Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Do I Introduce Old Anime To Younger Fans?
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I gave that some thought, and a reason I came up with is that anime viewers tend to skew younger than most other audiences, at least in the English-speaking world. (I don't mean people like you and me, but the people who have just gotten started or the most casual viewers.) To these kids, everything is new and wonderful, and they'll naturally prefer new and shiny things. If anime truly catches their interest, you can bet they're going to start trying to look for older stuff to see what that's like, especially if they hear people talking about it. At least, based on my experiences growing up, kids are surrounded by peer pressure on all sides to keep up with trends and fads. They don't want to look old-fashioned by their peers. They want to stay on the cutting edge, or they will be socially rejected. They treat all forms of entertainment the same way one might treat fashion: The only reason you'd intentionally dress a few years behind the current trend is to try to start a new trend or be a hipster. Same goes with everything they consume. (That's the reason I suspect is behind Mickey Mouse's status as an icon rapidly dropping. He's been effectively supplanted in kids' minds with the likes of Peppa Pig, Rainbow Dash, Gumball, and SpongeBob SquarePants--even if SpongeBob's been around for like 15 years, he clicks with children like few other cartoon characters can.) And really, the power of peer pressure can be overwhelming. If everyone else is talking about the Divergent Series or Maze Runner, you don't want to feel like the only kid still reading The Hunger Games. When people get older (and it varies depending on the individual), and they care less about what other people think of them, I think that's when people open themselves up to older works. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11424 |
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Did you read relyat08's post about his friend who had even seen clips of GitS-SAC that interested her but balked as soon as she learned its vintage? I think that's the phenomenon Top Gun was baffled by (me too) that seems unique to anime, not the idea that kids prefer new stuff and don't actively seek out older stuff. Of course they do, regardless of medium - that's kind of a no-brainer. Maybe it's time TG came back to elaborate himself. ;D |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6025 |
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That I know not that's it's something to be treated with much seriousness though.
Those shows I mentioned are ones that barring Boondocks, that while for kids have competent enough writing that adults may actually like them. You don't have to make your animated shows TV-14 to get older people to watch or like it.
Even if you ignore the Rotten Tomatoes score the movie is still pretty much disliked by a large number of people and the fact that it trailed off in it's 2nd week doesn't help. It's Batman vs Superman minus the ridiculously huge budget.
The comics and the Arkham games did it first.
We're not in Japan though and as you well know we in the west are a far pickier and somewhat less tolerant group of people Last edited by BadNewsBlues on Sat Aug 20, 2016 4:13 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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yuna49
Posts: 3804 |
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I see the same phenomenon when it comes to movies though the time-scale is a bit different because the catalogue is so much larger. I had hoped that services like Netflix and Hulu would license and stream classic older films, but other than the Criterion Collection offerings on Hulu Plus, there are very few films older than 1980 unless you are willing to watch them on a pay-per-view basis on Amazon or YouTube. That means younger viewers are not likely to "bump into" such films while browsing but must seek them out specifically.
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Spawn29
Posts: 551 |
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Devilman is still obscure to most anime & manga fans in the US. Anime and manga fans know about Casshern now thanks to Casshern Sins which is still a recent anime title. Devilman has two OVA's didn't adapt the rest of the manga and the third OVA is a spin off. It does surprise me that the younger fans know about the Fist of the North Star. I know there was Legends of the Dark Kings a while back, but it didn't had Kenshiro. |
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scarletrhodelia
Posts: 34 Location: Pittsburgh, PA |
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Madoka Magica is not targeted to little girls at all, cynical or otherwise. The target audience is adult males, especially apparently those who want to watch little girls suffer. |
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Zalis116
Moderator
Posts: 6878 Location: Kazune City |
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It's a theory of mine that when newer fans encounter older shows, it's often in a "less than ideal" format; instead of viewing something from the late 90s or early 00s via the actual DVDs, they're watching ancient DivX3/DivX5 .ogm DVD-rips... or worse, bootleg streaming site video re-encoded at an inevitable quality loss from those rips. (Of course, the DVDs for most of those titles have long been OOP.) Maybe a show like Eden's Bowy never looked that good in the first place, but it's clearly got the deck stacked against it right out of the gate. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Oh yes, I know what I describe is not specific to kids. It was my mistake for partially forgetting about these cases and not being inclusive enough. But now that you bring it up, I have seen my fair share of cases of someone who wants to get into something but will reject anything that's old. The way I see it though, either they will eventually be interested in older things, or they won't stay a fan of the medium for long enough to reach that point.
I know. I was not being serious. It was based on the idea that it looks like something for little girls, then turns into something very different, which could be very confusing for someone not used to the idea that anime and manga make sudden shifts like these.
Does that mean that during YouTube's earlier days, this effect might've been less pronounced because during then, everything on YouTube was blurry and grainy to the point of unwatchability? |
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TonyTonyChopper
Posts: 256 |
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But i have seen some modern manga fans look as with disgust at the art work of older manga as well ... also in the English industry there's hardly any older manga coming at all actually way more anime for some reason ? ... and even if something comes out it's usually from the same few manga artists ... whereas especially France (Italy and Spain) have perhaps 10 times as much of the older manga there's even some companies that specifically only Publish older manga. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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There actually ARE a lot of English-language manga releases that come out. The thing is that most of them are low-key, with companies like Viz (namely Viz) and Dark Horse heavily promoting only a few of them, combined with people in the United States generally preferring to read their books digitally, making it look like there isn't much interest in manga. |
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Ryo Hazuki
Posts: 364 Location: Finland |
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As far as I know, animation frames have never been directly drawn on cels but paper. Cels were simply used, because they're transparent so you can use several layers. Before cels, Winsor McCay and his crew had to redraw the same background for each frame. |
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Spawn29
Posts: 551 |
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I'm going to guess those people are born people born in the early 2000's. If they where still in elementary school in 2010-2013 that was a long time ago for them. I remember Digimon Season 1-3 was consider to be old in 2006 by most people. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Weren't they still traced onto a cel, then colored in from the other side? |
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Top Gun
Posts: 4621 |
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You rang? But yeah, your follow-up posts to mine pretty much nailed what I was trying to get across. The majority of any particular medium's fandom activity is obviously going to be focused on current and upcoming material, because well, it's new and exciting and everyone's experiencing it for the first time together. But as you said, anime fandom is the only place I've ever seen people flat-out rejecting everything made before a fairly-recent date just because of its vintage, even if it's something that they'd be almost guaranteed to love if it was a current product. I agree with leafy sea dragon that a lot of it probably has to do with the huge number of teens in anime fandom, which brings with it both an inherent peer pressure to like what's popular and a lack of perspective on what's available. Maybe it's something that does take a few years' worth of growing to happen, at which point in time many of them aren't really into the medium anymore. I know for myself, I only got into anime when I was in college, and a lot of what I was watching then on [adult swim] were reruns of shows that were already several years old, so I don't remember ever batting an eye at the age of the series I saw. You were right on with your other responses too. My point about reading had nothing to do with kids largely not doing it unless they're forced to, but that people who like to read in general don't think twice about picking up an older book. Retro gaming is much bigger than Guile gives it credit for...maybe not in the sense that a ton of people still play on the original hardware, but definitely in a larger cultural sense. Walk into any store that has a pop-culture graphic tees section, and I can guarantee that you'll see shirts with classic Mario or an Atari joystick or an NES controller (largely being sold to people who weren't even born when those things existed!). Ports and remasters of classic titles get a lot of buzz when they drop on console or PC digital distribution. (And hell, Nintendo's going so far as to release an NES look-alike pre-loaded with many of that console's most famous games.) As for films and TV, well, the sheer glut of remakes and sequels to decades-old franchises that seem to keep rolling out year after year speak for themselves, don't they? And most of the time the conversation about them tends to be how they hold up to the originals (or don't, in the case of the new Ghostbusters). Again, not everyone seeks out older works, but there's definitely a far greater awareness of them, and I'd argue appreciation for them, that just doesn't exist to the same extent with anime. Maybe movies offer the best examples of all: franchises like Star Wars or Indiana Jones or the classic Disney canon flat-out transcended their medium to become absolute cultural touchstones. Parents who saw them when they were young showed them to their kids, and those kids are probably showing them to their kids in turn, and there's no big outcry over their age. Kids born in 2010 are still shocked when Darth Vader reveals his true identity, or still fall in love with Cinderella or Bambi or The Lion King, and they're not whining about how old what they're watching is. (And at least with Star Wars and Disney, they're still getting their parents to buy metric crap-tons of merchandise!) So where is this with anime? Do we really have anything that's been passed down like this between generations of fans, that people who started watching last year embrace as much as those who first saw it thirty years ago? I honestly can't think of anything like that, and on some level I find that extremely sad. |
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DerekL1963
Subscriber
Posts: 1116 Location: Puget Sound |
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0.o The discussion isn't about the "larger cultural sense", nor ports, nor remasters - it's about retro gaming as it's usually and commonly defined, playing old games on original hardware. It's about getting as close as possible to apples-to-apples comparison with watching older anime.
As above, the question isn't whether remakes and sequels exist, nor about whether or not there is awareness and appreciation. The question is whether or not people seek out the original material and watch it.
Since anime is a very niche fandom, not a cultural phenomenon, that alone answers your question. You're (once again) comparing apples to the thing least like apples you can image. To make your arguments work, you moved the goal posts well beyond the scope of the discussion. |
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