About

Beach Episode is a term referring to the common occurrence in anime to have an episode focusing on the main characters of a series going to the beach or visiting a beach (or similar place, such as a water park, hot spring or any other recreational area) for an episode.

Origin

work in progress

Request: If you know which anime, notable or not, had the first actual stereotypical beach episode in existence, that would be an awesome addition to have on the entry!

The earliest known example of a beach episode in anime would have to be the 22nd episode of the original 1963 Astro Boy anime^[1]. Gainax seems to have popularized this trope as some of their early shows having a beach episode/s (somewhat), the first ones appearing in episode 12 and 23 of Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water^[2] and the ending of The End of Evangelion (which could also be considered a beach episode)^[3]. Sailor Moon's 20th episode for its first season of the original series also had a beach episode^[4].

Spread

On January 7th 2006, the blog BasuGasuBakuhatsu made a post discussing the event^[12]. On February 19th 2011, the blog Rabbit Poets made a post about a beach episode in the series Yumekui Merry^[13].

TV Tropes has a page on the occurrence^[5], defining the episodes as "an episode where the cast decided to take a break and go to the beach or a swimming pool for some wet and splashy fun".The earliest known mention of a beach episode being mentioned on 4chan was posted November 6th 2009^[6].
On November 23rd 2013, a discussion was made on the Anime and Manga board of StackExchange asking "why do almost all anime series have a "going to the beach" episode?"^[11] The website aniDB has a list of many beach episodes^[14]. The phrase has been referenced heavily on 4chan's /a/ board^[7] and has multiple topics about the event on Reddit on various sub-reddits^[8].
Tumblr has various results related to the term (art unrelated to anime under the "beach episode" tag usually has the character/s at a beach setting, usually wearing swimwear)^[9]. The term has over 4000 results on DeviantArt^[10].
On August 7th 2012, a video was uploaded to Youtube stating that "almost every single anime has a beach episode".

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References