Forum - View topicAnswerman - Where Have All The Space Operas Gone?
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Zalis116
Moderator
 Posts: 6867 Location: Kazune City |
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I have to think there's some sampling skew taking place here. Space opera and sci-fi were a bigger portion of the anime made back then compared to now, but they were an even bigger percentage of the 70s/80s anime that actually made it to the West. So we didn't get a lot of the kids' shows, sports shows, magical girl shows, WMT/Western literature adaptations, and other stuff that aired back then. Even the fansubbing scene hasn't yet brought us 1975-76's Laura, Girl of the Prairies, AKA Little House on the Prairie: The Anime, for instance.
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Scalfin
Posts: 249 |
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I think another issue is that writers ran out of ideas, so that the genre was kind of spent. While copy-cat profit can be a large part of a script being passed around, most of the scripts come from someone out there thinking he has an unexplored idea, nuance, or take.
A new show going big can often mean a large audience of writers, both established and aspiring, seeing the genre and going "why didn't they do X?" or "what it X were the case?" or "this setting would make a really good metaphor for x." |
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relyat08
 Posts: 4125 Location: Northern Virginia |
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Makes you wonder why sci-fi doesn't work in China. 
Sounds like it could also be a pretty complicated, but very interesting, discussion. |
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16935 |
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I have to say that does pique my curiosity as well. Might have to send that in as an Answerman question in itself. |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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China is focused on the past, whereas America (is) was focused on the future. 
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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Sci-fi does well at the Chinese box office, so it is curious that anime wouldn't perform well. Then again, Japanese sci-fi can have a tendency to, shall we say, assume the rest of the world is doing a lot worse than they are, or are about conflict vs evil authoritarianism, so maybe that doesn't fly well in China.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Also, Cartoon Network isn't the only country that tries to reduce the previous generation's overexposed Saturday-morning cartoon trend to facetious deconstruction/kitsch--Just look at the post-Madoka craze to deconstruct the 90's magical-girl industry, the fan-plague of that previous generation. In the 90's, Martian Successor Nadesico got big meta-laughs with its characters' devotion to Gekiganger III, the quintessential "80's space opera", with all the cliche's intact, as we saw in that one fantasy episode. As we also saw with CN, though, you can't passively-hostile dogpile on some retro-lore nonstop for very long before the audience's anti-bully reflex kicks in, gets curious, and starts wondering what was so darned wrong about it in the first place. That's why, as one poster said, these things come in waves. We just have to wait for space opera to come back in a different form than the goofball Space Dandy. |
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Chrono1000
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H. Guderian
Posts: 1255 |
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I feel an element is shattered expectations. Decades ago yo could hop in a spaceship and travel the galaxy in instants. Seriously, Harlock is all over the Galaxy like he is driving around town. Without FTL travel!
Now we learned so much in science its very hard to write anything about it. The classic line I bring up, 'there's no sound in space!' How long does it REALLY takes to get to Mars? Science has ruined Sci-Fi. So that's why I found Houkago no Pleiades to be such a wonderful Magical Girl show...in Space! They get to explore space in tiny chunks, with magic! So getting back to a Moon that is soft and fluffy, or a dashing at high speeds in and out of Saturn's rings....it made space fun again! Nowadays everything about space is dour and pessimistic, no wonder we don't want new stories there. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4074 |
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The first thing to mention is when was the last time you saw a long series that wasn't Gundam? Space opera takes time and it can't be done in ten or twelve episodes and probably shouldn't be done with 24.
Second is what would be a space opera these days? There's no need for it to exist by its own genre when it can mixed and once you broaden the definition you find titles like Heroic Age, Aquarion and the really under appreciated Majestic Prince which takes the usual alien villains you'd find in a typical Space Opera and puts them up against modern anime. Bodacious Space Pirates? Who's the bad guy? Even the "pirates" aren't bad so it's just kind of inert. AD0... I only made it through five episodes but if Mr. Perfect Hero represents what the present space opera can be then I'd rather have it disappear. Third, the live action Space Opera is running on fumes and nostalgia, being created by fans of the works created by non scientific people who were influenced by the genuine originators of space opera, literary science fiction made by people with scientific knowledge. It's so far removed from reality that even non science viewers are thinking "Does science even work that way?" Short answer, no. I can be amused by the thinking of how a Light saber works or doesn't... short answer is I can buy it, mostly because I think its not what it appears to be... but just be confounded by the idea that a concentrated energy beam can enter and exit hyperspace. There was a book series of Science of Star Trek and Star Wars. Now its just the Science of .. Oh, Why Bother? |
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Wrial Huden
 Posts: 149 Location: McKinney, TX |
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The Star Wars phenomenon also contributed to Gatchaman being brought to North Ameri ca. It was shopped around in the US as early as 1975. Little to no interest. After the release of Star Wars in '77, Sandy Frank scooped it up, chopped it up, added some American-produced framing scenes featuring a robot called 7-Zark-7 and his metallic canine companion 1-Rover-1, and gave us Battle Of The Planets. I know I was thrilled
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Which brings us back to China, and the recent headlines of why Star Wars: the Last Jedi did so badly over there. (Besides the obvious reasons that it stank.  )
One point that's been mentioned is that China was still closed off from the West in '77 when the mania erupted, and never really became attached to the Star Wars phenomenon at the same time the rest of the world did. And a film that owes much of its sentimentality to seeing Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in their 60's is likely only going to get shrugs. ...Which also gives you some idea of how off-compass the New Trilogy is heading. |
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Agapito López
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One missed point in the article is that right now we are living in the age of cynicism and cynicism is poison for a Space Opera narrative. How a genre like that can catch wide appeal in a “post truth” era in which some people really believe Earth is flat or than the Moon landings are fake?
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DerekL1963
 Subscriber Posts: 1113 Location: Puget Sound |
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You think classic [literary] SF Space Opera was any different from Star Trek or Star Wars in terms of scientific accuracy and technobabble? Have you even read any classic space operas? They practically invented technobabble. There's a reason why Hard SF is a separate genre.
Nonsense. Space Opera can be done in a short story or a single episode. Length is no part of the definition of the genre. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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I can say this much: Barrage was a space opera manga in Weekly Shonen Jump, done by Kouhei Horikoshi (who currently does My Hero Academia). I thought it was really good, but it couldn't gain a good readership and was canceled after about half a year.
That's a good point. Space operas, and space stories in general, simply aren't what's popular at the moment, so there won't be very many of them being made. The purpose of anime is for the companies behind it to make money, after all, and if there'smore money to be made elsewhere, you're going to have more projects tend toward that elsewhere. For the fan who wants the space opera back, what we need is a good isekai story set in space. After all, there is a blurred line between fantasy and science fiction, to where there is a "space fantasy" genre that stories like the Star Wars movies and the Valerian comic books would belong to, in which very advanced technology is used much like how magic would in a fantasy setting, and aliens and robots take the place of orcs and elves.
There are plenty, possibly limitless number of grand stories set in space there can be. I mean, look at the western. Seeing it from the surface level, it feels limited because you mentally confine yourself to the idea of cowboys, outlaws, and Indians, but new, original, and interesting western stories continue to be made all the time. The western looked stale in the 1970's as TV was inundated with TV shows set in the Wild West, and then The Wild Bunch came along. Then, it looked like there was all that could be done with the genre in the 00's, and then Deadwood and 3:10 to Yuma came along. Like any other kind of story, a really good one will create imitators, and a really bad one, or a string of mediocre ones, will put it to rest for a while. Though on occasion, there is an example so good that it also kills the genre, which is what happened to both east and west with the pirate story, with One Piece for the former and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curst of the Black Pearl for the latter--any pirate-themed franchises playing follow-the-leader died a quick death as the leaders took all the attention for the genre and never let go. But with any kind of story, give it time, and someone will eventually try it again. It's not always successful (2012 ended Hollywood disaster movies until Geostorm, which was a failed attempt at bringing back that genre--it says something that the most popular disaster movie franchise between them, Sharknado, was a parody), but someone will keep trying. Every genre that's ever had success has created lifelong fans, after all.
The most apparent reason is, unlike most of the other regions of the world, China doesn't have a robust space program. The only notable things China has sent into space I can think of are Dongfanghong I and Jade Rabbit, which were about 40 years apart. There also isn't the same sort of curiosity in Chinese culture that there is in most other countries that's required to really enjoy a space story, as regardless of what it's about, stories set in space are about unfamiliar places and uncharted territory. I would blame that on the Chinese school system, which is mostly about rote memorization and essentially tells the kids to simply imitate what other people have done before them. There is almost none of the critical thinking that exists in much greater quantities in most of the rest of the world that would create such curiosity in kids. You can see that in the wild success of Coco, which has been wildly successful in China, most likely because the story is about respecting and understanding one's ancestors. That is, Coco is a story that fondly looks to the past, whereas science fiction, by its nature, looks to the future (oftentimes not just in the setting but in the characters--Star Wars, in particular, has protagonists and other main characters always thinking about their fates and their futures, and if they don't at the beginning, like Luke or Jyn, they will by the end of their first movie).
None of the Star Wars films have performed very well in China though, not just The Last Jedi. Film scholars, critics, and historians have been trying to figure out why for a while, but some common explanations are that the country never got the Original Trilogy when it was new (which is not very well liked there either), they don't like the rebellious nature of the movies (apparently, a number of Chinese viewers sided with Darth Vader), some degree of continuity lockout, and the plain-looking protagonists clashing with the idea in China that protagonists must be handsome and/or beautiful. |
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