Digimon Data Squad - Production

Production

Digimon Savers was first announced during the December of 2005 Jump Festa convention in Japan with advertisements showing a remolded Agumon as the lead Digimon. The name of the series was later revealed in January 2005 with the character designs coming a month later. Savers was the first Digimon series to be produced in nearly four years, but the second Digimon production since 2005, coming off the heels of Digital Monster X-Evolution, where staff had mentioned early on that a new series might be possible depending on its performance. Unlike previous series which all featured human character designs by Akihiro Asanuma, Savers went with designs by Sayo Aoi that featured designs more typical of anime than the staple style of shows past. The series was aired as a family program rather than a children's program in an attempt to capture a wider audience, including those who might have watched the earlier shows but grown older. Because of this new market, this series also contains the oldest cast of main characters, ranging from late teens to early twenties.

Rather than the typical eight month wait between the Japanese airing and the English dub, there was a full eighteen months between the dub and the Japanese airing. Not long after the discovery of an entry for the show on Toei's website, which featured anglicized names for some of the characters and the show's new English title, chosen by Toei, on April 25, 2007, Disney's ABC Network announced that it had signed an agreement with Toei Animation to license the show. Much of the staff that worked on Digimon Adventure, including director Jeff Nimoy, returned to work on Data Squad. Because Disney had the rights to the show outside of Asia, it was aired in different channels throughout the world than past incarnations.

Bandai, in order to grab the older Digimon fans, wanted the reappearance of a Digimon from the old series, which was chosen to be the original main Digimon, Agumon.