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Answerman - What Happened To The 90s Anime Boom?

And yet even with that Marvel's films are still more culturally relevant and rake in far more money and play on far more screens than whatever anime film that's being exported from Japan. Anime as a whole will never reach that level here.

Unfortunately mainstream has a pretty flaky definition. But to try and make my stance clearer, anime is mainstream, individual series are subculture. For want of a better word, the "genre" of anime is part of the mainstream consciousness and an accepted medium of entertainment; it is mainstream. The fact that anime isn't really a genre though, and the spectrum of shows too broad, individual anime series will always remain niche subcultures inside of it. A huge amount of people watch and have exposure to anime, the problem becomes that it a much much more fragmented market than any other, hundreds of shows produced per year. Attack on Titan will never be mainstream (except for the fact that by some definitions it already is, but lets ignore that) but that does not mean "anime" is not.

To go to your person on the street test. You have to remember an important fact, even big huge mainstream stuff, a lot of people just don't care. They won't remember names. The thing to ask becomes whether they recognize images, or know what anime is. It has been a long, long time since I last met someone who didn't have some idea what anime is, if it came up in conversation. And I interact with a lot of people and age groups. Most of them wouldn't be able to name a single show. But even Marvel and the like will often fail such tests. "There was that movie with a big huge green dude, or that red suit guy." With anime you instead get comments like, "there was that show with the guy with really spiky hair".

The closest thing to that level of culturally relevant is the Transformers franchise, an exception that proves the rule indeed.

I have always long thought that the 90s anime boom was not entirely about looking for something people weren't finding just in US animation, but people looking for continuity in general, something that was badly lacking in both animation and live action in Western TV at the time, outside of soap operas (the 90s being after the big 80s miniseries and evening soaps like Dallas and Dynasty.) The X-Files had a lot of continuity for its time, but if you watch it now you'll see that it has no more continuity than a standard network police procedural these days like The Mentalist. Modern US TV has a lot more continuity, which means that anime is less unique.

Cable networks from Sci Fi Channel to Cartoon Network to IFC to HBO were occasionally broadcasting anime.

I know I wouldn't be an anime fan without that boom. I was an elementary school student back then eager to get home and watch toonami. When it got taken off I didn't watch it for like 6 years until my junior year when I tried looking for these nostalgic cartoons I remember watching when I was younger and finally learned what it really was.

The boom definitely had a lasting impact.

You ran to anime in the 90's to escape John K.'s grossouts, Spongebob's fourth-grade armpit-noises, AND Spielberg's incessant hyperactive Borscht-belt Hollywood-celebrity jokes about Schwarzenegger, Roseanne and LaToya, like a bad Henny Youngman Catskills-resort comic who thinks he's a hoot and won't stop bothering you at your table.