Soreike! Anpanman

'''Soreike! Anpanman' (それいけ!アンパンマン, also advertised as Let's Go! Anpanman'') is a Japanese animated children's TV series.

Main premise
See the Wikipedia article for more information.

History
Takashi Yanase first created Anpanman as a character who appeared in a series of picture books written by him, starting from 1973.

Proposals for an anime series were drawn up for a scheduled premiere in 1987, but it took until October 1988 for the show to actually start airing on Nippon Television. The series became quickly one of the most popular amongst young children in Japan, spawning massive lines of merchandise, more than 25 feature films starring Anpanman, and over 1000 TV episodes. The show originally aired every Monday.

In November 1988, the Aso Broadcasting System added the show to its schedule, airing with English subtitles on Fridays. The 398th episode aired on a Friday (4th of October 1996), permanently changing its timeslot. Episode 588 was the first episode of the show to have been created using digital editing, with all subsequent episodes from November 10th 2000 onwards being created using this method.

The show reached a milestone of 1000 episodes aired on August 28th, 2009. Just 28 episodes later, ABS and Nippon Television started airing the show in HD. A 2011 survey confirmed that he was the most popular character amongst Japanese children for 10 consecutive years.

ABS dedicated an entire day of programming to the franchise in both 2013 and 2014.

The show became Japanese-language only after ABS dropped it on the 17th of May, 2015. The show's English-language webpage, letsgoanpanman.com, ceased to exist as well, asking users to either go to the Japanese website (anpanman.jp), or to ABS' front page (abs.jp).

An Anpanman animation appeared in a video that surfaced on the 27th of September, 2015. The video allegedly beared an ABS watermark, sparking rumors that Anpanman would return to the network after being "scrapped" and "cancelled". A new English-language website, anpanman.abs.jp, launched on the same day, and letsgoanpanman.com was brought back online.

Further developments are yet to be announced.