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Answerman - What Happened To The 90s Anime Boom?


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Lil_Roddy



Joined: 11 Feb 2017
Posts: 4
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:11 am Reply with quote
This has got to be one of the more nostalgic Answerman posts i've seen yet, and I love it. It really brings me back to the days where there where multiple Anime Blocks: Sci-Fi's Ani-Mondays and Saturday, Adult Swim's Saturday Anime block, G4's Anime Unleashed, Cartoon Network's Toonami and yes even the 4Kids blocks. I think the moment all those blocks went away it was evident the boom was over, even CN got rid of Toonami, for many it was their first taste of anime and the only place where they could get it, then it all went away. I have another theory as to why a boom like that will never happen again. My generation (Gen Y) was probably the last generation to consider playing with challenging video games and toys a childhood pastime, this was also a time when Japanese video game companies owned the industry. Everybody wanted to play the new Sega, Sony, and Nintendo game, and that's where Pokemon came along. Other toy-franchises soon got their own adaptions (Digimon, Yu-gi-oh, etc). Anime boomed at the right time when us kids where still into Japanese RPG games and trading cards. Today's children are way too into Minecrap and Cunt of Duty for a boom like that to ever happen again, keep in mind that some of the first anime fans of today started out as Pokemon fans. It was the worst of times (9/11, Dot-Com bubble, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq War) but in some sense it was best of times. I still remember being blown away by the odd images found in Michael Jackson's Scream music video, not even knowing it was anime, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0P4A1K4lXDo.

Quote:
the idea of anime being in any way a "mainstream" thing in the way comic book superheros are at the moment is gone with it.

I feel like it was more mainstream back in the day when artist like MJ and Madonna used anime in their music videos or when MTV interviewed Katsuhiro Otomo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e3rz4gbaB0. I feel like right now the community is growing as more folks are okay with calling themselves fans of anime. But I don't think we'll be seeing the mainstream accept it like they used too and thats more than fine. Comics and video games used to be underground and now they are main stream and their industries have also become shit because of this.
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ew121



Joined: 25 Nov 2014
Posts: 160
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:32 am Reply with quote
Quote:
Japan, facing a prolonged recession, started turning its entertainment in directions that America's mainstream wasn't interested in: cute, moe and relaxing.


You couldn't be more wrong, that has always existed in Japan and the bloody/gore stuff you mentioned was NEVER popular there, it was popular in the US. In Japan they always loved super robot stuff, they always loved shows lize Sazae-san or Shin-chan. Cowboy bebop is a nobody there. There's only 2 or 3 "deep& mature" anime in a decade that become popular, in the 90's it' was GiTS or NGE. Most of the edgy stuff was released in OVAs because there was no audience for it other than underground Otaku, just like nowadays the most mainstream shows are Shonen JUMP/Sunday/Magazine stuff or the classics mentioned above while only obsessed Otaku buy Blu Ray late night anime that are the ones that target them.

I swear to god, why do US people lie so much just to pretend that anime was always edgy? Doraemon had Shizuka fanservice pretty much every episode, it was about comedy and silly stuff.
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Cutiebunny



Joined: 18 Apr 2010
Posts: 1746
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 4:42 am Reply with quote
Although I had watched Superbook episodes when I was really little, I didn't become an anime fan until I saw the first run of Sailor Moon in the San Francisco test market. Unlike the rest of the US, we were watching dubbed Sailor Moon during the summer of 1993. We also had Ronin Warriors as well, which, I liked, but it was Sailor Moon that really hooked me.

I did watch various Disney afternoon fare like Gargoyles (such a good series!) and was a huge Animaniacs fan, what I liked about anime was that it was, for the most part, highly detailed and well drawn. I enjoyed drawing, and had always gravitated to well drawn animated features. At the time, I wasn't smitten with the current Disney princess movie releases, so Sailor Moon filled that void. I also really liked the collecting aspect of it. I used to collect Panini stickers (so many incomplete albums), so collecting Japanese Sailor Moon cards was just a natural thing....which then evolved into collecting the actual artwork used in the making of the series.

What was hard as a teenager was not having the disposable income necessary to spend $50 on 4 episodes of anime. I went to Chinatown every few months and instead spent the movie on a couple of VHS tapes full of Cantonese sub/dub instead. I also relied on what was shown on TV a lot, so I was fortunate enough to have a good PBS station that aired Tenchi Muyo. That's what happens when your parents are too cheap to buy anything more than the introductory AOL 4 hours/month package. It wasn't until college when I discovered that there were people that would burn anime for you onto blank VHS tapes and send those tapes to you. I saw the first Pokémon movie about a year before it was released in the US.

Do I miss these days? While going to questionable stores in Chinatown was its own adventure (my personal fave store was an acupuncture/bootleg shop) , I like that there's so much more access to things now...not only in terms of anime and manga titles available both physically and digitally, but that there's so much more access to the Japanese market now than there was 20 years ago. If you wanted anime merchandise, you had to go/live to Japan, know someone who did, or hope that something would make its way to Chinatown/Japantown. I owe the majority of my anime/manga artwork collection to Yahoo Japan, and the deputy services that allowed me to bid on those items. None of these services existed prior to the internet taking off.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 5:11 am Reply with quote
Joe Carpenter wrote:
It's a sad story, I think about the boom years a lot, I really miss them.

It's great that ten years after the boom went bust anime fandom survived and it's now the healthiest it's been since then, but at the same time it's just not quite the same, I think you could describe the current situation as a "healthy niche", the mainstream visibility of anime, be it shelves of dvds at Suncoast/Media Play or airings on Adult Swim is gone and the idea of anime being in any way a "mainstream" thing in the way comic book superheros are at the moment is gone with it.


Bear in mind that comic book superheroes were not always the mainstream they are now. They were either even more underground than anime currently is, or they were strictly for kids. (Both of them could be blamed on the Comics Code Authority, but the fact remains that American comic book heroes weren't as universally accepted as they are now.) The era known as the "Dark Ages" is a pun: Not only was the trend towards grittier and darker, they were aimed strictly at existing readers, and the market was shrinking as people left without as many people coming in.

By the way, I'd say the present-day Toonami counts as a part of Adult Swim, so they're not gone.
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Paiprince



Joined: 21 Dec 2013
Posts: 593
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 9:55 am Reply with quote
The way I see it, if it's not recognizable in everyday white culture, it's not mainstream. Pokemon is the only thing that has achieved that feat so much so that auto correct on my phone keyboard instantly predicts it. As much as I hate to admit, whatever Joe Smith and friends from Suburbiaville, USA sees as cool, the rest of the world follows. This demographic is arguably the supreme trend setter. The rush of Kpop because of Gangnam Style is eerily similar to the anime surge.
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Tempest
I Run this place.
ANN Publisher


Joined: 29 Dec 2001
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 10:46 am Reply with quote
BadNewsBlues wrote:

What anime did HBO air?


Series: (in 1990)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Little Women

Movies:
Goku: Midnight Eye
Ninja Scroll
Vampire Hunter D
Wicked City

Those are the only ones I know of.
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Ziko577



Joined: 21 May 2014
Posts: 136
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 12:28 pm Reply with quote
ninjamitsuki wrote:
We're seeing another anime bubble though, which is great. It's way more accessible now with streaming, and there are even Crunchyroll commercials on TV! I feel like this time it's not a fad, it's here to stay.


I remember when Daisuki & Crunchyroll came out that most people barely took notice till the commercials started airing and everyone came to them in droves. I don't use either as the catalog they have are series that I'm simply not interested in because Daisuki makes you pay for older series and for free members, you get the scraps and this is kinda similar to Crunchyroll's approach.
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feuerwerke



Joined: 13 Jul 2012
Posts: 149
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:11 pm Reply with quote
The fact that this was written in a "let me tell you of the olden days of yore" tone and it's about the era of anime fandom that I gret up in makes me feel way too old.
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FLCLGainax





PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 3:35 pm Reply with quote
The anime boom really helped make anime more accessible. Before the late-90's, you pretty much had to go to dedicated comic book shops to buy videos or manga.

I remember around 1997, the local West Coast Video near me only stocked anime in a restricted area with hentai and exploitation horror films. They had copies of Slayers and Tenchi Muyo sitting next to Legend of the Overfiend and some random shock video. Rolling Eyes You had to be over 18 to rent Slayers. So ridiculous! The flood of anime videos/discs a year or two later helped enlighten store managers.

Edit: Name of the store corrected and message condensed.
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EricJ2



Joined: 01 Feb 2014
Posts: 4016
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 6:29 pm Reply with quote
#825565 wrote:
Quote:
Japan, facing a prolonged recession, started turning its entertainment in directions that America's mainstream wasn't interested in: cute, moe and relaxing.


You couldn't be more wrong, that has always existed in Japan and the bloody/gore stuff you mentioned was NEVER popular there, it was popular in the US. In Japan they always loved super robot stuff, they always loved shows lize Sazae-san or Shin-chan. Cowboy bebop is a nobody there. There's only 2 or 3 "deep& mature" anime in a decade that become popular, in the 90's it' was GiTS or NGE. Most of the edgy stuff was released in OVAs because there was no audience for it other than underground Otaku, just like nowadays the most mainstream shows are Shonen JUMP/Sunday/Magazine stuff or the classics mentioned above while only obsessed Otaku buy Blu Ray late night anime that are the ones that target them.


And even then, we weren't crazy about the blood, gore and hentai either:
We just GOT it in the early struggling "garage" days of anime on early 90's VHS, because indie companies didn't have much licensing, could only grab short features or OAV's, and then only for titles that had...pretty well tanked. And which fringey R-rated material was why they were on fringey NSFW OAV releases, and not showing on regular Japanese television.
It was very easy for an early 90's US garage company to give us the "classic features" of Harmageddon or Ninja Scroll, or OAV's of Doomed Megalopolis and Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland, getting Studio Ghibli was a little trickier.

(And in the words of Dana Carvey's Grumpy Old Man, that's the way it was and we liked it!
Well, okay, in retrospect, we didn't like it, we just didn't have much choice until Ranma, Slayers and Tenchi started hitting shelves.)
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ChibiKangaroo



Joined: 01 Feb 2010
Posts: 2941
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 6:37 pm Reply with quote
I think two things have happened since the "anime boom."

(1) The quality and depth of American animation has improved so much that new releases from major American studios have somewhat eclipsed Anime as far as creating solid entertainment for older audiences, including teens and young adults. It used to be that if you were in your mid to late teens or older, and you wanted to see something engaging and unique that was animated, then Anime was (for the most part) the only game in town because a lot of American animation was still focused heavily on young children. That has changed to some extent, including the stuff that appears on television. (There were some exceptions back in the 90s like Batman and X-men, but those were not the norm.) But nowadays you have stuff like Adventure Time and Steven Universe and The Last Avatar, and numerous star wars animated shows that have appealed to teens and young adults.

(2) I do think there has been a shift in anime where action, sci-fi and fantasy have been shifted a bit more to the back burner while romantic comedy, moe and slice of life shows aimed at otaku have become more common or featured. Obviously, the action, sci-fi and fantasy stuff is still being made, but I do think for the most part the quality and quantity of those types of shows has suffered, or they have been written in such a way to be put into service of more rom com trends. Sword Art Online is probably the quintessential example of this. As much as I criticized that show, the basic premise was solid fantasy fare and was very appealing, which is probably why it did so well. Certainly, it could have been written more in the mold of Trigun, Samurai Champloo or Ghost in the Shell. But instead it was written with more of an appeal speaking to rom com trends (such as the implied harem, the highly desireable waifu character, the "sexy sister" character, the focus on multiple occasions of the main character saving the sexual purity of the girls traveling with him.)

These trends would definitely make sense as to why anime may have slid back from the mainstream but still remains popular with the fans who grew up as fans, since even with the shift in focus, a lot of the same basic features of anime are still there.
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Kikaioh



Joined: 01 Jun 2009
Posts: 1205
Location: Antarctica
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 7:02 pm Reply with quote
#825565 wrote:
You couldn't be more wrong, that has always existed in Japan and the bloody/gore stuff you mentioned was NEVER popular there, it was popular in the US. In Japan they always loved super robot stuff, they always loved shows lize Sazae-san or Shin-chan. Cowboy bebop is a nobody there. There's only 2 or 3 "deep& mature" anime in a decade that become popular, in the 90's it' was GiTS or NGE. Most of the edgy stuff was released in OVAs because there was no audience for it other than underground Otaku, just like nowadays the most mainstream shows are Shonen JUMP/Sunday/Magazine stuff or the classics mentioned above while only obsessed Otaku buy Blu Ray late night anime that are the ones that target them.

I swear to god, why do US people lie so much just to pretend that anime was always edgy? Doraemon had Shizuka fanservice pretty much every episode, it was about comedy and silly stuff.


Actually, I think Justin hit the nail on the head pretty well, as it matches pretty accurately with my own perspective on that time period. I think the OVAs of the 80's and 90's are what you would normally compare to the late-night anime output that's made today, since it broadly represents the interests of the otaku audience of its time. The OVA output in those decades was actually pretty considerable too, and I think it was with the release of Those Who Hunt Elves that the industry started to move away from OVA production and more towards the late-night seasonal format.

To my understanding also, Cowboy Bebop was fairly popular/well-received in Japan at the time of its release (among otaku at least), but certainly nowhere near as historically impactful as it was here in the US. And TBH, there are lots of anime that were popular in the 80s and 90s that are all but forgotten in modern Japan. Certainly I think anyone who's actually watched much of the otaku anime from back then would agree that the tone and interests of those time periods are very much different from what's popular with otaku today. The 80s had a glut of science-fiction shows, and moving towards the 90s, many action and even violent gore-fests as well, along with light-hearted and even slapstick comedy --- which I think, for the most part, spiritually isn't seen very much in the modern scene anymore. Anime like Dagger of Kamui, Dominion Tank Police, Detonator Orgunn, Captain Tylor, Bubblegum Crisis, Lily Cat, They Were Eleven, The Professional, Record of Lodoss War, Phantom Quest Corp., Dirty Pair, City Hunter, You're Under Arrest, The Humanoid, Ninja Scroll, Angel Cop, Iria, Cyber City Oedo, Shinesman, Orguss, Demon City Shinjuku, Slayers, Battle Angel, MD Geist, Cybernetics Guardian, Giant Robo, Madox, etc. etc. etc.... I mean, those shows are pretty tonally different from the vast majority of content we're seeing in the otaku scene today, which seems to feature more in the way of middle to high school-age teens, and less in the way of young adults/college-age kids/adults. The tone is definitely different; the 80s was a bit ways more grounded and maybe serious with its treatment of sci-fi, eventually seeing quite a bit in the ways of ultra-violence action shows, and into the 90s seeing more of a theatrical, play-like air around some of their productions, and more charming/genki/upbeat personalities. As for modern anime, Justin I think was spot-on in saying that the modern generation is more inclined towards moe and relaxing sorts of shows. To me, I think the biggest change is the increased focus on personal relationships, romance, etc., which in older works was more of a side dish to the main course of genre story-telling. Many of today's characters also have fairly tepid, calmer, and sort of understated personalities in comparison (shows like Elf Princess Rayne or Excel Saga, make modern works like Nanbaka look fairly tame in comparison). TBH, I feel like the "escapism" otaku searched for back in the day is different from the "escapism" otaku search for today --- they used to be really passionately interested in genres like sci-fi, fantasy and action-adventure, but nowadays maybe are looking more to fill the emptiness and lack of intimacy/relationships in their everyday lives, at least that's how it seems from my vantage point.

Besides the cultural divide, I think some of the tonal differences between the eras may just come from the format --- anime back in the day was mostly either mainstream television or movies and direct-to-video OVAs, so the TV shows were more family-friendly, while the otaku anime could be as adult as they wanted. On the flip side, late-night TV anime today exists in a sort of in-between spot, where it caters to a more mature audience, but maybe is a bit more restrained since it's still broadcast on TV.

In any case, certainly there are exceptions to all of that, but I think broadly speaking if you look at the overall output of the older generation compared to the modern one, tonally and spiritually they're pretty different.
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Zalis116
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Joined: 31 Mar 2005
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Location: Kazune City
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 7:50 pm Reply with quote
EricJ2 wrote:

Quote:
But it's as if something happened in the early/mid-00s that decoupled the increasing popularity of anime from increasing sales. Wonder what that could've been...


Again, it was the decreasing sales--from the rising per-episode disk prices and the disappearance of retail outlets to find them--that decoupled the mainstream fandom. That, and the fact that everyone else was getting hooked on the shows you could watch on CN Adult Swim for free--and the Bandai/Pioneer companies using it as a free outlet--until AS became rather....infamously not interested in anime anymore.
In the US cable-anime industry, there was life before Shin-chan, and life after. Sad
People were getting hooked on shows they could watch for free, but not via CN or other TV channels.

I_Drive_DSM wrote:
We make jokes and memes about subs over dubs and whatever, but dubs were near always much cheaper that subtittled tapes due to them having a lower production cost (it was much more difficult back then to produce hard subs into footage).
Plenty of random fansubbers with an Amiga and a genlock could hardcode subtitles onto VHS tapes back in the day, for far less than what it cost to pay voice actors, engineers, directors, etc. to produce an English dub. If I'm not mistaken, dub VHS tapes were cheaper because there was so much more demand for them that companies were able to sell them in more places at a lower price point. Subtitled VHS tapes were a rarer, more niche product for the smaller hardcore/purist market, and were priced higher accordingly. Which is why I find it funny/sad when purists whine about the so-called "dub tax"; it was the popularity and greater market penetration of English dubs, including the infamously over-localized/butchered ones, that allowed North American release prices to decrease over time in the first place.
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Jose Cruz



Joined: 20 Nov 2012
Posts: 1767
Location: South America
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 8:37 pm Reply with quote
Kikaioh wrote:
Actually, I think Justin hit the nail on the head pretty well, as it matches pretty accurately with my own perspective on that time period. I think the OVAs of the 80's and 90's are what you would normally compare to the late-night anime output that's made today, since it broadly represents the interests of the otaku audience of its time. The OVA output in those decades was actually pretty considerable too, and I think it was with the release of Those Who Hunt Elves that the industry started to move away from OVA production and more towards the late-night seasonal format.

To my understanding also, Cowboy Bebop was fairly popular/well-received in Japan at the time of its release (among otaku at least), but certainly nowhere near as historically impactful as it was here in the US. And TBH, there are lots of anime that were popular in the 80s and 90s that are all but forgotten in modern Japan. Certainly I think anyone who's actually watched much of the otaku anime from back then would agree that the tone and interests of those time periods are very much different from what's popular with otaku today. The 80s had a glut of science-fiction shows, and moving towards the 90s, many action and even violent gore-fests as well, along with light-hearted and even slapstick comedy --- which I think, for the most part, spiritually isn't seen very much in the modern scene anymore. Anime like Dagger of Kamui, Dominion Tank Police, Detonator Orgunn, Captain Tylor, Bubblegum Crisis, Lily Cat, They Were Eleven, The Professional, Record of Lodoss War, Phantom Quest Corp., Dirty Pair, City Hunter, You're Under Arrest, The Humanoid, Ninja Scroll, Angel Cop, Iria, Cyber City Oedo, Shinesman, Orguss, Demon City Shinjuku, Slayers, Battle Angel, MD Geist, Cybernetics Guardian, Giant Robo, Madox, etc. etc. etc.... I mean, those shows are pretty tonally different from the vast majority of content we're seeing in the otaku scene today, which seems to feature more in the way of middle to high school-age teens, and less in the way of young adults/college-age kids/adults. The tone is definitely different; the 80s was a bit ways more grounded and maybe serious with its treatment of sci-fi, eventually seeing quite a bit in the ways of ultra-violence action shows, and into the 90s seeing more of a theatrical, play-like air around some of their productions, and more charming/genki/upbeat personalities. As for modern anime, Justin I think was spot-on in saying that the modern generation is more inclined towards moe and relaxing sorts of shows. To me, I think the biggest change is the increased focus on personal relationships, romance, etc., which in older works was more of a side dish to the main course of genre story-telling. Many of today's characters also have fairly tepid, calmer, and sort of understated personalities in comparison (shows like Elf Princess Rayne or Excel Saga, make modern works like Nanbaka look fairly tame in comparison). TBH, I feel like the "escapism" otaku searched for back in the day is different from the "escapism" otaku search for today --- they used to be really passionately interested in genres like sci-fi, fantasy and action-adventure, but nowadays maybe are looking more to fill the emptiness and lack of intimacy/relationships in their everyday lives, at least that's how it seems from my vantage point.

Besides the cultural divide, I think some of the tonal differences between the eras may just come from the format --- anime back in the day was mostly either mainstream television or movies and direct-to-video OVAs, so the TV shows were more family-friendly, while the otaku anime could be as adult as they wanted. On the flip side, late-night TV anime today exists in a sort of in-between spot, where it caters to a more mature audience, but maybe is a bit more restrained since it's still broadcast on TV.

In any case, certainly there are exceptions to all of that, but I think broadly speaking if you look at the overall output of the older generation compared to the modern one, tonally and spiritually they're pretty different.


I would think that such impressions are also biased from what you have access to. If you cherry pick recent Sci Fi stuff you can get very close to the stuff of the 80s and 90s. Manga is an enormous medium with great diversity, what happens is that Westerners only have access to a small subsection of it. Today, the stuff Westerns have access is much closer to the actual stuff in Japan than they did in the 90, Crunchyroll airs essentially the bulk of the anime shown there and these are many more translated manga. Although there was an important change which was the development of slice of life moe manga with Azumanga Daioh in 2001 which was a completely new development that caused a substantial impact.

Anyway, westerns basically consume some small fraction of such enormous world which is Japanese pop culture and get some very biased impression of the whole thing. Almost nobody in the west actually understands anime/manga and it's not true that random people know what "anime is" in fact because to pose the question as such already shows that the person who poses the quedtion also does not know: its a huge medium, like music, literature and film. "Anime" is not a thing that is "something". Stereotyping doesn't mean enlightenment and I would rather prefer that nobody actually had stereotypical notions of a medium rather than having people have such stereotypes.

I wouldn't ever think that anime will be mainstream in the US because the US culture is not really open to foreign culture. They lack a certain cultural humility to accept cultural differences in any kind of stuff. For the same reason that Indian movies or Brazilian soup operas will never be mainstream in the US.

Anime/manga is a weird case because those (animation and comics) are artistic mediums that simply do not exist in the West (in a well developed form) so they can get a cult following in the West because it's a world so different from anything locally produced. And indeed the number of people into animation in North America is constantly increasing.

However, they will not get mainstream because American culture specifically and Western culture in general just does not accept foreign culture as an equal. I think that's just a general feature of the eurocentric world we live in. China for instance is much more open to Japanese pop culture due to its close cultural proximity, as Your Name performance there shows. I would never expect a Japanese auteur film to get such popularity in the West.
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thinmint



Joined: 10 Feb 2017
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 8:46 pm Reply with quote
I don't remember this boom. I spent a lot of time in video stores in the 90s hunting shit tier horror movies, my suncoast had one shelf, the independent video store had a few tapes mixed into the action section, and an independent video game store had two small shelves but a more varied selection than suncoast. Guess it never made it to my area.

I_Drive_DSM wrote:
Imagine spending $20-$30 on just 30 minutes of footage

That still happens, look at the Flip Flappers blurays.
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