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Answerman - How Do I Introduce Old Anime To Younger Fans?

About the only way to get teenagers to read books at all is requiring reading for class. That's why Harry Potter was so embraced by adults, especially teachers, because kids wanted to read the books. It's also why we were talking about people who read books for pleasure as opposed to people who can read. Top Gun's lament was that among fans of various media, only anime viewers seem to reject older titles simply for being old. As far as I know, manga readers don't turn up their noses at older manga if someone gives them a copy. Yet some of those same readers won't watch its anime adaptation because it's old.

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.

It's not much of a preference if an alternative doesn't exist. People have been complaining about the death of 2D for a long time now.

Only one of those is aimed at adults, and Fox still airs Simpsons and Family Guy and Bob's Burgers.

What are you defining as a whiff because Suicide Squad is immensely popular and made a lot of money. Rotten Tomatos scores don't matter.

New, prostitute-looking Harley Quinn has completely taken over old red and black jumpsuit Harley Quin, for better or worse.

Those people who complain every season are in the minority, similar to people who say anime is dying every season. Most people, especially in Japan, love current stuff just fine.

Neo Human Casshern and Devilman are also really good examples.
Very old shows, but still very good nonetheless.

That being said, if the intent is to create familiarity with what has been popular in anime, I'd say Episode 11 of Madoka is a perfectly good standalone episode whose only context needed is "Magical girls fight witches." (Or was it Episode 10? It's the one about Homura's backstory.) Or maybe it'd be better in a class like I mentioned above, where you can then throw the others discussion questions like "Based on this episode, can you determine the target audience of this show? Does it even have a target audience at all?" (Answer: Really cynical and jaded little girls.)

There were a number of 16:9 shows from 2006-2008 shot in SD at 848x480 like Seirei no Moribito and, I believe, Baccano!. This was back in the DVD days when 16:9 shows were distributed on disc in the "anamorphic widescreen" format. "Widescreen" and "HD" didn't always go hand in hand.

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

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.

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.

Top Gun's lament was that among fans of various media, only anime viewers seem to reject older titles simply for being old. As far as I know, manga readers don't turn up their noses at older manga if someone gives them a copy. Yet some of those same readers won't watch its anime adaptation because it's old.

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.

Also, digital animation is still hand drawn. It's just now drawn by hand on a tablet or a touch-screen monitor instead of a cel.

For the life of me I will never understand why anime fandom seems so hyper-focused on new content, to the point where I've seen people refer to shows made five years ago as " too old," which to me is the height of insanity.

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.

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

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?