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@whiskeyii:

DBZ is my favourite anime ever. But I'd be the first to admit that it is really poorly written.

AoT was one of the very few streams I was able to catch as it was available on CR (thanks to craptastic internet access). It was fun on a weekly basis, but as far as revisiting it now? eh. well. *scrunchy face*

Having started with the manga singles, I ended up buying the discs to show my support. Not because of "oh my gawd this is the best thing ever and it HAS to be in my collection". More a case of having my viewing/reading history accessible. That and the artists brought something for my enjoyment, made me smile. Fair trade for me.

Everything can't be on the "you need to see this before you die" list. That's impossible. Very few shows will fire on all eight for me. On hindsight I'll wish some tweaking were implemented, a minor tune up done. It's always something. At its worst I'll just wish it never left the garage because it steered like crap and made for an uneven ride.

I like to think (ok more like fantasize) I've gotten better at selecting what I decide to spend time & $ on, but let's face it, curiosity & wanting to see what everyone else has, can and does get the best of me.

By the time I got to AoT animated it was just another one of the 1200 titles (500 + entirely/600 + partially, a tiny fraction of what's been produced) I've had the good fortune to be able to view legally. Expectations were not high. I was already into the comic.

And well aware of production issues, expenses and other difficulties involved in trying to animate any story (to completion during my lifetime) So as I watched one Ep at a time, any quibbles or concerns easily got cast aside as I allowed myself to wonder what the heck was going to happen next. For sheer entertainment value I thought it delivered pretty big Wink on that.

As for stuff covered by the Answer:
The setting made for easy suspension of disbelief. They're in the wilderness, amongst the trees, and on occasion, they're subject to being snacks. That's life. They were merely doing what they had to do to survive. Or die. Not much math for me there.

Action Oriented? - Who doesn't know Spider Man? The idea of being able to move like that was interesting to see on that weekly basis. Overall it was good in that tiny human, ripe for the picking, low hanging fruit sorta way.

Not surprised by its popularity.

whiskeyii wrote:

dtm42 wrote:

Oh please. If that was even remotely true then how do you explain Dragonball Z, Naruto, Sword Art Online and Gundam Wing? All were huge overseas, all were poorly written at best.

I'd argue that each of these were "good" in that they did something unique for American kid's TV when they released (with the exception of Gundam Wing--can't quite figure that one out, except that maybe it was filling the "I need something dark in my life" void that Eva introduced--and SAO).

Gundam Wing goes on a loooot of people's "my first 5-10 anime" list. It was on TV at a time when very little other anime was. The vast majority of its viewers at the time either had no idea what Evangelion was or only a vague awareness but hadn't seen it because the only way was to shell out several hundred dollars on vhs tapes. The last DVD volume of Eva wasn't even out until after Gundam Wing had finished on Toonami at least once and was hugely popular here.

Last edited by ninjamitsuki on Mon Oct 05, 2015 7:59 pm; edited 8 times in total

My parents and grandparents are super open minded. My mom probably ended up loving Gintama more than I did. This is what surprised me the most, considering it's sub-only and very, very Japanese. I guess some of the jokes are just universal.

My grandma laughed out loud at jokes in Watamote.

It's my uncle that's the test for me. Thus far I've only showed him Studio Ghibli movies, Cowboy Bebop, and Michiko & Hatchin....Though my uncle is a bit of a geek. He watches Steven Universe, meanwhile I still have yet to even get into that show.

My brother, too. I remember when I was 15 and in that phase I sat him down to watch Hetalia (the Funimation gag dub). He didn't even smile and it was very, very awkward. I don' think he even liked the Ghost Stories dub, either.

I can say from sharing anime with my decidedly non-otaku Mom over the years that the shows she's liked tend to have two things in common.

1. Really strong characters. It's been five or six years since the last time we watched an episode of Naruto together, but she still talks about that series to this day, and a big part of that is that the core cast of characters were all very strongly defined and really popped off the screen as distinct and different people. I think you could probably say the same about the main characters in a lot of other "mainstream" shows too like Bebop, Eva, One Piece, Death Note, Trigun, and Ghost in the Shell - all of them have really strong and vivid core casts that they're building the story around.

2. Echoing earlier points, they also tend to have comedy and/or drama that you can still appreciate even if you don't know much (if anything) about Japanese culture. My Mom actually loved K-On, and I think a sitcom-like series about a group of high school friends having fun and bonding with each other and starting a garage band together was just universal enough that she didn't have to stretch much to understand it. Also, the tropes embodied by the characters (airhead, shy smart girl, tomboy) weren't specifically Japanese archetypes either, so she still had a frame of reference to put them all in. Conversely, I couldn't get her into Toradora at all, and one of the biggest reasons was because she had no concept of the "tsundere" archetype. She couldn't understand why Taiga was always hitting people, or why we were supposed to laugh at it, and it just ended up souring her on the whole series real quick.

NeoStrayCat wrote:

In other words as what this "Answerman" article is for...Go with what works, and if it gets good, then yeah, its good! X3

Also, Lili-Hime, the image from "Angelfire" is hotlinked and not displayed properly, had to see the image into another tab to see what it was...And...there it is, lol. X3

Lol fixed it I'm glad you figured out a way to see it before thoXD

A thing that might also help is if it's an original anime. That is, you can potentially attract fans by having a series where you don't deviate from the source material like it would if it was based off a manga or light novel.

[quote="whiskeyii"]

dtm42 wrote:

People I've reminisced with told me they thought Dragonball Z was "new", "cool", "different", and "edgy" when they first saw it, and it was certainly very different from most kid's TV (notable exceptions being the Batman cartoon and Gargoyles), so it's not too hard to see why that worked.
Then again, this is all from the perspective of someone who was in elementary school with DBZ came out, so I have no knowledge of what the buying/watching trends of actual adults were at the time. And it's veeery "hindsight is 20/20".

In the US, the earliest incarnation of DBZ came in at the late-90's end of pre-WB Warner afternoon-station syndication (usually in a double block with Samurai Pizza Cats), fresh on the heels of the first season of Dragon Ball:Classic, which was very much aimed at a kiddie-mainstream audience with only a slight "kung-fu" flavor.
After the first season of DB:C aired (not sure if it was the Trimark dub), the syndicators moved on to showing "Tree of Life" as two episodes, so we could see Goku now returning grown up with a wife and kid--skipping over the whole tournament and Piccolo years--and then going right into the Raditz and Namek arcs.
AFTER that, the show moved to the Funi dub on Cartoon Network.

So in the early days, we audiences already had a grasp on who Goku, Bulma and Roshi were, and the action was transitionally ramped up a little from the goofiness of the DB:C days, with enough explanation about what the heck was going on since the last series.
After that, however, it was banished to two episodes on Sunday mornings on syndie stations...Okay, try following the series that way. Shocked

dtm42 wrote:

Justin wrote:

It has to be GOOD

Oh please. If that was even remotely true then how do you explain Dragonball Z, Naruto, Sword Art Online and Gundam Wing? All were huge overseas, all were poorly written at best.

Live action example: how do you explain Bayformers?

Quality and popularity have little to do with one another.

I can see what you are saying about Sword Art Online, it is based on a series of light novels. Dragon Ball Z and Naruto are like them or hate them on being well written.

But Gundam Wing was one of the best Gundam and a top anime.
It has a conflicted premise of how to achieve world peace either by tyranny or example.

ParkerALx wrote:

DmonHiro wrote:

That's not a quality, that's a strike against it. Less then half the episodes are actually relevant to the plot.

It would only be a strike if Cowboy Bebop was a plot-driven show -- which it isn't. It's a character-driven work that focuses on the lives of a motley group of space-faring misfits. Not all shows need a neat story arc that progresses from one plot point to the next. Sometimes it's fun simply to watch the lives of likable characters unfold.

Even then, a large majority of Cowboy Bebop episodes still contribute something to the "main plot," whether it's introducing a new recurring character or revealing something new about their past.

It would actually be a plus for a anime going mainstream. Adult Swim is one of the main sources of non established anime and is full of episodic non-anime cartoons/shows. Not having to catch the last episode to understand what is happening is a plus.

This is why they chose Lupin III Part 2 for adult swim. It has mostly episodic stories that you don't need to see in order.

WashuTakahashi wrote:

bobob101 wrote:

I think I'll add one more criteria: The first episode has to completely sell the show

This for sure. Any series that starts weak and you have to convince someone to watch by "It gets good after episode 3" isn't going to make it, no matter how amazing the series may get. People are more likely to stick around for a mediocre series that had a strong start than an amazing series that started slow/weak.

I think you're absolutely right about this, and thinking more about it it's probably a bigger factor than we realize. The thing about American television series is that, traditionally speaking, they tend to lead off strong, and then gradually begin to slide in quality over time. Sure, there are a few all-time classics like Seinfeld that took a season or two to find their feet, but they're overwhelmed by cases like The Simpsons where everyone's left saying, "Man, the first X seasons were SO much better than what's on now!" (Lost is probably the most egregious example of this for me personally.) Many anime series tend to be slow-starters; I can't count how many times I've seen a show's fans trot out the "It gets better!" line. Whether it's an accurate claim or not, in an incredibly crowded media market, casual fans are going to flock to titles that draw them in right off the bat. Among many others, DBZ's high-powered fighting and AoT's cataclysmic prologue certainly fit the bill.

As you also noted, I think this phenomenon also explains the longevity of series like Bleach, which even most ardent fans tend to view as having fallen significantly from its heights. A strong start goes a long way in engendering goodwill towards a series, and it can take a lot of mediocre content before that's finally exhausted for all but the most hardcore fans. Regardless of their overall reputations, all of the series that Justin mentioned had at least some sort of hook right at the start.

It needs to be action-oriented:

This is mainly because for a show to become popular in the western mainstream it needs to be dubbed in English.

This causes western voice actors to create a westernized version of the characters voice and these tend to be either boring or annoying.

Then they tend to do internal voice-overs versus a more theatrical internal monologue.

bobob101 wrote:

I mean this is the million dollar question. I think I'll add one more criteria: The first episode has to completely sell the show AND cannot pull a "you thought the show was about this but actually..." Think of Attack on Titan, the first episode you see humanity in the shitter, then the Titans come up, but only after even more despair. Or cowboy bebop, a show that is intensely stylish from episode one to the closing. And both shows are exactly what you think they are going to be after you watch the first episode. I feel this rule does apply to most hit TV anime.

That's a good criteria: Whether or not a show is "too foreign" or "mainstream enough" for non-otaku audiences, it has to establish its concept and tone in the first episode and deliver on it. Even for fans, some first episodes can lose new viewers in the first five minutes. (I'm looking at YOU, Lucky Star and Monster Musume... Mad

)
Sword Art Online was another example of a show that laid out its cards (at least for the first arc) in the opening deal, and kept a winning hand.

One infamous example was trying to show Escaflowne in the US, skipping over the entire first episode that ends with the main character ending up in the new land, since the story had barely even been established yet. Expecting a new audience to be as ruminative and contemplative as you want the tone to be before the story actually gets started is overestimating them somewhat.
We could accuse the US Cardcaptors of the same thing, shuffling scenes around and flashing forward to the big battle in the first five minutes, but even then, it did take a lot of first-episode to get Sakura to finally open that book.

Lili-Hime wrote:

JTHomeslice wrote:

I think the point about hits not being pervy is interesting when you look at the success of Kill la Kill.

I haven't really seen KLK get much attention outside of the type of people who are already anime fans. It's no Attack on Titan, where pretty much everyone knows what it is. It may have got high ratings on Toonami, but so did Space Dandy. Both KLK and Space Dandy did well enough, but not enough to make an impact on western pop culture like Deathnote, FMA, DBZ, AoT or Cowboy Bebop. Could change in time though. FLCL only got more popular as they ran it over and over and over again.

WashuTakahashi wrote:

I'd add in that it has to be pretty gender-neutral. Shojos are never big hits since you can only hit half of the fanbase.

Sad, but true. There's so much fanboy nostalgia for anime as bad as Outlaw Star, Tenchi Muyo, and Yu Yu Hakusho, but a shoujo masterpiece like Utena gets comparatively ignored. Kind of continues today too. Princess Jellylfish was great but got little attention outside its own niche audience. You made a good point though about appealing to a broad audience . Shows like Escaflowne, Rurouni Kenshin and FMA were hits because they had both action and character drama/romance. It's a bit saddening that recently anime studios have forgone the drama/romance aspects and just include hot guys to get the female fanbase (Death Note is a great example of this).

Justin wrote:

Also, the big hits tend to have fewer school uniforms.

Cannot stress this enough both to appeal to non anime fans as well as anime fans who have left because they perceive anime as nothing but harem/moe now. (It isn't, but there's enough to give off that vibe). I know quite a few people that want to get back into anime and watch the new action shows like Gurren Lagann & AoT, but in general hate anime because it's all schoolgirls and panties now (according to them). Some anime fans don't realize how unappealing that is outside its target demographic (single straight guys in their 20's & 30's).

Tenchi is generally regarded as one of the founders of the genre, and still considered one of the finest examples, at least counting the first 13 episodes anyway.

I also find your argument to be completely biased, You clearly target male demographic shows, but than bitch and moan a female oriented show being unappreciated. None of the shows you mentioned are particularly bad, and Utena gets so much exposure its not even funny. I would wager there is hardly a person who could be called a casual fan who has not heard of Utena. For God's sake it even got a remastered set a couple of years ago from Rightstuf, for a show decades old when nothing outside of dragon ball z gets remasters.

A male oriented shonen series is a lot more likely to garner female viewers than a shoujo show is to garner male viewers. You kind of remind of those people who always complain how underrated the LBGT community is, and how well they would sell and how out of touch everyone is, and then lo and behold they can't even garner enough support to hold their own cons, and sales are middling at best.

I am sorry, I have nothing against Shoujo, but no body cares what you find appealing or don't, they only care about what will sell. And apparently what interest single straight guys in their 20 and 30s is what interests the people actually buying, and therefore interest those making and selling it.

CrownKlown wrote:

I also find your argument to be completely biased, You clearly target male demographic shows, but than bitch and moan a female oriented show being unappreciated.

Uh.... that was kind of my point. Female centric things don't have the same clout in nerd culture that male centric things do. That is certainly changing in anime recently- but in the 90's and early 00's when the shows I mentioned came out it was a bit different. I never said Outlaw Star or Tenchi were bad; just that they aren't on part with Utena as far as writing, creativity, direction and artistry goes. And harem stuff was around long, long before Tenchi.

Quote:

I would wager there is hardly a person who could be called a casual fan who has not heard of Utena. For God's sake it even got a remastered set a couple of years ago from Rightstuf, for a show decades old when nothing outside of dragon ball z gets remasters.

It's not necessarily obscure anymore, but compared to the shounen heavy hitters like DBZ, Evangelion, Bebop etc... it may as well be. And that's what the article was about- getting crossover success like those big shows with casual public not just anime fans. Do quick search on CDJapan for blu-ray sets of old shows. Whether or not they're released in the US is another thing due to reverse importation fears, but nearly every show with some popularity has been remastered in Japan. Even stuff as obscure as Votoms, Angel's Egg and Five Star Stories has been remastered.

Quote:

You kind of remind of those people who always complain how underrated the LBGT community is

As a (mostly) gay female I know full well that I'm a minority and that no one makes things with my demographic in mind. I'm kind of confused to what you mean undderated?

Quote:

I am sorry, I have nothing against Shoujo, but no body cares what you find appealing or don't, they only care about what will sell.

If you'd read all my post without getting upset and jumping conclusions you'd realize that I'm agreeing with you; that action and shounen sells miles better than shoujo. I also like way more anime than shoujo (I even own some Tenchi! Razz

)

Quote:

And apparently what interest single straight guys in their 20 and 30s is what interests the people actually buying, and therefore interest those making and selling it.

The anime demographic isn't like videogames. There are way more women into anime and manga and they do buy things (listen to the last ANNcast with Funimation). You're kind of implying single guys are the only ones buying anime, which is very far from the truth. If it was the truth stuff like Hetalia, Free! and Black Butler wouldn't have gotten so popular.

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