Forum - View topicWhy hasn't Magical Girl anime been popular on American TV after Sailor Moon?
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mgree0032
Posts: 290 |
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In 1995, DiC Entertainment, LP, by then a subsidiary of ABC, acquired the North American license to Sailor Moon. The wildly popular Shojo anime that breathed new life into the stagnating Magical Girl genre by incorporating elements from Shonen and Tokasatsu shows. Like most anime at the time, Sailor Moon, despite being aimed at an audience of young girls, featured content and subject matter that executives at DiC felt wouldn't fly with American children. The initial English adaptation of Sailor Moon featured numerous changes such as removal of Japanese names and locations, toned down violence, removal of objectionable content such as death, alcohol, and darker, more dramatic elements being either removed or lightened up to appeal to younger children. PSA segments known as "Sailor Says" were also added at the end of every episode to appease stations who wanted to air it.
The series premiered in syndication September 11th, 1995, but was taken off after only 2 seasons due to low ratings, largely caused by stations airing it in dead timeslots. After a brief re-run on USA Network, the show eventually ended up in the hands of Cartoon Network, Airing alongside Dragon Ball Z on the weekday Toonami block. Sailor Moon experienced newfound success, especially among the then niche demographic of girls aged 9-14, which prompted CN to order a third season from new distributor, Cloverway, Inc., which premiered in 2000. The Cloverway dub featured the original music, and (infamous "Cousins" incident aside) far less censorship than DiC's production thanks to the looser standards of the Cable Broadcaster. In 2014, Viz Media announced that the 90s anime would get a redub with a whole new dub cast to go along with the Crystal reboot saga and the resurgence of the anime is back again. But with Sailor Moon now being a hit, why wasn't it followed up on properly? At least with Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z, networks scrambled to get their own Mon series and Shonen anime on air to replicate their success, but every Shojo/Magical Girl series that could've been a hit on TV, never got proper airings. Cardcaptors infamously stripped the "Shojo" out of Cardcaptor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth was rejected by networks, Smile Precure being butchered by Saban Brands, Pretty Cure only aired in Canada, ADV dropped Mermaid Melody as fast as they took it up, and Tokyo Mew Mew and Ojama Doremi have been unsuccessful when they were licensed by 4Kids. Why was it so hard to follow up on the success of Sailor Moon during this period? |
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Southkaio
Posts: 379 |
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More than likely it was the distributors' intent to dub selected episodes. Nelvana simply selected 39 episodes (8-46) and the movie of ''Cardcaptor Sakura'', while 4Kids Entertainment intended to dub only the first 26 episodes of ''Tokyo Mew Mew'' as a sci-fi low fantasy. |
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FishLion
 Posts: 175 |
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In my opinion it is a marketing issue. Pokemon and DBZ both have big tents of fans that are hard to replicate elsewhere. Pokemon is naturally kid friendly and still appealing to broader audiences without too much needing to be changed. Dragon Ball Z is something that was completely unique and has no equivalent in American media, as well as the fact they you can edit it heavily and still be compelling due to the excellent action. That means that anime targeted at girls were edited to try and make them more appealing boys for the very successful shounen market.
Then you have magical girl shows, which have a lot more weight placed on interpersonal relationships. Sailor Moon worked because the parts they didn't edit down were compelling enough to appeal to a broad range of fans and especially teens due to things like character age and plot. If you edit the more iffy parts of a show centering on teenagers fighting for justice and having dramatic romance with a mysterious stranger, there is plenty for older kids and teens to latch on to. Meanwhile, other magical girl shows are nearly stripped bare by the editing and focus on kids (meaning even harsher edits so parents didn't throw a fit). If you edit Card Captor Sakura so there isn't romance , the characters are more aggressive, completely cut half the episodes and reorder them, it isn't the same show at all. The show is very relationship-centric, with friendship and romance and familial love motivating a lot of the actions. They removed those parts thinking that boys would not like romance or female main characters and they wanted to capture that anime watching boy demographic that other shows were building. Sure you can still see her capture cards and all, but everything that made the show special and gave meaning to those actions has been carved away. When I looked into the differences, I even found someone say this specifically: "I remember as a kid seeing the promo commercials for the show and getting excited for it, then when I watched the first episode I got really confused and thought I missed the actual premiere date. This girl was trying to catch a card...but she already had cards...but they never explained how she got the ones she already had...I ended up tuning out because of how confusing it was." In other words, American licensors and localizers looked down on their audience so badly that they butchered the show to make it conform to their standards of what anime was already successful and what they thought would sell. Other anime has been edited heavily, but since many shojo series focus on things marketers thought were unappealing to boys. They tried to have their cake and eat it too by stripping everything too feminine from a series designed for girls to appeal for boys, and then neither boys nor girl found anything appealing enough to latch onto. Most people I know who liked Magical Girl shows as a child and haven't watched one recently really enjoy the characters or the visuals, no one has told me about any of the plots outside of a premise. Most of them fell off from watching them because networks stopped licensing them when they weren't profitable. Speaking for my peer group, due to our age when they didn't keep coming out we just took at face value that they ended and didn't think to look into a more complete version of the series or other series that might be similar but were never brought over.. It's unfortunate too, because this created a lasting impression that media targeted at girls was less successful when really I think if they had left more of the original charm intact that it could have survived some edits, but they didn't understand the core appeal. I am deeply, deeply thankful that fandom has led me back to these shows. I was one of those people attached to the visuals and the characters of Magical Girls, so rediscovering them with all of the added depth I never got to see as a child is incredible |
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 5068 |
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I think it all came down to a lack of toy deals. With Sailor Moon even back in the mid 90s there was always tons of dolls, plastic wands, a card game, a table top RPG, and a Windows 95 game. Mew Mew Power was actually quite successful in ratings on 4Kids TV but they were unable to secure toy deals and the Japanese licensors were also reportedly unsatisfied with the dub. Doremi was also the case that there was little in the way of toys made for the show in the US. Also with a lot of the 4Kids magical girl shows came out in the era where more casual audiences had access to high speed Internet and it was easier to just download the fansubs while Sailor Moon came out in the era where you had to rely on VHS fansub trading to watch any of the original show and official subs didn't come till later. By the time Mew Mew Power was airing I had already been watching the fansubs of the original and so I didn't have a need to wake up at 8:00 am to watch a localized dub. Likewise Cardcaptors the sub VHS tapes and DVDs from Pioneer came out pretty quickly in the US and quickly outsold the dub because there was no need to watch it when a superior version and the manga were easily available.
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FishLion
Posts: 175 |
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The availability argument really makes sense to me outside of the toy factors, the amount of content cut from shows targeted at children means that without toys to sell and a better version easily accessible, there wouldn't really be staying power. I am glad in this age I can access the uncut CCS dub, I know the Japanese voice acting is superior, but it kind of recreates the fun of Saturday morning cartoons while I still get all the stuff they tried to cut
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Flash33
 Posts: 62 Location: Florida |
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I think it's a bunch of contributing factors, but here's some that I can think of in no particular order.
1. Availability/options. Back in the 90s & early 00s not everyone had access to solid internet, and even if they did there's no guarantee they knew what to look for outside of word of mouth or blindly/randomly guessing. With the rise of the internet people now have more options for available shows to watch and don't have to wake up early to catch shows, and if they still want to watch shows on TV they can always record them on their VHSs and/or DVRs to watch them later. 2. Reputation. While most people (often kids) watching at the time likely weren't aware of it, as they grew older/more knowledgeable they learned that the shows they watched were heavily edited to be more kid/family friendly or otherwise to fit/conform to Broadcast Standards & Practices (whether by the network or in general varies from region to region). While kid/family shows aren't themselves bad the amount of edits done to them often turned them into different shows entirely at worst (Cardcaptor Sakura (turned into Cardcaptors), DiC Sailor Moon) or downplayed/watered down their more important/serious moments at best (4Kids One Piece, Yugioh, S1 Bakugan), something that still sadly happens today with shows like Pokemon (see SM064 & SM118) and other kid targeted shows. This naturally didn't sit well with fans who then decided to check out the original/better versions (sub or dub) and/or make better dubs that can be or already have been released on streaming platforms like Youtube, Hidive or Crunchyroll, which also meant less time watching TV as why bother watching a heavily Bowdlerized show on TV when you could just not? 3. Timeslots. Most shows at the time aired either very early or very late (even the revived Toonami, which airs shows as uncut as possible (OPs are shortened & EDs are often cut as they're required to do but that's about it in terms of forced edits they make), suffers from this due to airing on Adult Swim), and sometimes the air time would change without warning or notice (i.e. a show supposed to air at 6:30 PM would air at 7:30 PM instead), with the listings you'd see on TV channel guides not being accurate or updated to reflect the timeslot changes. Depending on how often this happened it could be difficult or impossible to catch the shows you wanted to watch on time, so rather than wake up and/or record and hope you get lucky you could just go online and watch on your own time and at your own pace. 4. Sales. If the DVDs/VHSs/toys/other merch of the shows don't sell then the networks will often pull the plug. An infamous example is Sym-Bionic Titan, which was cancelled after 1 season due to not being able to get a toyline. Even if it sells well many popular series have still been axed due to the higher ups just not "getting it", one example being Hot Wheels: Acceleracers (a personal favorite), which was cancelled on a cliffhanger due to this very reason. There's no doubt more but these are just some of them. Last edited by Flash33 on Thu Jul 25, 2024 9:41 am; edited 5 times in total |
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GNPixie
Posts: 316 |
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I don't know about America since I'm not a American but I distinctly remember both the Teletoon airing of Nelvena's 'uncut' Cardcaptors dub and YTV's airing of the Pretty Cure being relatively popular during their period when they aired, especially the former since it was a common talking point on the school playground at the time amongst my year peer groups.
I think the big thing when it comes down to it is merch; most of the series were a yearly thing but merch for them were relatively hard to come by if you weren't importing, etc. which probably put a damper on any sort of lasting staying power once the show's TV run was done since they had no real reason to air it another time.
Nelvena did do the full series run, all 70 episodes in fact. The US airing just did so notoriously bad, both due to the further editing and the fact they wasn't any interest, that they never aired the rest. Teletoon in Canada aired the full 70 episodes, both in English and with a French dub iirc and Teletoon pushed the series hard for what it was worth. |
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FishLion
Posts: 175 |
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What I heard is the network is the one that did the editing, so even though Nelvana did dub all 70 episodes, the way people in America remember it is "The Nelvana dub is an awful hack job of an edit and the Animax one is decent and uncut." So while you are right that they stopped because it did so bad, it was the networks fault for editing it so extremely. Also, even the episodes that aired weren't aired in full, a lot was taken out and then the remainder was spliced together from my understanding |
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