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Does anybody miss the "boom" years?

You can roll your eyes at it, but it's going to happen. As you get older, you fall into the "been there, done that" because entertainment will always be targeted to a select demographic, and your 40+ year old butt won't be in it, old timer.

I didn't even think that there were any Sam Goody stores even left! There used to be a Sam Goody in every shopping mall, but they're long since gone. Even the FYE and Suncoast stores near me are dwindling.

I have a pet theory for one reason why it may have happened, it seems like every so often American gains a fascination with a foreign country, the country in question becomes cool, it all started I guess in the 60's with the British Invasion (The Beatles etc), then in the 80's you had fascination with Australia (Livin' in a Land Down Under, Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max), in the 90's it seems like America was fascinated with Celtic culture, both Scottish and Irish (The Cranberries, Braveheart, River Dance)

and finally, in the 2000's it was Japan's turn, America had gotten over seeing them as economic rivals and instead saw them as cool (The Last Samurai is one example of this, as is all the J Horror remakes like The Ring) and it just so happened that there was already a following for something Japanese in America, anime, which got a boost from this general Japanese hipness

but it's over now (the last J Horror remakes for example were all released in 2008), America is too self centered these days, there's just no room for appreciation of another country in the age of Kim Kardashian, Twitter and Facebook, Americans are fascinated with America itself now

An interesting article I read speculate if Japan is losing it's cool around the world, and even said that Japan is losing to Korea.
But the question is: Can the Japanese govt give the entertainment and music industry the same push like Korea did for K-pop and K-drama?

mdo7 wrote:

An interesting article I read speculate if Japan is losing it's cool around the world, and even said that Japan is losing to Korea. But the question is: Can the Japanese govt give the entertainment and music industry the same push like Korea did for K-pop and K-drama?

"Losing" to Korea, unquote, isn't a validation of Korean pop culture, it's just what one poster mentioned earlier--Every country becomes "trendy" for a few years the minute we find out they exist. (Until they blow it, of course--Australia had the jolly nah-worries free ride for most of the 80's, until they sent us Yahoo Serious, and then we realized they were just easily-amused beer-belchers. )

Japan, as pointed out, was cool for most of the late 90's--Go back and look at some of the depictions of Japan in the 70's and 80's, before we knew that J-culture "existed": Much of the national pop-depictions of Japanese in TV, sitcoms and movies, partly fueled by racist anger over their boom economy, hadn't changed since the Courtship of Eddie's Father--Business executives in little herds still snapped cameras, their wives dressed like geishas, and giant monsters stomped through their cities. When Sailor Moon and the Power Rangers suddenly linked up with the (Lum-obsessed) underground tape-trading cult community--now in college after having watched Robotech and Star Blazers in sixth grade--called out that Disney's big hit Lion King wasn't "original", Disney and Fox gave us these two cute heartwarming imports we'd never heard of before, and a lot of old-fogeys in their 40's said "Hey, I remember Astro Boy!", all of a sudden, we realized that there was this new cultural wellspring out there. US cartoons of the 80's were dying out, the 90's corporate push to imitate post-Mermaid Disney, and cable's attempt to be hip and ugly left room for some new export to capture weary, disgruntled US animation tastes and reshape them. And all of a sudden, it became hip to have "heard" of Japan, even if that cool "Japanimation" t-shirt you'd bought at the mall Hot Topic wasn't really Goku or Priss, even though it looked like them.

The trick is whether that "new" country can stay on the cultural map--J-horror was the taste craze of the US, after a few remakes caught disgruntled US horror tastes. But after they got repetitive and too imitative of each other, it became a genre you either loved or hated...Leaving room for, ooh, K-horror to wander in and surprise us! Followed by K-pop, K-drama, etc., all after we'd "gotten too used" to the J varieties.
But so far, there haven't been that many solid breakout hits that reshape our entire image of Korea from the days of MASH reruns, except to notice that, ooh, they make their own horror, action and animateds too, but you have to keep from confusing them with Japanese ones. That's NOT exactly the makings of long-term influence.
We can still talk about an anime show as its own entity, without slapping it on a skater's t-shirt as "hip". Discussing an anime show is different from discussing Adventure Time on CN, because an anime show IS what it was made to be, and can be appreciated on that level. That makes it more of an art form than a trend, and not having the former is why the latter dies out.