Forum - View topicAnswerman - How Do Japanese Producers Factor Cultural Differences Into Their Sales Plans?
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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This isn't even really something specific to what works from one region will or won't catch on in another. Filmmakers and TV producers frequently struggle to figure out what they can do that will catch on in their own market. Things that in theory should don't, things that no-one expects to do. Occasionally it's enough to just be different from whatever the currently overdone thing is and halfway competently made and you've got a hit.
Those are easy to explain: they're action-oriented series. If you can fairly accurately describe it as "this guy/these guys fight these other guys" there's a considerably better than even chance of it catching on. As long as lack of familiarity with Journey to the West* or Shinto/Buddhist concepts or whatever doesn't impede one's enjoyment of watching people beat each other up, that's at worst irrelevant trivia about the show, not any real point against it. *Not quite as unknown as you might think. There's a generation of Australians who, even if they don't know it's called Journey to the West, if told the details will recognise it as "oh, like Monkey Magic". |
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MoonPhase1
Posts: 492 |
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Well Detective Conan aired on Adult Swim Action so it wasn’t marketed for kids in the states. Teens maybe but it wasn’t on like say Toonami which would have Edited it at the time. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1817 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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The Tagalog dub left all the names in Japanese. Same with the Animax Asia English dub with Andrea Kwan as Conan. |
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zenbud
Posts: 96 |
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Hasbro and Precure is one of those things with that terrible Glitter force.
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I'll be honest here. Even though I ought to know better than to judge an anime's content by some promo art, I drew the exact same conclusion about Detective Conan. Given the art style I assumed it was some kiddy show. And I can't speak for all Western otaku, but the character designs are certainly not appealing to me. I think Akanue made a good point about it being in a strange spot for localization, which might explain why it's not so well known here. The murder angle made it inappropriate for it to be marketed as a kid's show, but the character designs make it less attractive for older audiences. |
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CastMember1991
 Posts: 858 |
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Actually, no one I know has any idea what Neon Genesis Evangelion is outside of someone I knew from a church youth group I used to attend in NC who is a big fan of Japanese culture. So, even Evangelion is more of a niche series at best outside of hardcore anime fans, largely because of its psychological horror elements. Most of my peers are more into franchises like Marvel, Stranger Things, Star Wars and whatnot. And when it comes to Japanese anime and video games, the few that were really able to break into the mainstream were shows like Dragon Ball Z or anything from Nintendo (i.e. Super Mario, Pokémon). |
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jdnation
Posts: 1998 |
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Could just be a first impressions thing.
Detective Conan looks like a little nerd. Chihiro is a little girl doing things we expect little girls to do. For appearances sake, only one of these can be taken seriously. So it probably boils down to "Does it look cool?" Of course it's unfair to compare a major film with Disney backing like Spirited Away, with a long-running TV series like Detective Conan. Also America has lots of detective programs. But Spirited away...? Now THAT looks different and new! I'll take a ticket to that! It fills a gap that is missing. Yokai Watch was already filled by Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, etc. That market has been saturated. Best idea is to find a vacuum, and fill it with something that's been missing. Or give us something we didn't know we wanted. If some series comes up like that - example - Attack on Titan, that when you look at it you can go, "Hey! That's... different. And it looks cool!" then you've likely got a hit on your hands. Of course there's tons of other factors too, like target audience, subject matter, age rating, etc. but this is essentially what it is overall. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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Two comments. First, I don't mean to speak for j_plex here, but I think they used it as an example of one popular action show. The point wasn't that "Everyone has seen Eva" but rather "between Eva, Bleach, DBZ, and Pokemon, etc, we can say that Shonen action shows are very popular". After all, you're casting a very wide net. You get the young fans (or the nostalgic old ones) from Pokemon, you get the adult fans with Eva, and everything in between. Second, I think you misunderstand just how influential Eva was/is. It's not unfair to say that the anime market the way it is today in the west is dependent upon Evangelion in one way or another. Love the show or hate the show you can't deny it was a more-than-huge financial success which played a major role in kicking off the anime boom stateside. With the proceeds from Eva, ADV licensed dozens upon dozens of new titles and brought them stateside too. And from an artistic perspective It has been as influential on Anime as Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was to cinema. Just recently it was announced that Evangelion's OP theme, Cruel Angel's Thesis, was voted the most significant Anime song of the last three decades, and it remains so popular that its writer earns nearly a million dollars a year in royalties from it. |
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AmpersandsUnited
Posts: 633 |
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According to the Detective Conan wiki, only a handful of countries localized the series into their own language. Most adaptions kept everything in Japanese. 
It is always possible it was still the Japanese company who asked Funimation to localize the dub, as Japanese companies have had low expectation out of Americans in the past, such as lowering difficulty in video games that come west. But it could also be possible Funimation simply lied about that to justify doing it as well. A similar situation happened with Ghost Stories back in the early 2000s where ADV producers insisted the show was a failure in Japan so the Japanese companies told them to make the dub as inaccurate and jokey as possible. It wasn't until years later people found out Gakkou no Kaidan was actually one of the highest rated anime of the 2000s and extremely successful. |
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CastMember1991
Posts: 858 |
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I definitely understand how influential it is. I'm just saying that I don't think anyone outside of anime fans or film buffs knows what Evangelion is, nor how big of an impact it has on pop culture. |
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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Detective Conan should have aired in a primetime family slot. It clearly wouldn't fit on our children's blocks, nor was it suitable for Adult Swim.
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 661 |
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I agree with this.
But would parents have let their kids watch it with them? |
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CastMember1991
Posts: 858 |
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If that happened, the PTC, Fox News, and other Christian conservative groups would have had a hissy fit. They think the Hallmark Channel, Charlie Brown, and CBN are more appropriate for families than Detective Conan. |
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AkumaChef
Posts: 821 |
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I agree with that statement, but the previous one implied that it was only known to "hardcore anime fans". That's what I take issue with. Anyone who was into Anime from the mid-90's through the 2000's would CERTAINLY know what Eva was, even if it wasn't their cup of tea. I suppose that now the series is 20 years old there are probably some young fans who aren't yet familiar with it, but generally speaking I'd say that an anime fan not knowing about Evangelion is like a cinema fan not being aware of Star Wars. It's hard for me to imagine an Anime fan not being aware of Eva unless they are so new to the scene they haven't yet heard about the classics or other big influential titles. |
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 661 |
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Detective Conan and Shin-chan (nobody mentioned this one, so that’s why I’m bringing it up) are just really awkward to market properly in the Anglosphere. They have a lot of content that would be considered values dissonance for kids here, but removing a lot of that stuff out would take away their uniqueness from similar shows. FUNimation tried rather hard to market them toward the teen/adult crowd, and while both did manage to gain a small cult following, the company dropped both shows for one major reason: the amount of fans actually supporting them weren’t enough for the company to justify releasing more.
Both shows seem like they would do better with anime fans, but shows with hundreds and hundreds of episode not named One Piece, Dragon Ball, Bleach, Faiy Tail, or Naruto are too unattractive for that crowd. Sub-only streams are pretty much the only viable option at this point. While Crunchyroll has been doing this with DC for the past few years, they have yet to do so with Shin-chan. Either they think the demand for the latter show isn’t there, TV Asahi doesn’t want the Japanese version to stream outside of Japan, trying to get the international streaming rights for the Japanese version cleared is such a huge pain in the butt that nobody feels like dealing with it right now, or some insane combination of all three reasons. Last edited by OjaruFan2 on Fri Mar 08, 2019 4:19 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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