Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Happened To The 90s Anime Boom?
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Joe Carpenter
 Posts: 503 |
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I loved Tiny Toons and Animaniacs as a kid, but you're right that anime offered something different, that doesn't make US cartoons of the era bad though. When I was a kid if I wanted to laugh I'd watch cartoons, if I wanted action and excitement I'd watch something like Jurassic Park or Raiders of the Lost Ark, US cartoons with rare exceptions like Batman TAS did not offer much in the way of action or excitement. That was what was mind blowing about Dragon Ball Z was it was animation where the fights felt intense and had real stakes, people could actually get hurt, even in Funimation's bowdlerized form it was way more envelope pushing than anything from American animation at that time. And then later when I first saw Cowboy Bebop? I was hooked for life. But that doesn't mean I still don't love the cartoons of the 90s, including the Nicktoons and CN shows like Dexter Laboratory. Anyway when would you all say the boom went bust? I think it all started with the closing of Geneon in late 2007, from there 2008 and 2009 is when things really cratered, CN abandoned Toonami before Adult Swim revived it, more and more companies started closing and I noticed a sea change in the culture where anime was by no means "cool" any longer, just to say you watched anime made you a "filthy weeaboo" in the eyes of most people, a great snapshot of that is the Sakura con 2009 commercial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5lz2CYNR4 that went viral, that summed up what most people hated about anime fandom at the time. But a funny thing happened as we progressed into the 2010s, suddenly being a freak, an outcast and outrageous came back into style and now no one really bats an eye at anime anymore, so that's nice. 
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EricJ2
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Well, if you put it like that, some "Pin" has to actively cause a Bubble to pop, and the 00's Pin was arguably Best Buy finally heave-ho'ing non-DBZ anime off their mainstream-retail shelves with the famous "Anime with Princess in the title" snub-- Which started a chain reaction of pretty much tactlessly saying what the entire non-Amazon retail industry WANTED to say, namely that nobody, especially the fans, was buying the over-priced 4-ep. singles of under-promoted and little-known series in a mainstream retail market that was supposed to support it. (Even the fans bragged about "Who cares, wait for the boxset!" whenever ADV released a new series.) And that chain-retail stores could be a little, er, snarky about an "uppity" industry that was asking them to sell something that just wasn't moving with the regular crowd. Suncoast was able to become a "friend" to the emerging early-90's anime community because it sold all kinds of video and just video, and could court specific video markets--Unlike Target and Best Buy, which didn't need to court niche markets of DVD/Blu sales when they still had every other manner of goods to sell, and could make more money with the mass-market Hollywood movie titles if they were under any obligation to sell disks at all. Geneon's going under wasn't half the blow to the industry that ADV's going-under was, since ADV had practically invented 90's-anime's emergence into the wider mainstream market, and taught the industry how to do "real" dubs instead of afternoon-syndication ones. Losing the outlets to sell disks is one thing, losing the people that were making them is another. But Geneon fatally put its trust in thinking that CN was the cable-breakout broadcast-deal friend of the disk industry, only to see Lupin III V2 mangled, snub-dubbed, exiled to 3 am and dropped like a cold potato. Up to that point, every company thought that CN Adult Swim was their golden ticket to making any next big series the next Cowboy Bebop, but when the Williams Street Potheads were more interested in Milk-chan and a gag dub for Shin-chan, the 90's industry realized it was on its own again. Which left no one to help them and only themselves to blame when the 00's Bubble popped. |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2421 Location: Germany |
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That is the WHOLE problem right there and what i always felt too. Almost joining the gentlemen club still isn´t joining in the end. As Justin said. It was "new", so people were willing to try and then the fad was revealed for what it was and the market went back to being niche again, with a few exceptions as DBZ. Another reason is that is that anime / manga is something one is supposed to grow out of. Even... or especially in Japan. As let´s say the youth book market. I can easily name MANY people throughout my life who used to be into anime. As i said, used too. I even had a conversations with 2 of my female roommates who were into BL manga. Now her younger cousin is at it, while she is in her 20s with a boyfriend and job (pro tip: drunk women tell the craziest stories). Still another reason my anime didn´t make it as Japan itself loss prestige. Look at the future in Back to the Future II. Japan took over, dito for Cyberpunk and so on. Then the bubble burst and the big Asian kraken shrunk down to just another 1st world country. The Japanese games industry isn´t what it used to be either and that sector had huge mass appeal. So let´s maybe focus on dragging it into the spotlight. That goal is realistic. PS: I notice more and more that the market needs a 2nd Miyazaki. Not having another strong leader is why Ghibli fell apart too. Hm. |
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Paiprince
 Posts: 593 |
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Personal anecdotes are just that. Anecdotes. I could say I've met my fair share of people who enjoyed anime in their childhoods and never quit cold turkey and they're in their 30's and 40's. No, they're not basement dwelling losers either. One can still carry a passion for the hobby without needing to "grow up." Your examples are most likely the people who were of the "fad" camp. It's already recognized as something in popular culture. What needs to be done is to be seen in a better light. And despite you calling Your Name "Emotional schlock" Shinkai has real potential to gain Miyazaki status. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9841 Location: Virginia |
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I started following anime and manga in the late 1990s and still do. I was there during the period in discussion. Calling it a "boom" or a "bubble" followed by a "bust" makes it sound really dramatic but it wasn't like that at all.
Shortly after I started watching, anime and manga began to pick up momentum. More companies joined the field and more titles became available. However, at the time the shift from VHS to DVD and from OVA and movies to TV series were more noticeable as trends. What is now called a boom took place over a couple of years and was more noticeable in retrospect. The same with the bust. Slowly some companies went out of business and for awhile less titles became available. Less merchandise was offered. Part of this also confused by the loss of specialty magazines and the closure of brick and mortar locations. This effected anime but was part of a larger trend. Slowly the hobby has recovered. Again it happened in modest steps and it is different now as people have mentioned. Streaming is a factor, singles are mostly gone and the internet has taken the place of the magazines. While I doubt that anime and manga will ever be larger than niche, I would say that we are now in a "Golden Period" to be an anime/manga fan. We have access to most of the new anime, it comes out on disk faster and we also have much better access to older titles. It is currently a good time to be an anime fan, boom and bust be damned. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Well, you also got The Simpsons during that time. On the other hand, that show pretty much monopolized adult demand for western animation until the very end of the decade (except for Beavis and Butt-Head briefly), when Family Guy and South Park popped up. Every other attempt at adult entertainment, like Fish Police, Capitol Critters, and The Critic, flopped. I think the difference now is that western animation on TV of the 2010's is focused on a wide audience. While shows like Dexter's Laboratory and Aladdin: The Series had heart and genuinely appealed to adults, the adult audience was an afterthought. Now, you have stuff like a creator of Phineas and Ferb saying that they wrote the show with adults in mind but kept it accessible for children, and there's Over the Garden Wall, a non-comedic miniseries that plays out closer to a novel (granted, it feels like a Newbery Award bait novel, but Newbery Award winners have a lot of adult crossover appeal too). But what I feel is an even bigger factor is anime's disappearance from TV. Through the 00's, anime series started dwindling in number on TV, until only Pokémon, Beyblade, and Adult Swim Action remained, and the last of those was not a big profit-turner and was a labor of love. I think anime being a thing people on the street would talk about was because anime was available to watch right there, very easily, and, unlike with streaming models, people would accidentally stumble upon it, allowing it to pick up fans for whom word of mouth would never reach. (This is how I got started--I came home from school, turned to Cartoon Network, found that Dragon Ball Z was showing, and decided to watch it out of curiosity.) Aside from Ranma 1/2, every popular anime series of the 90's aired on TV somewhere (mostly Toonami, but there were others, most notably Pokémon, Digimon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!). I don't think it's coincidential that TV channels dropping anime from their schedules happened at the same time as the anime bubble's burst, when licensing costs grew to astronomical amounts: The prices were so high that it would've been difficult for an anime show to make it up in ad revenue and turn a profit. It became cheaper for TV channels to obtain domestic content or just produce their own content.
I'd say that depends on what you mean by "getting hooked." Piracy was a popular means for people to get their anime fix (still is, especially for certain series like One Piece). But I think anime being on TV was what ignited the spark in people to be interested in anime in the first place. Very few people I knew got started watching fansubs. Most of the time, they'd begin watching Toonami, Fox Kids, or Kids WB!, then find out about fansubs online and turn to that.
Anime is not a medium. It's a subset of audiovisual entertainment, and depending on the individual project, either falls under television or film. If anything, it's a sub-medium (if there's a word for that). You don't consume an anime TV show in a different way than any other country's TV shows: You either turn on a television or you use a streaming service, then it plays out non-interactively on a screen. You also don't consume an anime movie in a different way than any other country's movies: You either go to a movie theater and watch it on a big screen, or it comes out on home video later and you watch it through that. I forgot who mentioned it earlier, but I remember reading an argument that the reason anime has such a tough time in the United States is because Hollywood and Burbank (and to a lesser extent Glendale, New York City, Vancouver, and Toronto), as well as indie filmmakers and showrunners, already produce all of the entertainment needs of the people of the United States, and there is simply no room for anime in the mainstream. Contrast this with industries like cars, food and drink, video games, and jewelry (and possibly aerospace in the near future), where products from other countries have a huge market share in the United States. In those industries, there is a demand that is not met by domestic producers that at least one other country was making, and so Americans will get them from those countries.
The thing is that Adult Swim really wanted to keep Lupin III on the air, but the ratings stayed low. Then, when it was taken off, the existing viewers complained and convinced the Adult Swim people to put it back, but the ratings remained low. It created what they called "the Lupin cycle," which I think holds true for any TV show with a small but dedicated fanbase, one too small to keep a show profitable but one big enough to be loud when they want to be. |
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TheAngryOtaku
 Posts: 29 Location: New York |
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Those were indeed the days. I was in high school working part time at an anime store in NYC and ended up getting interviewed by Japanese news program after news program who thought it was just the most amazing thing that the Americans like Japanese animation when they had stuff like Superman or Mickey mouse. Was hard to explain.
This just scratches the surface too. There was so much going on. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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There is a "Lupin cycle" when you talk about shows that "signed a Faust contract" by airing on CN, but has nothing to do with low ratings, and in fact is more of a vicious cycle. AS, in fact, has very narrow tastes when it comes to anime: Bandai forced Cowboy Bebop on them, and they aired it because it was "newer" than airing more 80's Robotech, and got to like the show itself because it was slick and cool, but that's NOT the same as liking Anime in General. When it comes to comedies, they prefer their own random/pottymouthed/stoner Squidbillies and Aqua Teen (or whatever garage-Flash stoner-belches they're showing now), and apart from the "bad boy" element of Shin-chan's reputation preceding it, most standard comedies wouldn't get past the door at Williams Street. You might see ADV's Ghost Stories gag-dub, but don't expect Ranma or Azumanga to show up there in our lifetime. Lupin III wasn't "cool action" enough to be Bebop, so Geneon had to sell it as a "raunchy sex comedy", and gag-dub dopey crass Sgt. Frog-style hipster snark coming out of the characters' mouths. It didn't help, and since, like Frog, nobody had seen the original subtitled version, old viewers hated it and new viewers didn't see what all the fan fuss was about. So nobody watched it, analysts tried to come up with reasons why not without having seen the original (the popular guess was "Eww, the animation looks so old!"), and everyone assumed nobody wanted it in the first place. We've since learned from the late 90's: JUST SAY NO to Adult Swim. |
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Spawn29
Posts: 551 |
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Well Lupin the 3rd is from the 70's, so the dated animation probably turn people off from watching it. Same thing happen with Saint Seiya on CN back in 2003 since the show looked dated compare to the other shows release around that time. |
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writerpatrick
 Posts: 671 Location: Canada |
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People did collect large VHS movie collections in the VHS era, even though they could also rent movies. They tended to buy the movies they liked and wanted to rewatch. But VHS anime wasn't very easily available and it often depended on where you lived as to whether you could even find it.
The 80s saw a lot of anime movies popping up, and even though they weren't always the best anime the look and style of the movies were interesting. The 80s also saw afternoon TV for kids showing a lot of cartoons. Previously any sort of children's TV in the afternoon were reruns of the Batman and Superman TV shows. Many kids anime started showing up but "anime" itself wasn't such a big thing until the 90s. During the 90s, not only anime but animation in general was big. WB got back into animation, especially TV animation, and Disney was producing some high quality TV shows. So many anime fans would also watch American shows. This was also when fans realized there was much more anime than they were getting on TV and started tracking it down. It just happens that the 90s where also when DVDs were starting to come out. So a lot of people got into collecting on DVD but there were a lot of people collecting on VHS as well before that, but much of it were home recordings because anime tapes weren't as easy to get hold of. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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By your logic painting is not a medium, it's a subset of "audiovisual art" just like photography because you look at a painting in the same way you look at a sculpture or at a photography. If painting is regarded as a distinct medium from photography then animation is a distinct medium from film. Animation is film manufactured instead of filmed. So its like comparing paiting and photography. Two distinct artistic mediums with distinct styles, aesthetic principles and cultures. For instance, the fictional concept of "beautiful fighting girl" (characters like Nausicaa, San, Asuka, Rei Ayanami) is perhaps a by-product of the particular visual language of manga and anime. It wouldn't have developed without animation and comic as the adequate medium for its emergence.
Live action film, music and literature are well developed artistic mediums in the US. Although there are many genres of film and music that do not exist in the US. I am a big fan of Viking Metal which is all made in Scandinavia and Germany, for instance. Nor do I know any American films that are comparable to Ozu's or Tarkovsky's. But, the US comics and animation industry are pretty underdeveloped. The fact that an Anime fandom exists in the US demonstrates that the US animation industry is not well developed. Otherwise Anime would be less popular than Indian movies (which has no fandom in the US despite being maisntream live action film like Hollywood). Interestingly, Japan is the only country in the world that has developed comics into a full fledged artistic medium (and as a consequence, the world's largest animation industry). I think the reason why Japan is the only country to develop these artistic mediums so far is because Japan is the first industrialized society outside of the Jewish-Christian Western world. In our Jewish-Christian civilization, our aesthetic principles are based on the Ancient Greeks and as Plato stated, art is regarded as a second rate copy of reality. So photographic realism reigns supreme in Western Art. That's why even Western comics and videogames all seek to look "realistic", Westerners have their minds programmed to seek realism in artistic expression. One Japanese psychiatrist even concluded that this mentality has prevented development of western artistic expression, specially in comics and animation, whose visual languages are stylized by their very nature. Anime is by the way, more popular than manga in the west (while manga is 10 times more popular in Japan than anime), the reason is that anime is consumed in the same way as live action film while manga is consumed in a different way: comics and comics are a tiny niche in the West while live action film is mainstream. So in the West in general and in the US in particular, anime is more popular than manga. Even though the so called "anime style" is actually "manga style": manga is perceived in the West as being more underground than anime while manga is so much larger than anime.
WhIle there was a stigma against manga/anime in Japan up to the 1990s I think that now this stigma has mostly melted away. In the 1990s, when annual manga sales were 2.3 billion, or 18 manga books for each men, women and child in Japan, there was still a stigma against manga but it certainly did not prevent people consuming it in massive quantities. By 2014, 40% of Japan's college students identify themselves as otaku whIle the former prime minister is a manga fan. If you take a look at Amazon.jp you will see enormous amount of Anime and Manga titles everywhere. In Brazil everybody in school was into DragonBall in the 4th-6th grades. In fact, I remember in the 7th grade, in a volleyball match when I made a mistake my classmates threw themselves on the ground just like in manga/anime. Anyway, in Brazil we tend to think more in terms of individual series rather than in terms of "anime", which is healthier since i notice "anime" is just a stereotype westerners have about Japanese pop culture and not a real thing. Although it's true almost nobody after 8th grade was into serious cartoons anymore.
Well, in China anime/manga stylization is getting big specially if you look at popular pc games: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2016top10/2016-02/17/content_23512453_8.htm Look, numbers 4,5 and 8 and 10. And these are played by hundreds of millions of people in China, a country with 2.5 times the US population in Internet users. Considering that Manga stylizations are pretty much getting mainstream in China, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, that's 1.6 billion people, more than all the Western world combined. I think that given that China is rising in influence and power we might get "anime" in the form of mainly Chinese animation and comics to become highly popular in the west in the future, I believe it's quite posible that Chinese, Korean and Japanese comics and animation might get completely fused together. Finally, I don't think another Miyazaki is a possibility now. A person with that level of talent doesn't appear very often (Japan had 2 big shots: Tezuka and Miyazaki who influenced comics and animation to a huge degree, Tezuka was actually by far the most important of the 2). Shinkai might get uber popular but his influence over animation will never be as big. Last edited by Jose Cruz on Mon Feb 13, 2017 12:19 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Heishi
 Posts: 1319 |
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I think they also aired Street Fighter 2: The Animated Movie. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I didn't say animation is not a medium. I said anime is not a medium. As in the animation output of Japan.
Well, that was the corollary: During the 90's, anime became big because it was fulfilling a need not met in the United States, namely action animation in a serial format. But it's gone back to being underground due to a combination of factors (my aforementioned anime disappearing from TV being a major one), but it's remained there because there aren't a lot of kids today in the United States who seek anime out, at least not to the extent they did in the 90's. And that's because serial animation is now being served in the United States, with the void being filled. (There's also how the TV execs prefer to air domestic content, as is evident when Cartoon Network happily gave Pokémon to Disney XD.) As for action animation, as is evidenced with the bunch of single-season flops over the 2010's (Sym-Bionic Titan, Thundercats, Motorcity, Beware the Batman), American kids are simply not that interested in action TV programming anymore. The only recent actions shows are The Legend of Korra and Star Wars Rebels. Now, this is speaking from my personal experiences, but when I was in elementary school and middle school, what made action shows popular was that watching them made me, and other kids, feel more mature. At that point, pure comedies had a reputation of being for even younger kids than ourselves, and action shows were what we perceived as what the cool, older kids watched. Anime caught on because of that image, that the cool kids were watching them. Now, I think it's kind of flipped, or at least mutated into something else: Action shows are what parents are now watching, and with the ever-present urge to distance themselves from their parents, I think kids in the United States in the present stay away from action shows. (Obviously, not all of them, and not even close to all of them, but the biggest amount seem to avoid them and seem content to consume only comedy.) |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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["See what I mean?" shrug] (Hey...Am I ever wrong?  )
Also, back in the early days of DVD, mainstream Hollywood almost literally DID NOT KNOW what to do with DVD's. Back then, they were all neato-smitten with "Alternate angle", and trying to find ways to use it. (And anyone remember Nuon, a feature that was going to bring game/computer style function to your DVD's?) Most were bare-bones releases, up-dumped from the mass-market laserdiscs, or the chintzy DiVX's most studios thought were going to take off. Criterion was bringing all their fancy disks over from laser, but it took Hollywood another few years to even hit on the idea of Commentary, let alone any other extras. Anime fans knew what to do with it: Onscreen captioning and alternate audio tracks meant that you could put the subbed AND dubbed versions on one release, which brought VHS's "Sub/Dub Wars" to a nurse-smooching armistice overnight. Fans no longer had to grumble about only a dubbed version being available, argue at each others' throats about which format "deserved to live", or petition the company to put out a subbed VHS in a limited pressing for $5-10 more, and only available by mail order or specialty comic stores. If you had a DVD player in 1999, you were probably an anime fan, and Ghost in the Shell or Akira was probably the first disk you bought. (Mine was the Pioneer disks of the Tenchi and Ranma 1/2 Movie 1's.) Most big hardware-manufacturer home-entertainment rollouts are fatally bungled, and we wouldn't have had a DVD revolution today if it hadn't been for the Playstation gamers and the anime fans. |
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Chiibi
 Posts: 4829 |
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I'm in agreement with the "boom" losing speed around 2007-08
But the ironic thing is, you can still find anime-related things almost anywhere. Society seems to have recognized that lots of people like this stuff: Barnes and Noble's manga section is BIG, and for the first time ever, I saw imported Gundam models in their pop culture section along with Figma's Sailor Moon figures. Hot Topic carries ALL kinds of stuff from accessories like cell phone cases, T-shirts, figures, mascots, pins, even wallets and hats. Even from less mainstream shows like Owari No Seraph (Which almost made me scream out loud; yes, I bought it )
Every art supply store has a "How to Draw Manga" book and a kit to go with it. Jo-Ann Fabrics has a fabric section dedicated to cosplay. My jaw pretty much dropped. In the mid-2000s, this would have been unheard of. Best Buy still has a smallish anime section. Wal-mart has anime dvds from Sailor Moon and DBZ to more niche stuff like Accel World My local four times-a-year con, "Steel City Con" only used to have American comic merchandise and sci-fi toys with maybe ONE tiny anime merch booth and in the past four years or so, the anime booths have been popping up ALL over the place. Con attendance records are higher than ever. It's not mainstream.....but I don't think it's gone back to niche, looking at all these facts here. |
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