Sailor Moon wore a mask in the beginning of her series.
 * An early chapter in the manga involved Usagi, Rei, Ami, and Luna investigating Princess D, suspecting she could be their missing princess. When Princess D is possessed by a dark shadow, Sailor Moon exorcises it by reflecting moonlight off of her tiara, the only time she ever healed a person like that. That same chapter also has Sailor Moon change her transformation pen into an umbrella when she and Tuxedo Kamen fall off a balcony, which is also the only time that power comes up.
 * And then there's her "sonic weapon" in her first adventure, where her tearful wails somehow resonate with the red gems in her hair, and end up knocking out all the human women controlled by the youma in the jewelry shop. It never comes up again.
 * A minor case in Slayers where Lina's multiple berserk buttons are pressed...to no effect, whereas each of them in later instalments would likely involve a Dragon Slave being cast.
 * A more notable example is Gourry-he begins as a rude, selfish, glory-seeking swordsman and ends as a friendly idiot savant.
 * Tenchi Muyo started out as a pure space opera with no harem elements whatsoever. It was all about a 2000-year-old alien space pirate, a bunch of people she knew 700 years ago, and all of their drama and unfinished business with each other, while Tenchi mostly sat in the background wondering when all these aliens were going to get out of his fucking house so his life could go back to normal. The only female character who had any kind of romantic or sexual interest in him at all was Ryoko, and she kept that fact to herself; it had no effect on the plot. The rest of the female characters had the minds and/or bodies of children (including the alien space cop with an IQ lower than room temperature), and/or were blood relatives of Tenchi. This state of affairs lasted for a whole six episodes. In episode seven, the writers decided that silly things like "incest" and "the inability of mentally retarded people to give informed consent" weren't really a big deal, and the show took a hard left turn into harem territory, from which it never recovered. Reboots like Tenchi Universe and Tenchi in Tokyo would avoid these issues entirely by making making some characters mentally and/or physically older and making Tenchi pure human rather than the result of one of his ancestors fucking an alien 700 years ago.
 * Early in the manga version of Urusei Yatsura, Ataru was the only main character, rather than sharing that status with Lum (chapter 2 didn't feature Lum at all). In the game of tag in the first chapter, Lum isn't shown to have her electrical-shock ability, unlike in the anime adaptation. There were also many examples of Art Evolution (Cherry was drawn taller than usual, male characters had Big Ol' Eyebrows, eyes were drawn more realistically and less tall-and-narrow, etc.) Lum was also much more ambiguously antagonistic and perhaps even malevolent at the beginning, as opposed to the sweet naif that she became later on.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! was originally a manga where every issue contained a new type of game, but the card game episode was so popular it quickly took over. There's also the fact that the card game didn't exist in real life until partway through the series, so the earlier episodes don't necessarily follow the real world card game's rules, thus the large amount of New Rules as the Plot Demands.
 * Yu Yu Hakusho had early chapters (as well as early episodes) involve him solving cases involving demons from the Spirit World. By the time the Toguro brothers were introduced, it became more focused on his combat abilities and strengths fighting demons rather than solving cases.
 * The manga even moreso as a good chunk of the early chapters were nothing but Yuusuke floating around the afterlife trying to do some good deeds.
 * They even skipped whole volumes of this when making the Anime. Impressive considering the near lack of filler.