Anyone who sees Gosho Aoyama's Detective Conan is in for a real treat. Before you run away because it stars a little kid, let me tell you that it's one of the most-watched shows in Japan. It may not get top ranking in favorites polls, but it comes in first for TV ratings in some districts and usually appears in the top 10 for all districts of Japan.

Shinichi Kudo is a high schooler with a gift for observation and deduction. He's well-known in his town for being able to solve mysteries and murders before the police or local private eyes even have a list of suspects. Unfortunately, he gets mixed up with some dangerous bad dudes in the first episode, and they inject him with raw sewage! No wait, they give him a mystery formula with which they hope to kill him. Instead of dying, Shinichi shrinks down into a younger form. To preserve the illusion of being missing (so that the bad guys won't come after him), he pretends to be Conan Edogawa, a name taken from two of his favorite authors. He gains a bunch of sidekicks (real children) and solves a mystery, usually a murder, every episode, while trying to get a lead on an antidote for the evil formula.

You might hear an E-board member accidentally refer to Detective Conan as DBC (Detective Boy Conan); this is because some of us have seen parts of a series called Future Boy Conan and have mistakenly added the "Boy" to this show's title. The two are unrelated except for the coincidental use of "Conan". In Japan, DC ran (before/after) another mystery show during primetime television, and since someone dies in almost every episode of each program, it became known as the bloody hour of TV. It is still going, after more than 90 episodes. In episodes 81 and 82, he saves the famous J-Pop duo Two-Mix, one of whom is Minami Takayama, Conan's voice actress. Animage magazine had an article in which they asked a real detective to watch and evaluate Conan's abilities and realism. This detective found DC to have excellent observational skill and deductive reasoning, very similar to an excellent detective in real life!

[Seiyuu Notes: As mentioned above, Conan's voice is done by Minami Takayama, who also does Nabiki from Ranma ½ and Dilandau from Escaflowne. Shinichi's voice is performed by Kappei Yamaguchi, the voice actor for Ranma. The main female protagonist, Ran Mouri, is voiced by Wakana Yamazaki, the seiyuu for Meiko in Marmalade Boy, and the seiyuu for Ran's father, Kogoro, is Akira Kamiya, more widely-recognized as the voice of Ryo in City Hunter.]