<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Ranma 1/2 began as a serial manga in 1987, published in the weekly magazine Shonen Sunday through 1996. The animated television series, which started airing in 1988, ran to 161 half-hour episodes and three telefilms. It was followed by 11 OAV (Original Animated Videos) released from 1993 through 1996. One of Japan's best-known manga artists, Rumiko Takahashi was born in 1957 in Niigata, Japan. She had two successful manga titles already—Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku—when she started Ranma 1/2, a fantasy martial-arts series that also falls into the romantic comedy category.

The number of important characters in the series increases over time. To start with, there is the eponymous hero/heroine Ranma Saotome, a martial artist who has fallen under a curse that causes his gender to flip male when he is doused with hot water, and female when doused with cold water. He and his father, whose water-curse turns him into a panda, live with the Tendo family. Of the three Tendo daughters, Kasumi, Nabiki, and Akane, it is Akane, a martial artist herself, who has been selected to seal the bond between the two families by marrying Ranma. The affianced pair, still in high school, quarrel endlessly, as each episode brings new suitors on the horizon to threaten their relationship. Ryoga, Shampoo, Kodachi Kuno and her brother Tatewaki Kuno are but a few of the troublemakers, whom the pair must either date or defeat in battle.

Loaded with physical comedy and romantic tension, the series delights in making martial-arts contests out of any event: gymnastics battles with spiked clubs and razor hoops, ice-skating battles, cookie-baking battles with deadly spatula weapons, and so on.