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Answerman - Why Do TV Networks Air Reboots Instead Of Originals?


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MoonPhase1



Joined: 29 Nov 2007
Posts: 492
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 10:42 am Reply with quote
fuuma_monou wrote:
Toonami Asia has the annoying practice of cropping 4:3 shows into fake widescreen. On the SD feed. (AFAIK there isn't an HD feed.)


Toonami America puts this background of outerspace in 4:3 shows to cover the black borders on the sides.

And also the original Hunter x Hunter was on the Funimation Channel. While not something more mainstream like Toonami but it definitely did air in America on TV.

animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-04-06/funimation-channel-adds-viz-anime-starting-late-spring
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Arcwave



Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 246
Location: Seattle
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 2:49 pm Reply with quote
I'd love to see a classic throwback Z run, OG Ocean Studios dub for the first 2 seasons followed by the initial 1999 Funi broadcast of Z <onward>.

One can dream...
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 5888
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 4:58 pm Reply with quote
G S Palmer wrote:

I can't believe they didn't call it "The Lupin Loop". What a missed opportunity.


Given that loops aren't recurring processes like a cycle it's fine.

Primus wrote:


The first 98 episodes of Dragon Ball Kai are 4:3. The show was successful in the US on Nicktoons, The CW and Toonami. Each of them presented it in 4:3. If that was such a huge turn off, why did Toonami grab Kai instead of running the 16:9 crop of Z for those episodes?



....because it would make no sense given Kai was supposed to be Dragonball Z as it was meant to be.....even if it lead to awkwardness and cries of laziness.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 8:13 pm Reply with quote
Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
samuelp wrote:
Heck you could throw in like trivia or notes about the show on the sidebars to make it more interesting.

I don't really see that happening for a full-length episode of anything or a movie. (Yes, movie. Lots of movies, primarily in the black and white era, were originally shot and shown 4:3.) Trivia and notes like that have to be researched, compiled, and set on the screen, which is employee man-hours and therefore expense that TV networks are unlikely to be seen as worthwhile for old content that they're mostly showing to fill time.


There's also how most people wouldn't really be too interested in trivia, production information, little details, and such. They're just there to watch the thing and enjoy the story. The people who would be interested are the hardcore fans and trivia people (me falling into the latter category, which is why I go for whatever home video release has the most special features in regards to its production).

Also, it'd be really awkward to fit them into pillarboxes. Letterboxes, sure, but definitely not pillarboxes. English is awkward to read vertically.
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Wyvern



Joined: 01 Sep 2004
Posts: 1545
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 8:29 pm Reply with quote
Xe4 wrote:
It's worth noting that The Wire was originally shot in 16:9 because it came at the time which it was pretty obvious that was the format for the digital future. Simon shot it in that and cut it down so as to future proof the series.


Smart man. A lot of classic 4:3 shows end up looking awful when they're upscaled to 16:9.

My favorite example of this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was changed to widescreen by expanding the image to show parts of each scene that viewers weren't originally supposed to see. Sometimes this means you see stuff like the boom mike next to an actor's head, or in one case, a cameraman standing to the side. It's a bit of a mess.
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Kalessin



Joined: 15 Aug 2007
Posts: 931
PostPosted: Thu Jan 18, 2018 11:41 pm Reply with quote
Dr. Wily wrote:
But I do understand. I try to appreciate the classics, but I remember long ago when Toonami tried to air the original Gundam, but after watching Gundam Wing I just could not get past how... old the series looked. These days I can cope with such things better, but I'd be lying if I said I seek out old titles rather than watching more contemporary anime.


Yeah, I'm definitely a Gundam fan, and I'd like to watch the original Gundam, and I don't want to watch its sequel shows without watching it first (making me that much more interested in wathing it), but the original Gundam just looks so terrible that I have yet to be able to bring myself to watch it. I've actually been buying all of the Gundam series that Rightstuf has been releasing, so I have plenty of old Gundam to watch, but thus far, most of it just sits on shelf.

I'm definitely not against older anime series the way that a younger fan is likely to be, but there's still a point when it looks bad enough that it's hard to watch - especially if it's not one that you watched and enjoyed when you were younger.

And honestly, there's so much newer anime to watch, that aside from some gems, it probably isn't worth watching a lot of the older stuff, especially if you have a harder time watching stuff that looks old.

Kougeru wrote:
TLDR: The general masses are to blame for everything wrong. The fact that they CROPPED images just makes me want to vomit


Yeah, I don't understand most folks. Sure, black bars suck, by why on earth does anyone think that it's worth cropping - or worse, stretching - the video in order to get rid of them? Cropping at least isn't as obviously bad (much as it's undesirable), since you don't always know that it's been done, but stretching just looks so terrible that I don't understand how anyone can look at it without being disgusted. But I've known folks who didn't notice that everything (including people) were stretched or who kind of sort of noticed that something was wrong but didn't know what it was or think about it much until you fixed the aspect ratio for them. And unfortunately, the fact that you pretty much have to be blind to not notice the black bars means that everyone notices those even if they don't notice cropping or stretching, so that's what they complain about, and the result is that the TV companies too often make TVs default to stretching and broadcasts too often stretch or crop. Fortunately, I think that it's pretty rare that home video releases are stretched or cropped (it's usually left to the TV to muck with the video), but unfortunately, Funimation did not behave when it came to DBZ, and that's that much sadder if it's because of fans complaining that the video wasn't ruined to make it 16:9. The fact that DBZ sells to a much more maintstream crowd than many series and is such a huge seller for them is likely to make them a lot more willing to destroy the video though if that's what enough of the fans want.

Personally, I'd like to pick up DBZ on Blu-ray, but until they release it without cropping or stretching the video, I just can't bring myself to do it anymore than I'd want to pick it up if they dropped out occasional lines of text or cut out sections of the episode.

Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
samuelp wrote:
Has anyone ever attempted to show 4:3 shows with an extra wallpaper on the sides or other stuff to make it look less black pillar-y?

One trick I've seen is copying the left- and right-most whatever percent of the picture, applying a very heavy blur filter to it, and using that to fill the blank area either side of the actual picture.


I've seen the news do this a lot with cell phone footage. It is so distracting and makes it way harder to see the actual footage. I really wish that they'd just use black bars. At least the black bars get out of the way and doesn't distract from the actual image.

BadNewsBlues wrote:
G S Palmer wrote:

I can't believe they didn't call it "The Lupin Loop". What a missed opportunity.


Given that loops aren't recurring processes like a cycle it's fine.


LOL. Clearly, you're not a programmer. In programming, loops are very much recurring - and the buggy ones sometimes loop forever. There, a loop is a piece of code that is run over and over again as long as a particular condition is true.
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Sailor Sedna





PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 12:03 am Reply with quote
Call me old-school, but I don't bother with most of the modern mainstream stuff out there, nor with a lot of mainstream audiences (and I feel out of place in the whole anime/manga community). To me a lot of older anime (Bubblegum Crisis, Sailor Moon Classic - Sailor Stars, DBZ [and including Kai], Saint Seiya, Escaflowne, Oh My Goddess, Dragon Half even), even with whatever flaws/faults they may have, are a lot better than most of the anime nowadays out there, especially ones like Sailor Moon Crystal's first two seasons (I still hate those with a burning passion, and the wretched, rotten fanbase it was attached to ruined them and nearly the manga for me), which was poor in animation, storytelling, and pacing, was just a shot by shot "if you've read the manga, there's no point to watch it" (it's like everything's too fast paced nowadays to me, I don't like the whole 12-13 episode format a lot of anime nowadays do also, as I feel it makes character development suffer for some story based ones), in fact, a lot of anime nowadays are just getting remakes that I don't even know are necessary (Gundam 0079 is getting one too), it's like how there's a lot of reboots you see out there, but it feels like they just only put out a cheaply made anime or poorly made one and slap on a label of a familiar series people love to get it to sell. It feels to me there was more effort, care, and time put into older anime than newer ones (with some exceptions, like I'll say, DBZ Kai, I can understand why some people prefer that).

I know the whole "flashier" thing attracts newer audiences (I say a lot of older anime look more flashier than newer ones though!), but the thing is it feels to me nowadays good anime is few and far in between and hard to find (but same thing could be said about older time periods like the 90's, that one had crappy/mediocre anime that drifted into obscurity too) and it feels like a lot of people are just out of ideas to the point where they just resort doing remakes, and it gets to the point where it's like "been there/done that", where they all look the same and it's like most of no one can think of anything original. I just feel a good amount of anime studios/makers (like Toei Animation mostly nowadays) have just nowadays lost the art of successfully telling stories and making great, enjoyable characters through the anime medium, with some exceptions (Mary and the Witch's Flower from Studio Ponoc, and this new Mazinger Z movie looks cool).

I'm not trying to sound like I want everything to go back to how it used to be, I just mostly prefer stuff done back then than mostly nowadays, most anime and such nowadays just...don't interest me or catch my eye, I don't know why.

I also have a feeling this could happen with Cardcaptor Sakura.


Last edited by Sailor Sedna on Fri Jan 19, 2018 10:42 pm; edited 1 time in total
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 12:28 am Reply with quote
Kalessin wrote:
Yeah, I don't understand most folks. Sure, black bars suck, by why on earth does anyone think that it's worth cropping - or worse, stretching - the video in order to get rid of them? Cropping at least isn't as obviously bad (much as it's undesirable), since you don't always know that it's been done, but stretching just looks so terrible that I don't understand how anyone can look at it without being disgusted. But I've known folks who didn't notice that everything (including people) were stretched or who kind of sort of noticed that something was wrong but didn't know what it was or think about it much until you fixed the aspect ratio for them. And unfortunately, the fact that you pretty much have to be blind to not notice the black bars means that everyone notices those even if they don't notice cropping or stretching, so that's what they complain about, and the result is that the TV companies too often make TVs default to stretching and broadcasts too often stretch or crop.


For better or worse, you got your answer right there: The reason they would rather see a stretched or cropped video rather than a pillarboxed one is specifically because they don't notice the video has been stretched or cropped, whereas pillarboxes are blatantly obvious.

Me, I always thought it was obvious, especially when circles or spheres are present onscreen, until the aforementioned YouTube "stretch" and "crop" tags came out, uploaders started using them, and viewers complained to uploaders like myself who chose the pillarboxes. You wouldn't believe the number of times I had to explain what the "stretch" tag actually does, though luckily (maybe), only one person refused to believe me--all of the others realized what the tags were actually doing.

There are definitely some people who know they're stretched but would rather have that than pillarboxes. For them, they very much value the image taking up all of the screen even if they have to compromise the video itself. And for some others, well, they're not exactly artists or art lovers (excluding the fact that what they're seeing onscreen is, strictly speaking, an art form) and so they don't care, as long as they aren't missing anything (or think they aren't missing anything). A possible analogy is day-old pizza: The crust has hardened up, the cheese has become slightly see-through due to the denatured proteins shifting, and the toppings sometimes slide right off the cheese. Not as good as the pizza when it was fresh, but it's still pizza and I'll still eat it.
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Kalessin



Joined: 15 Aug 2007
Posts: 931
PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 2:09 am Reply with quote
Sailor Sedna wrote:
I know the whole "flashier" thing attracts newer audiences, but the thing is it feels to me nowadays good anime is few and far in between and hard to find (but same thing could be said about older time periods like the 90's, that one had crappy/mediocre anime that drifted into obscurity too) and it feels like a lot of people are just out of ideas to the point where they just resort doing remakes, and it gets to the point where it's like "been there/done that", where they all look the same and it's like most of no one can think of anything original. I just feel a good amount of anime studios/makers (like Toei Animation mostly nowadays) have just nowadays lost the art of successfully telling stories and making great, enjoyable characters through the anime medium, with some exceptions (Mary and the Witch's Flower from Studio Ponoc, and this new Mazinger Z movie looks cool).


I think that the reality of the matter is that there have never been very many really great anime. You get a lot of stuff that's decent but not fantastic, some stuff that's really awesome, and some stuff that's total trash. The old stuff that folks tend to remember and rewatch is the better stuff, but there was plenty of mediocre to decent anime back in the day as well as plenty of trash, just like there is now.

You do end up with trends in tropes and story-telling that may skew things even further depending on your preferences, and some of the changes that have happened due to economics (e.g. the fact that 12 - 13 episode a season are now more common than 24 - 26) aren't necessarily for the better, but overall, I don't think that the number of gems has changed drastically over time. I think that the bigger issue is that over time, the stuff that isn't gems becomes less palatable as you've watched more and more anime.

Sailor Sedna wrote:
I'm not trying to sound like I want everything to go back to how it used to be, I just mostly prefer stuff done back then than mostly nowadays, most anime and such nowadays just...don't interest me or catch my eye, I don't know why.


The biggest thing that I've found is that some tropes have become really annoying to me - either because I've seen them done in a ton of anime for years now and have gotten sick of them, or because I've gotten older, and I have a lower tolerance for them (e.g. most any joke related to a guy accidentally seeing or touching something related to a girl that results in her screaming or slapping him has become incredibly annoying to me, and I wish that they'd just stop that sort of thing entirely). So, while the content hasn't necessarily gotten worse, I have a lower tolerance for a lot of what's being made.

Similarly, a lot of tropes get reused so much that even if they're not annoying, they seem unoriginal and boring. Once you've seen the same thing enough times, it just becomes uninteresting. So, if you had a series that was made 20 years ago that you liked and somehow it were made today instead, it would be uninteresting today simply because you've seen 20 years of anime doing similar stuff.

Really, you run into the same sorts of problems in any sort of story-telling medium though, so I don't think that a lot of this is unique to anime so much as it stands out more due to the fact that anime series are usually short, so you end up watching a lot more of them than you'd watch US shows even if you watch a lot of both, and even if you do a lot of reading, you're likely going to have consumed a lot more anime series than book series simply because it takes so much less time to watch 12 - 26 half-hour episodes than it takes to read a book series - even if it's just a trilogy and the books aren't very thick. So, with anime, the flaws of that tend to come out when you've consumed a lot of series are sometimes more pronounced.
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BadNewsBlues



Joined: 21 Sep 2014
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PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 6:10 am Reply with quote
Sailor Sedna wrote:

I don't like the whole 12-13 episode format a lot of anime nowadays do also,


To be fair having 25 or 50 episodes isn't much better especially if your story is setup in way that even 50 episodes isn't enough to tell your story.


Sailor Sedna wrote:

and it feels like a lot of people are just out of ideas to the point where they just resort doing remakes,


I don't like to think that's the reason the original Gundam is getting a remake (if it is) though more like you have a bunch of different Gundam series and out of all them the original looks the worse tack on the fact that The Origin exists and it's even worse.

Kalessin wrote:

LOL. Clearly, you're not a programmer. In programming, loops are very much recurring - and the buggy ones sometimes loop forever. There, a loop is a piece of code that is run over and over again as long as a particular condition is true.


You're on the money I am not though I told the liberty of looking up the various differences
between cycles and loops and even after that cycle just came off looking like a more practical term. Whereas loops even with to multiple meanings make me think of roller coasters and old school Sonic The Hedgehog.
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Violynne



Joined: 09 May 2014
Posts: 128
PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 8:48 am Reply with quote
I recently popped in a DVD of an older series to see how it looked on my 4K UHD OLED TV and I wanted to vomit. No matter what I did, the image quality was horrible, even with as "native" could get.

Outside the image quality, I couldn't get over how ugly old anime is compared to anime of today. It's so jarring. The one-colored costumes, the overuse of pan and scan, and the repetition of sequences is hard for me to watch today.

While I won't forget many of the classics of yesteryear, I prefer they remain in my head as memories than on a screen using technology which can't cope with the interlaced and limited resolutions it was designed for.

On a separate subject, I also don't care for these "remaster/reboot" piles of garbage being released for the sole purpose of a cash grab.

Either redo the series from scratch or leave it alone. Ruining it by stretching, cropping, and "coloring" it to fit today's screens is an insult to the original.

Now I bide my time and hope Aria isn't bastardized in the same manner with its US bluray debut.
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Chiibi



Joined: 19 Dec 2011
Posts: 4828
PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 1:26 pm Reply with quote
It's a shame....but I figured this would be the case. :/ It doesn't work for HD anymore....
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Sailor Sedna





PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 3:38 pm Reply with quote
Kalessin wrote:
I think that the reality of the matter is that there have never been very many really great anime. You get a lot of stuff that's decent but not fantastic, some stuff that's really awesome, and some stuff that's total trash. The old stuff that folks tend to remember and rewatch is the better stuff, but there was plenty of mediocre to decent anime back in the day as well as plenty of trash, just like there is now.


Agreed, it reminds me of how in a review on Battle Skipper (which was so-so/decent to me) by Bennett the Sage, he mentioned in the beginning how "the vast, vast, VAST MAJORITY of anime released back then...and today, are just mediocre wisps of effervescent nothing; or they're just bad in altogether uninteresting ways." But at least his reviews do uncover hidden gems I've never heard of.

Kalessin wrote:
The biggest thing that I've found is that some tropes have become really annoying to me - either because I've seen them done in a ton of anime for years now and have gotten sick of them, or because I've gotten older, and I have a lower tolerance for them (e.g. most any joke related to a guy accidentally seeing or touching something related to a girl that results in her screaming or slapping him has become incredibly annoying to me, and I wish that they'd just stop that sort of thing entirely). So, while the content hasn't necessarily gotten worse, I have a lower tolerance for a lot of what's being made.

Similarly, a lot of tropes get reused so much that even if they're not annoying, they seem unoriginal and boring. Once you've seen the same thing enough times, it just becomes uninteresting. So, if you had a series that was made 20 years ago that you liked and somehow it were made today instead, it would be uninteresting today simply because you've seen 20 years of anime doing similar stuff.


Maybe that's the problem I'm having...but I don't know. I just really don't know... Sad

BadNewsBlues wrote:


To be fair having 25 or 50 episodes isn't much better especially if your story is setup in way that even 50 episodes isn't enough to tell your story.

I don't like to think that's the reason the original Gundam is getting a remake (if it is) though more like you have a bunch of different Gundam series and out of all them the original looks the worse tack on the fact that The Origin exists and it's even worse.


Agreed on the episode count, it shouldn't be like if I made a 50 episode anime and it was all like "if you've seen the first episode you saw the other 49". And yeah, that is a problem with 0079, its dated look and animation could turn others off.

I also gotta say, how many Gundams is Sunrise gonna make? That franchise is practically their baby.
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leafy sea dragon



Joined: 27 Oct 2009
Posts: 7163
Location: Another Kingdom
PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 7:39 pm Reply with quote
Sailor Sedna wrote:
Agreed on the episode count, it shouldn't be like if I made a 50 episode anime and it was all like "if you've seen the first episode you saw the other 49". And yeah, that is a problem with 0079, its dated look and animation could turn others off.

I also gotta say, how many Gundams is Sunrise gonna make? That franchise is practically their baby.


Sunrise will make as many Gundam series as it takes before the franchise stops being profitable, of course. And as they can always fall back on their die-hard market of collectors and tinkerers, I don't see it becoming unprofitable any time soon short of a scandal or a catastrophic manufacturing incident (or both).

You could potentially argue "if you've seen one episode, you've seen them all" to any episodic show, really. When it becomes a problem is when it plays itself up as a serial and proceeds to stagnate (like Pokémon), promise plot progression that reveals itself as a fake-out and return to the status quo (like Nisekoi), or both (like InuYasha).
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Sailor Sedna





PostPosted: Fri Jan 19, 2018 10:31 pm Reply with quote
I'm guessing Gundam could go on for quite a long time then. Smile

About the episodic thing, Pokémon, I could understand, but I've never seen Inuyasha (want to), so I wouldn't know. Only anime I've seen so far (not many though) that don't seem episodic to me would be older Toei anime or something like Saint Seiya or Sailor Moon (while the latter did have a formula, they did change it up and no two episodes feel the same to me, even with its filler).

Then again, I'm not really an anime maker, I'm just an anime fan (though one who's not really involved that much in the community, like I said, I feel a bit out of place).
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