Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Happened To The 90s Anime Boom?
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ChibiKangaroo
 Posts: 2941 |
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I was going to mention the Best Buy thing earlier but I forgot to. Best Buy used to have a dedicated "anime" section at all of their stores that was pretty large. Now those have dwindled down to like maybe a shelf and a half of super saver titles. Frys still has a decent size anime section but even that has dwindled. I remember like 6 or 7 years ago it was a whole row of shelves and now maybe 4 or 5 shelves (so half at most). Yea we do have more streaming now but Dvd and blue ray are still the overwhelming dominant form of ownership (don't know of too many titles being popular on iTunes or whatever, or even offered there.) So yea, I think those decreasing selections at mainstream retailers indicates a drop off in mainstream appeal.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I have a DVD of Pleasantville that boasted "Interactive Menus." One of the screenshots on the back even had one of these menus instead of something from the movie.
It is kind of strange to me. I see all of that stuff too, but anime is just one of those things that's not talked about. I suppose anime, as a whole, has joined the ranks of Doctor Who, Deadpool (until the movie), Adventure Time, and Portal in the status of "geek stuff everybody sees merchandise for that most people ignore but enough people buy them that these vendors still sell them."
The Fry's Electronics in Burbank used to have an entire aisle dedicated to anime releases. It's been reduced to 3 shelves, one of which is clearance. |
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Chiibi
 Posts: 4829 |
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You say "not talked about".....but exactly where and who do you mean? It's certainly all over social media of every type. I'd say it's talked about quite a bit? I mean where do you do want people to talk about it? On CNN and People's magazine? 
I don't. For starters, movies and music in general are decreasing because of iTunes, Netflix, and Hulu. Secondly, companies like N.I.S. and Aniplex will not distribute to stores like Best Buy and f.y.e. because they are super-anal about keeping the price as it is. They refuse to reduce them. Which only leaves Funimation and Viz to give up their releases....and both companies do their own streaming services now. They're only going to bring in DVD and bluray titles that they are sure would sell. Did you guys ignore the rest of the stuff I mentioned? ;
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I mean offline. When Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead were at their peak, I've had family members, co-workers, friends, and random people I meet asking if I watch the shows. Same goes for if I play Pokémon GO and if I had already seen Sausage Party. The "random person on the street" test would only work if you do it offline, for that matter, because for something to qualify, it has to have gained interest among people completely unrelated to the fandoms. From what I have observed, anime is big, but anime is also something mostly restricted to people who call themselves fans. Unlike, say, Adele or the Divergence books, you don't have quite as many casual consumers, who don't call themselves fans and don't associate themselves with other fans. You can't really do that online, because you don't get random passers-by. People congregate based on what they're fans of. When you're online, you can form communities of very specific things and talk amongst each other, then see people coming in with shared interests. This can create the illusion of making something seem more popular than it really is. |
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Chiibi
Posts: 4829 |
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Ah, so that's what you meant.
Good points. Sorry if I sounded like a smartass before; my dad is always telling me to knock it off even when it's not my intention
I think when it comes to a product regular customers might consume, I think perhaps light novels stand the best chance for that. Ones without suggestive covers or artwork inside. 
That raises another topic; didn't light novels get more popular after the boom? I can recall Haruhi and Spice and Wolf novels on the shelves around 2008 but now in 2017, Yen Press keeps bringing more titles over. Viz too. What do you guys think caused this? SAO maybe? Or was it something else? |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Heh, it's fine--I realized I wasn't being completely clear in what I meant. For something to catch on bigger, though, there has to be a way to get non-fans aware of the thing, then get these non-fans interested in the thing. I think that's going to be something increasingly difficult to do, however, between how social media circles grow stronger (and thus more isolated) and how advertisers now depend more on selling to niches rather than the people at large. I know I mentioned it before, but I think the mainstream itself is dissolving right now. By the 2020's, the mainstream might not even exist anymore, with everyone in their own niches and keeping separate from each other, with the occasional breakout hit that crosses these social boundaries. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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Live action TV will always be mainstream. I mean, shows like Big Bang Theory and Game of Thrones are pretty much the only thing everybody knows about. Hollywood as well. Essentially, American culture will be mainstream in America.
Niches will get progressively more developed as people will be able to easily seek the stuff they like (essentially you get what you like from the internet now) but the "mainstream" like the Super Bowl and Star Wars, will be there always. Still, anime is a medium not a genre. Its a niche subculture without being a particular thing. It's quite unique in that way: other niches like metal heads, for instance, are a very well defined musical style, while anime is, well, something like a subculture built on something like "European popular music" as if it were not mainstream. |
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Deadwing
 Posts: 174 Location: North Augusta, SC |
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I've been meaning to reply to this for a while, but it's been a busy week. Excluding the super-expensive imports released by "boutique" distributors like Aniplex USA (which are the exceptions to the rule), the per-episode cost for anime has actually declined over time. Typically, a TV anime released on DVD in the early 00s would retail for $30 per disc with 3 or 4 episodes per disc, which translates to $7.50 or $10 per episode. A full 12-13 episode series would be spread across 3 or 4 discs, so that ends up being $90 or $120. And that's not accounting for inflation. Overall, that $30 you spent per disc 15 years ago was worth $40.50 in today's dollars (or $10.13 to $13.50 per episode), so you're talking $121.50 to $162 in 2017 dollars for a 13-episode series bought in 2002. That's obviously just the MSRP, and I was often able to get my anime for about $25 per disc at Best Buy, and Suncoast also shaved a few bucks off of new releases for like the first week, so we're taking $75-100 for a 12-13 episode series instead of $90-120, which translates to $6.25 to $7.70 per episode. But by the end of the decade DVD "singles" were already being replaced by "half-season" sets as the standard release for TV anime by the end of the decade. Instead of an MSRP of $30 for 3-4 episodes, you got 12-13 episodes for $40-60. That's like $3-5 per episode, a tremendous drop in the per-episode sticker price from the 3-4 episode singles. The vast majority of TV anime has been released in this fashion ever since, at least from the likes of Funimation, Sentai, and Viz. Most standard edition Blu-ray sets run at a maximum MSRP of $65, or $5 per episode, but you can usually get them much cheaper at Right Stuf, often no more than $45, or less than $3.50 per episode. Per-episodes costs for buying anime in the U.S. are simply much lower than it was back during the height of the anime boom, especially once you take the effects of inflation into account. Aniplex USA does charge more than the norm for most of their releases, but they're the exception, and even then some of their more reasonably priced releases are about on par with the per-episode costs of the old DVD singles of the 00s when you take inflation into account. Overall, collecting anime on home video is a much cheaper endeavor than it was back in the early to mid 00s. Also, you really hate 90s cartoons, don't you? I was born in 1980, so the 90s were my preteen/teenage years, and I can say that I really enjoyed a lot of the Western animation produced that decade. Warner Bros. was knocking it out of the park, and I really liked most of the Nicktoons and CN's Cartoon Cartoons released that decade. |
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Deadwing
Posts: 174 Location: North Augusta, SC |
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Oh, and in regards to the anime boom, I remember it well. I'll be 37 in less than two weeks, so I grew up in the 80s. Anime, or at least its style, was first starting to enter the public consciousness. Many Western cartoons were animated in Japan by companies like TMS Entertainment and Toei, and many of them had rather stylized aesthetics evocative of the anime "look." Highly-edited versions of actual anime like Voltron and Robotech were running in syndication as well, though back then we didn't really recognize them as anything more than just another cartoon.
But I don't think I really took notice of anime as its own distinctive form of animation until my middle school years in the early-to-mid 90s. Video game magazines would occasionally cover Japanese game imports that had anime stylings or were based on anime. I knew of Ranma ½ years before I ever watched it because of EGM's brief coverage of the Hard Battle fighting game based on the show. I also remember one magazine giving brief coverage to AnimEigo's early localization and home video efforts, with a two-page spread for Bubblegum Crisis. But I didn't really start to get into anime until the early part of the latter half of the decade, maybe in my freshman year of high school. The Sci-fi Channel would play anime films and OVAs during their "Saturday Anime" block, and when I discovered that I couldn't get enough of it. I watched it regularly, and when I found that Blockbuster was renting out anime on VHS I would watch those as well. Then I discovered DBZ and Toonami back in late 1998 and my love of anime continued to grow from there. When anime really started to proliferate on DVD after the turn of the century, I was excited to run to Suncoast or Best Buy every other Tuesday just to see what was new and buy whatever series that interested me and weren't being shown on Toonami (and, later on, Adult Swim). I didn't have access to the internet at home back in the early 00s (I did use the local library's computer, though I wasn't familiar with ANN at the time), so most of what I learned about newer anime at the time was through friends and Newtype USA. I don't have much nostalgia for my high school years and early 20s as a whole (I hated high school, and not being able to move out of my parents' house until I was 24 was a drag), but the anime boom was definitely one of the highlights. I had discovered something new and exciting, and I was eager to consume as much of it as possible. After over 20 years of being an avid anime fan, much of that initial wonder has worn off, but I still enjoy anime immensely. Money issues greatly slowed down my collecting after 2005, and when the boom went bust in the late 00s, with Geneon closing down in 2007 and then ADV dissolving/fragmenting in 2009, I had some concerns about the future of my hobby. I'm able to collect more anime these days, and while the face of the U.S. market has changed quite a bit from how it was 15-20 years ago, it seems that, despite not having that big semi-mainstream impact that it once had, the market is still healthy. Crunchyroll proved to be a great service, and there's no shortage of series being released on home video. |
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KabaKabaFruit
 Posts: 1871 Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba |
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I still remember buying anime in the 90s back when it was available in stores on VHS and DVD in the "Japanimation" section. I knew the prices were expensive back then but I bucked the trend and purchased the tapes and DVDs due to my love for the sub-medium and to help support the growth of the industry here in the west.
Unlike the rest of the poseurs here, who, by their posts in this thread, think that unless anime is available to them at an "affordable" price, they don't see a reason to support the industry. Seriously, without the purchase of singles from the generation that committed to them, the anime industry wouldn't be what it is today in the west. |
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Joe Carpenter
 Posts: 503 |
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Ye gods, I honestly forgot just how expensive those dvds used to be, while I miss the "boom years" culturally I definitely don't miss those prices. |
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