Forum - View topicAnswerman - Is There Too Much Anime Being Made?
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1113 Location: Puget Sound |
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Since nobody said marketing could create something out of nothing or nearly so, that's pretty much pure strawman. What marketing (and especially tie ins) can do is keep things alive well beyond their natural lifespan. Yes, people must have a desire to buy, but in the general run of the populace that desire generally starves and withers once it's no longer being fed. Building and maintaining 'buzz' is nowadays a well honed science.
Movies are different in the age of physical media because one can actually own a copy of a movie and watch it whenever you want. Or loan it to your friends. Etc... etc... Back when I was a kid, if you missed the annual showing of Wizard of Oz at Easter time, you didn't see it again for a year. If you missed whatever movie(s) Disney had re-released for the summer kid's matinee circuit that year, you might not see it again for decades. Today, at worst, you might have to wait two days for Amazon to deliver it to your door. In some way, we're in kind of a stasis because the works of decades ago are as available as yesterday's. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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By that logic, Cowboy Bebop doesn't deserve its "groundbreaking" status because it's just an episodic cop show in space. Sorry to burst the bubble, but it would've struggled keeping its relevancy had it fighting against a bunch of other shows with similar themes that somehow got its way to the US as well. Now I'm imagining an alternate reality where Toonami was the CR of the generation and shown DT Eightron, Weiss Kreuz, Lost Universe, Lodoss War TV and Brain Powerd on the same airwaves as Bebop. |
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zrnzle500
 Posts: 3767 |
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It's not really a strawman argument, just a reductio ad absurdum of your position which you described as "marketing über alles". The idea being that if marketing were above all other factors, like quality or nostalgia, there ought to be a point where enough marketing could keep even utter dross in the cultural memory for long periods of time, but even you have admitted that for some things, no amount of marketing will keep it alive. I should have made it more clear that I didn't think you actually believed that though. Even beyond that I disagree that continuous access and marketing and continuous remakes, reboots, and sequels necessarily means that there is no nostalgia. Certainly those are an effective and common way to keep things in cultural memory but they are far from the only or even the only significant way to do so, some of which Kikaioh has brought up, references being the most salient in my opinion. There are a number of shows brought back from the dead by streaming not due to any marketing by companies but rather organic fan desire for continuation of the series, such as Arrested Development and recently Gilmore Girls. But I think my point will be best illustrated by the following example, namely Pokemon. Even just 10 years ago, the primary audience of the Pokemon games was still grade school age children with very little of the older audience that may have played the original series as children. In other words, while they played it when they were younger, older people were not actively engaged in the franchise, despite the franchise continuing thoughout that time. But when they made a remake of Silver and Gold, there was a significant increase in older players (though the primary audience was still younger). They weren't just buying the same old stuff but rather bought an iteration that directly appealed to their nostalgia. To keep that older nostalgic audience from graduating, they made Black and White with an older demographic in mind, which it got. Likewise and even more so for X&Y and Omega Ruby and Alpha. Pokemon Go was played most by an older audience, with the average user being 25 yo. In fact Pokemon Go, which played most directly to nostalgia, seems to have done the best of recent iterations in terms of engagement, with it peaking at around 40 million daily active users worldwide as compared to around 10-15 million units for the post Diamond and Pearl iterations, which is probably more comparable than the number of downloads (600 million) given the price differential. Yes, you are correct that its continual presence helped it stay long enough to make these ones that were more appealing towards older fans but that doesn't mean that there was no actual nostalgia on the part of those older fans. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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Actually, Cowboy Bebop is just "Lupin III (IN SPACE)" and with a popular Jazz soundtrack. I don't really think it is influential or "important" in the broad scope (aside from making a lot of money for it's licensers), it just happens to be popular with the "right" people. (same with FLCL) I AM left to wonder if Cowboy Bebop would have caught any traction if it was exactly the same EXCEPT with a different soundtrack, since so many fans cite the music. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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It's often said that there's only 7 basic types of story, and all stories are just those retold in different ways. What makes something groundbreaking or not isn't whether it's something that's been done before, but in how it's done. In the case of Cowboy Bebop, it's not that being an episodic cop show in space is something that different, but it's the way it's done. "Cop show in space" might just be the police station being a space station, the guns being lasers and the crooks being robots, and otherwise being identical to something set on Earth in the present day; Cowboy Bebop really fleshed out the setting, thought through the implications of the kind of technology they've got, and generally put a lot of work into doing it well. Edit: and as HeeroTX points out, it's not actually a cop show. Not really Lupin either though; it really is more of a Western. Might be why they call it Cowboy Bebop. Anyway. If it had a different soundtrack, I think it still would have gained some decent traction, just not quite as much as it did. |
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Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
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Cowboy Bebop success is due to the fact then it was the first 'adult' anime people saw due to the creation of the Adult Swim block. Same reason why America loves Voltron. Plenty of better mecha anime exist, but Voltron was their first exposure. Now anything with combining robots is a Voltron rip off, even shows that existed before it. Marketing is totally a key factor for what shows America clings onto. Japan isnt obsessed with these shows because they didn't have the same marketing experience. They had plenty of otaku and mecha stuff before Bebop and GoLion |
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mbanu
 Posts: 159 |
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I think that more than the timing, it was because Dragonball and Sailor Moon had good dubs -- a good dub that understands how to connect a show to an audience can have a really powerful effect. If they had tried to copy Goku's baby-voice, or had just stuck with the original Japanese Sailor Moon opening, or a number of other little things, I don't think either show would have caught fire. I kinda wonder how it happened, really -- like maybe there was a brief brief window after North American voice acting had resurrected itself but before every talented voice actor was snatched up by video game companies who paid more... except there were just as many garbage dubs back then. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5914 |
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The original funimation dub of DragonBall Z was trash.
No one really argues they should've tried to copy Nowaza just that Goku's voice (along with almost everyone elses) could've been a bit better than it ultimately was.
The spanish dub of DragonBall Z kept it's openings and endings, didn't seem to hurt it's exposure in anyway. But we got Rock The Dragon (for both the intro and outro) then when Funimation took over no intro (at least on Toonami) and outro with some instrumental garbage with clips from the anime. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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With the growing demand for animation thanks to the rise of Chinese, Western and other markets (even though Japan is stagnated), the tendency is for the number of shows produced to increase even more in the future. Like in 20 years we will get something like 500 anime shows per year.
Also I don't think Crunchyroll and Funimation are substantial players. The North American market still is very underdeveloped even though the dollar is super strong against the yen right now. Crunchyroll has only about 700,000 subscribers which means only about 50 million dollars a year compared with the 7-8 billion dollars of manga/anime revenues in Japan. |
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walw6pK4Alo
 Posts: 9322 |
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I was just mentioning to a friend today that with the way anime works, you can pick a dozen new shows every single season, be satisfied with that number because you undoubtedly also have a backlog of dozens more shows from seasons passed, and not even be aware of the other two dozen series that also premiered that season. It's nuts! Even with a wide range of taste and very little barrier to checking out new stuff, there's just too much to consume.
This also leads to some kind of bias for the "old classics" and how they stand out. Just looking at the numbers, they had far less other anime to compete with. Spring 1998 didn't have as many late night series as Fall 2016, a diehard with a good head for timetables and remember to set a VCR could have followed everything and spend a fraction of the time that someone today would. |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13550 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Honestly, there is too much anime being made per season. I think they should tone it down to an of avg. to 15-20 seasonal titles (TV/OVA). With this, QC on some titles could improve and streaming sites wouldn't be in as big of a bidding war.
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zrnzle500
Posts: 3767 |
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^15-20 is too little, and probably excessive if workload and hence QC is a concern. And the latter has been mitigated by the recent CR-Funi pact, which made the streaming market into mostly one and change sites.
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 9835 Location: Virginia |
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The problem with this idea is that there is no "They" capable of imposing such a quota. Each production committee makes its own decision to animate or not animate a specific series. The Japanese government does not regulate anime (thank goodness) and as far as I know there is no industry organization that could impose a quota. If there was how would you decide which shows get made? First come, first serve? Should a great show be disallowed because they were slow with the paperwork? Would you have a committee to choose on the artistic merits of shows not yet made? That is basically censorship. I'm sure that every production committee is feels that a proposed show is, if not great, good enough to serve their purposes. Keep in mind that seasonal anime is not made solely to entertain. Most series are made to sell stuff, books, figures, disks and other merchandise. As long as the individual members of production committees believe that the most recent series was worth what they invested, they will continue to fund new series. Series have to entertain in order to achieve this goal but the entertainment is a by product, not the main idea which is to make money. You will know when there is "too much" anime when companies refuse to join production committees because their individual goals are not met. |
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TarsTarkas
 Posts: 5823 Location: Virginia, United States |
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Same old false argument, there is too much anime, because some people said so. Well there are too many cable channels on TV. I missed out on Breaking Bad cause I didn't know about it.
Cutting back on anime productions, will mean job losses all around the industry in Japan. It will not mean that the surviving productions will hire more people or take more time. Time is money. So if you are for an unnatural pairing down of anime productions, then you are for the mass firing and layoffs of anime industry workers. I don't see this largesse of anime as a negative. I see it as hiring more workers, who are gaining more experience and history. Out of all this work, there is increased chances of exceptional people rising to the top to tell their stories, or to make others sparkle. We are not having a glut of anime, but rather there is something for everyone. Which is good for everyone. Especially, since that hasn't been true in the past. |
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Haterater
 Posts: 1727 |
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It'll just be tough to have a stand out classic. Kind of like how dog shows with their ever growing new breeds introduced but still picking the best out of the lot. I think quality and the test of time plus people spreading the word will help with that.
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