Bakugan Battle Brawlers (Seasons 1–4)

Bakugan Battle Brawlers (2007) is a Japanese-Canadian anime series you can watch online on iFILM. One day strange cards rain down across the planet, and a schoolyard game suddenly carries much higher stakes.

Each card hides a Bakugan, a creature tied to one of the elemental attributes. Six kids invent their own game around them and name their crew the Battle Brawlers. The fun stops when a masked player called Masquerade starts using a special card to banish defeated Bakugan to the Doom Dimension, a place with no way back. Dan and his friends set out to stop him, and learn that the parallel world of Vestroia and the fate of Earth are bound far more tightly than they guessed.

The show was built around the real-world collectible game of spring-loaded Bakugan spheres and kicked off a franchise that was everywhere with kids in the late 2000s. Its format is tournament-driven in the Pokémon mold: new monsters, power-ups, rival teams. For younger viewers, or anyone who lived through that craze, it's an easy nostalgia hit. Stream every episode of Bakugan Battle Brawlers online on iFILM.