Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Did Anime Take So Long To Take Off In America?
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Agent355
 Posts: 5113 Location: Crackberry in hand, thumbs at the ready... |
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I'm wondering this, too. I think British TV is a good comparison to anime, because there were always *some* British stuff airing in the US--original Doctor Who, Upstairs, Downstairs, various literary adaptation miniseries (including many iterations of Sherlock Holmes), etc. But Anglophiles did not get a whole lot until VHS & DVD came along. Now after the NuWho and Downton Abbey booms, British live action is probably as popular as anime (or more), with various dedicated streaming services, availability on regular streaming services, and American cable TV (and PBS, which is where most of it was regulated at the start). |
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Dumas1
Posts: 75 |
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I think one aspect is that foreign media has, well, foreign practices in things like how many seasons a series might run and how long a season is. Different countries have different expectations on how to fill the broadcast schedule. It seems loosely tied to the deep deep need for control that American networks have: Picking up a series that is already complete means they have minimal room to make changes, probably no ability to order new seasons if something turns out to be popular. Take The Office. In the UK, it got two series and a couple specials, about a dozen episodes in all. The US version ran for 9 years and 200 episodes. The only comment I can make on the models is that one is much less intimidating to think about rewatching. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4080 |
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How should I put this... anime/animation has been by whoever done for whoever and it has been that was long before Akira's been around. Wait, adult animation and it's not anime? In America? Yes, unbelievable but true. Akira was the anime gateway because it wasn't 50 episodes long filled with occasional filler. It's the kind of work that not only could someone watch in a single sitting but you could guide them through it along side them. Also, VHS helped a bit. Just a bit... Why did it take so long for anime to get anywhere in the US though? Marketing. Not the shows but the merchandise and the toys the shows sell. What were the exact dates and facts of when the FCC eased content guidelines to allow more commercial fare, the rise of additional channels as well as US animation studios outsourcing animation to be done in Japan... the sweet spot of all these things colliding just happen to be when anime started to become less "Astro boy"/"Speed racer" style works and more its own thing in the late 70s/early 80s. But it's like I said, if that anime isn't used to sell US toys... or whatever you want to list Transformers under; Transplanted Japanese toys animated by a Japanese company that's still somehow American? But Avatar is an anime?... then it's going to get a less than prime timeslot. Let's face it, anime didn't start to catch on in the US until the rise of cable because it hit that sweet spot of having air to fill... produced shows ready to go? I'll take them!... but not having enough funds to produce their own IP. Pokémon is its own thing... selling a marketable video game series that has never gone away? Now that's something America can get behind!... but it took years and years for Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon to catch on. I watched both shows as they were originally broadcast on UHF syndication, the same channels that had Robotech and Battle of the Planets, in the early 90s but they didn't get talked about until Toonami of the late 90s. And that was gone once Cartoon Network was able to fill their time slots on their own. That brings us to the DVD era... and anime still hasn't gone real mainstream yet in the US. It has an audience but what doesn't these days? Anime has come close to mainstream but America is too obtuse for it. |
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Mune
Posts: 376 Location: Minnesota |
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Interestingly enough, I recall the first time exposure to anime. I was like 6, when voltron aired on American tv, not cable. No one wanted to watch it except one of my cousins and me. In a household majority female at the time, 2 boys and 6 girls, we didn't get very much control of the tv, as most people had 1 tv in their houses at the time. Years later, I was reexposed to anime through Dragonball. Again, I was ripped from it. I had minor exposure over the years until middle school, where I was fully reintroduced to it through friends, cable, and the internet.
My experience might be like many others is mild exposure at first due to limited availability to anime. Luckily, I followed my passion for anime and realized it was worth my time as an entertainment avenue. Now, with the explosion of technology and services, anime is at my fingertips. I have a smart phone (which I personally do not use to watch anime), my iPad, my laptop, and my ps4. Services vary from free to $9.99 a month to stream anime. The technologies are getting better and cheaper. Younger and younger children now have access to anime that I once had problems getting to. Plus, it's on demand, rather than scheduled only. No more staying up until 2am or getting up at 5am to watch anime. Or messing around with a DVR. It is now the best time to be an anime fan because technology supports it so well. The only down side is parent interaction and possibly complaints about the content of anime. |
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0nsen
 Posts: 256 |
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I wonder if the general decline of Hollywood over the last 30 years has anything to do with the rising success of anime.
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Raikuro
Posts: 347 |
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One BIG factor that helped in Japanese media gaining traction in the US was the mainstream popularity of Power Rangers (which itself was running off a weird merging of Saved by the Bell and Transformers successes). The most action heavy parts of the show were just dubbed over old footage which made production super cheap and practically printed money. So obviously the floodgates got shoved open a bit more to shove as much cheap Japanese media on the air to get some more cash cows going through crossover appeal.
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Black_Kenshi
Posts: 20 |
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To kind of expand on the point of editing the crap out of the early broadcasted shows, a lot of them were also done to tone down the Japanese-ness of the content to make it more palatable for US audiences in a time when most people had absolutely no exposure to anything Japanese in their lives. Because this was done so much through cutting and splicing episodes together, a lot of people had no idea that these were cartoons from another country. Heck, if you ask anyone over the age of 30 or so about how they got into anime, a lot of them would start off with something along the lines of, "I watched X show, but didn't realize that they were cartoons from Japan until I somehow got exposed to the truth through a friend or something."
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srlracing
 Posts: 87 |
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I had some friends who lived next door at one point as a child from Argentina. We were all really into Dragon Ball Z right as it was getting into the original Frieza arc on Toonami. But their collection and knowledge of the Dragon Ball franchise extended over a decade into the future with VHS after VHS of Dragon Ball GT episodes. They were talking about multiple levels of super saiyans before we even actually were introduced to Goku doing it and that crazy fusion thing that at the time just blew my mind. They even had the whole routine down. That was before I even realized what I was watching was anime.
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TheAnimeRevolutionizer
 Posts: 329 |
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Some other notable factors to add into this equation:
*The collapse of the Japanese Economic Bubble Economy of the late 1980s. I agree, anime was huge since and before it ever reached massive levels of awareness, but I can point this one factor of delay to the coming of anime to the US being rather major. After when the recession came in 1991, I'm very sure that US interests in Japan shrunk up a bit when the Yen deflated and companies experienced a cool down of overseas cultural and economic investments thanks to this. While I'm sure that anime was still safe in the face of the crash, interests became a lot more lukewarm around the beginning of the decade. Things that accelerated its growth: *The floundering of animation and comics in the public eye in the US during the mid 1990s. Yes, there are the shows that defined the DC Animated Universe. Yes, there was Nicktoons and Cartoon Network and Fox Kids. Yes, there is Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux. But let's not lie about this. Around the mid 1990s, thanks to the near collapse of DC and Marvel, and the 1980s animation glut, the medium of sequential art was lumped into a corner of stigmas and dismissal by the public. DC killed Superman and Marvel gave into the edgehard anti hero craze brought on by years of censorship by the Comics Code. But when the rain came, it came hard. Anime was the light that showed that yeah, sequential art can be with integrity, and not just for kids, but for everyone. *The Japanese video game importation market. This would probably be one of the most important factors. Being a "geek" in the 1990s didn't just mean you stuck with reading only comics or catching up on Star Trek: The New Generation. Back then, I can say that there were more interests into being a geek than today. Video games were the last vestiges of the Japanese import market as the result of the 1980s, and man, did it last. It wasn't just Mario and Sonic either. Tell me fellow ANN goers, why are there video game articles too here on ANN? Exactly. Video games were the gateway to anime just as animation was. Around this time, there was Street Fighter II, a whole library of JRPGs, Megaman, Final Fantasy, Toshinden, SNK, and Working Designs, and a whole ton more to list down here. Anime wasn't just found in animation, it was also found in the video games too, and it did spread just as much than if anime was presented alone. When Street Fighter II the Animated Movie absolutely destroyed its live action version, that's when I could tell that anime already made its presence known too. Sure, the market wasn't as huge as it was now, but man, anime then wasn't just a kind of media, it was THE style, and it was a precious commodity that any fan got and cherished to all time when they were presented with it. When it took off, it took off. Plus, you think girl gamers and anime fangirls are just a recent thing? Back then, I could recount the tons of Megaman X series Zero, Cloud Strife, Kenshin Himura, Kayin Amoh, Sousuke Sagara, Kamui Shiro, and T.M. Revolution fansites made around the turn of the century alone. And that's not including the other characters people fell head over heels over. |
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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Primus
 Posts: 2761 Location: Toronto |
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You guys started before English Canada, but seemed to burn out at around the same time. |
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TheAnimeRevolutionizer
Posts: 329 |
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If you want the reason for that, it's probably very cutting it close, but I blame factors of nationalism and some degree of xenophobia. You'd think for a country that promotes diversity and equality would have anime sweep like crazy, but then again, the last year and so has proved us elsewise. Yech. Plus, that probably is a unique standpoint only held by me; I grew up watching anime without pretenses of it coming from another country thanks to dubbing and being wowed by it overall just for what it was. Plus, I did play more video games than watch anime, but hey, when something is presented in anime format that's not too charged in it being overly Japanese, you get a sense of world unity and understanding. I'm just saying. |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2419 Location: Germany |
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I don´t know, Robotech, Star Blazers etc. were hits in the 80s and anime isn´t really all that hot with the US public right now if compared to the late 90s to mid 00s. IGN for example had 2 anime channels fail in the last decade, yet every single comic show needs an episode by episode review. Those get view from their teen and young adult demographic, the anime stuff doesn´t.
And about DBZ. Well, it´s Z part that hit big and not the original, GT or likely Super. Even the much hyped new game is a Z adaptation. What sticks out to me about the DBZ fanbase of the 00s is that it´s nearly a decade older than the intended one in Japan. Many of the Netflix anime noticeably target audiences out of their teens so they seemingly have a similar view as me as to who their viewers are. Hm. The biggest problems the industry faces is that the new kid shows don´t play outside of Japan. Yo Kai Watch, Monster Hunter Stories etc. only succeeded in Japan, something that clearly harms the sales of those games. I would continue mining that market, to bring new blood into the industry. The first anime i saw were kids shows after all. Namely Arabian Nights: Sinbad's Adventures, Jungle Book Shōnen Mowgli and other children book adaptations. Having a Hollywood adaption succeed would be nice too but all the brands they are adapting right now tend to be at least a decade old. |
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Dr.N0
Posts: 149 |
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rizuchan
 Posts: 974 Location: Kansas |
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And it's interesting, because the reason I (and so many others in the US, I wager) fell in love with anime is because it was so very different than anything that was available in the US. I always felt like the vast majority of stuff on US television and in movies just wasn't written for me. (And that's especially gotten worse in recent years since Romcoms have gone the way of the dodo to make room for more superheroes.)
Just the way it looked was so completely different. This isn't as true anymore with digipaint, but anime in the 80s/90s had that beautiful pastel cell aesthetic. I'm going to wax nostalgic, but I fell in love with "anime" when I saw the opening video for Sonic CD. I had grown up on the american Sonic TV show and comic, and I just loved how the Japanese Sonic was more... simplistic? Fewer lines, more subdued colors, somehow just a little bit cuter. It seemed like the perfect example between what [marketing people thought] american audiences want/expect vs Japanese audience. Anyway, I was always a little worried that as production companies became more conscious of American audiences that anime might lose some of what I loved about it. But gladly that doesn't seem to be the case. If anything I think anime is starting to do a very good job of combining what made anime so unique with some of the better aspects of US-made entertainment. And there's still plenty of weird niche shows for me to enjoy. |
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