Hey, Answerman!

Netflix Violation

In case anybody was ever wondering how I come up with the titles for these columns, here is a beat-by-beat insight into my creative process:

"One of the questions is about (specific thing). I should build a pun out of that."

"Lemme just pull up my iTunes and see if there's any song titles that I can match that up with. Maybe like a Bob Dylan song or something. Nothing? Huhn."

"Maybe a movie pun! Or a Latin phrase!! No, that doesn't work either."

"A common phrase!! COME ON THERE MUST BE SOMETHING - no not really"

"ARRRRGH"

"WHY IS THIS WORLD CRUEL AND UNCARING. FROM WHAT DANK PIT OF SOUL-POISON DID I CRAWL OUT OF TO DESERVE THIS CURSE."

"Okay. Just go with the next thing that pops into your head. (writes out lame thing) That works. You always spend too much time on the titles anyway. Pun titles are more Zac's bag, anyway."

So JUST IN CASE anybody's wondering why "Netflix Violation" is the title. The only word that I could think of that reasonably sounded like "Netflix" was "ethics" and there's not a lot to go off of there. Here I am, explaining away my mediocrity.

But even I'll be perfectly honest - Slayers is kind of terrible. Fun-terrible, but still terrible. The characters are fun and likeable, but completely one-dimensional. The villains and hardships they find themselves embroiled in are completely rote. And the jokes suck. Fairy Tail struck me as all those things, and to be honest it's more of a shonen action-show than Slayers is I'll admit - but ostensibly, it scratches the same itch. A buncha fun, wacky characters imbued with magic, thrust into perilous situations with boob jokes aplenty. They're both equally rather mediocre but lighthearted enough to be enjoyable. But I can completely and honestly understand why Fairy Tail is a rather popular series with today's modern anime fans - who would probably take one look at Slayers and simply roll their eyes and move along.

And of course, the truth is - this is an endless cycle! This will continue, onward and onward, until the End Of Time Itself. Today's Fairy Tail fans will grouse uncomfortably in 20 years or so as the next, slickly-produced anime series crops up featuring a band of merry magical misfits on wacky adventures. As always, the song remains the same. In that sense, the storytelling *has* advanced, if only in that the audience has a MUCH different set of expectations and demands than you and I did in the 90's. The standards of animation have advanced with better technology, both in production and also distribution. While I and several others lament the hand-crafted look of a cel-animated show shot on film, there's no QUESTION that anime has benefited tremendously from switching to digital and high definition as the standard.

In other words, for your average anime viewer, I completely understand that they're averse to watching older titles. Whether their rationale can be explained away so neatly is up for discussion, though - but that's almost irrelevant. Sure, Cheers is a much better sitcom than Two And A Half Men, but only an insanely small fraction of viewers of the latter are going to be curious enough to seek out the former.

And that curiosity is the key, really. Because there's really no reason, honestly, for most current anime viewers to go back and watch Tenchi Muyo. Every single element of that show has been done to death by dozens of other shows over the past 20-odd years. Much like how movie audiences yawned at John Carter earlier this year, the individual elements of the original source material have been fed to these younger fans for so long, the original just looks stale and unappetizing. But! BUT!

While stuff like Tenchi Muyo and Slayers has a direct lineage to current shows, there's an astonishing amount of shows that simply aren't made anymore. In the past 20 years, has there ever been a show remotely comparable to Legend of Galactic Heroes? Or Maison Ikkoku? I've searched high and low for another anime as outright bizarre as Elf Princess Rane, to no avail. What about feature films? OVAs? I don't think we'll ever see something as unique as Take The X Train from a mainstream anime studio like Madhouse ever again.

And those "unique" titles are, unfortunately, the ones that suffer in this new-versus-old debate. This silly, silly debate. As an old-timer, which is weird to say as a dude still in his 20's, let me just reiterate - by and large, the majority of anime being produced in Japan is just as good if not better than it ever has been since I first immersed myself in this stuff. Are we just drunk on nostalgia? Absolutely. Except for its excitingly weird and dark ending, there's nothing in Video Girl Ai that's particularly exceptional. I was a younger fan back then, and so I ended up watching as much stuff as I could get my grubby hands on. Considering there was also a lot less of it being made available to me, that meant I ended up watching (and enjoying) a lot of different kinds of shows than I would probably have time for today. If something equivalent to a Video Girl Ai came up nowadays, I'd probably (shamefully) ignore it, until the reviews came in to mark it as a "must see."

Still, nostalgia is a powerful elixir. It's fun to shake our heads in shame at what those poor young kids are into these days. One Direction? Man I remember when I was that age, I was totally into Nirvana and stuff. That was real, man. Alvin & the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked??? I remember when I watched Gremlins on VHS every day when I was five. That was the real deal, man. It's a delightful little blanket of emotional comfort - it's our brains validating our lives and the entertainment we used to distract us from the callousness of the outside world. But maybe, maybe some of those kids listening to today's "garbage" will be curious enough to pick up a Nirvana record at some point. Maybe some of today's kids, whetting their anime appetite with Fairy Tail, will have that intense curiosity and that urge to discover more about this broad medium. Maybe they'll Google something and wind up here on ANN, click on Justin Sevakis' "Buried Treasure" column, and be intrigued enough to track down any number of wonderful, older titles that are simply unrepresented in today's marketplace.

But then I realize, "Oh, that's right, Harmony Gold was trying to get a Robotech movie made." Ah!

Here's the problem - the "Robotech" name and property is still worth quite a bit of money to Harmony Gold. There's a new TV channel that airs an updated and very successful version of My Little Pony. There's a second G.I. Joe movie coming out in a couple months. And the three Transformers movies have made over a billion dollars around the world.

And, more importantly, the merchandising opportunities created by those three resurrected properties bring in millions of dollars for Hasbro.

And by the way, what's happening with that Robotech movie? Hell if anyone knows. Last I checked, there hasn't been any real news on it since three years ago. IMDB still has it listed as "in development" with a very loose "2016" release date. Can't wait for the news that Warner Bros. let its option on the film expire! So then Harmony Gold can shop around the abandoned project to other uninterested movie studios who do the same thing!!

But, here's the thing about movie projects that are "in development": there's still a *LOT* of money being thrown around there. Writers are being hired and fired by the truckload. It's not uncommon for films like this, at this stage, to go through over 20 writers and even more "script doctors." I mean they hired Lawrence freakin' Kasdan to write a script, and I don't think the guy who wrote The Empire Strikes Back works for cheap. (Although he should. Dreamcatcher was pure, distilled awful.) Producers and agents are cashing checks while Warner Bros. throws money in the air, hoping that at some point this will be considered a wise "investment" when this dead project finally lurches to theaters and potentially becomes a huge hit.

Is it a ton of money? Not really, but it's certainly not nothing. Also keep in mind - that recent original Robotech direct-to-DVD movie they made, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, actually sold pretty well. For all of our cries to the Gods to release unfettered Macross product once more, an awful lot of people, outside of anime, still remember Robotech.

And besides, ADV released unfettered Macross not that long ago. It... didn't do so well. See the answer to the above question.

Now, that's no reason to let perfectly fine stuff like Macross Zero and Macross Frontier sit in Harmony Gold's warehouse of death. "Why are they sitting on FREE MONEY??? WHY WON'T THEY LET ME BUY THINGS FROM THEM???" fans often ask. Because, in the mind of Harmony Gold - if they're able to make this Robotech movie, *or* maybe another original animated film or series, they can make even more money than they would releasing an anime series on DVD. Their original Robotech-branded product could reach beyond us niche anime fans and into the broader market! All four quadrants, even!! And the merchandising!!!

But, as a wise man once said, Mo' Money, Mo' Problems - and the problem is that Harmony Gold is simply sowing nothing but acrimony from fans that WOULD give them their money. If you read the movie industry trades (like I do, because I am a sad man), no studio on the face of this Earth would be foolish enough to fund a movie with the budget something like Robotech needs. The only movies Hollywood wants to spend any money on are superhero movies and young-adult novels. Pop sci-fi? Pssh. Unless you've got J.J. Abrams producing, forget it.

But still - that sweet, sweet Hasbro lucre is just too tempting. If a small company like Harmony Gold could harvest even a fraction of that money, they could probably legally kill Harmony Korine and coat his corpse in solid gold. (HARMONY GOLD!!! ugh)

So, here's the absolute honest skinny on where money goes regarding Netflix. They do, in fact, get an up-front royalty payment, from Netflix, for every title that Netflix "licenses" essentially. And, it should be noted, Netflix is a little light in the cash department lately - lots of expensive purchases from Hollywood studios has drained a lot of their capital - so watching any of their anime content is a good way to let Netflix know that their money was well-spent. "Thanks for spending money on Trigun, Netflix! Here are my eyeballs." With something like Hulu, that's still ad-based - and, due to their huge subscriber base, they pay their rights-holders the best share of ad-rates in the streaming video business. And if the show is popular - like I dunno Naruto Shippuden or something - those ad dollars add up to a lot.

More important than the royalties, though, is the simple fact that these services are HUGE now. Huge to the point that it's actually a pretty terrific way for new fans to discover these shows - or, possibly maybe, new fans to discover anime itself! And new fans are always a good thing; statistically speaking, the better a show performs on Netflix, the more DVDs and Blu Rays tend to sell. And that is a definitive Good Thing for everybody.

So, make no mistake - no anime company out there is getting "burned" by your Netflix binging. They're pleased as punch, to be frank. Anime companies take it as a sign that their content is still valuable and that their license still has audience appeal. Major movie and television studios, on the other hand, are the ones that are having a problem with Netflix and its ilk - they see it as a threat to cable networks, as cable subscriptions decline while Netflix and Hulu continue to rise. (Hence the kerfluffle recently where Hulu threatened to pull its services to anyone without an accompanying cable subscription.) Cable networks, of course, pay outrageous sums of money to acquire major films and TV shows. Will any of those same cable networks pay anything to acquire any anime? Probably not. And if they do, it's a pittance. Unlikely to be any more lucrative than Netflix, at least.

So, it's a good thing. Don't feel guilty. Be glad! Your Netflix subscription and Hulu watching puts honest money in the right pockets and everybody but the greediest and most frightened major studios are happy with the arrangement. So don't pack your bags for the Guilt Trip just yet.

But of course, their main priority is how their various shows are performing in their main market - Japan, obviously. That's where they're going to make most of their money in merchandising and DVD and Blu Ray sales. But they are closely watching their shows' performance on Crunchyroll and Hulu for a number of reasons. One very big reason is piracy - they are scared to death that evil pirates are going to steal every anime they upload. Of which, sadly, there is precedent, given the One Piece leaks and HorribleSubs and such.

But beyond the constant worry that the foreign audience is going to steal everything they produce, there's also the fact that us US fans, on occasion, buy DVDs and Blu Rays as well. Those DVDs and Blu Rays tend not to cost as much as their Japanese counterparts (Aniplex USA notwithstanding), so the profit margin is a lot slimmer - nonetheless, every Japanese production company enjoys it when they know they've got a title on their hands that can sell overseas. But because there's no real place on Western television anymore for anime, the one outlet to gauge potential interest is by monitoring the simulcasts.

I don't think you should be *terribly* concerned that Japanese companies would pull a series two episodes before completion. I don't think there's any real precedent for that aside from the live-action incident you mentioned. There's certainly been delays that've upset people, but nothing so drastic as an outright removal of content.

Ninja anime tend to do pretty well over here. Naruto, Ninja Scroll, Dagger of Kamui. Meanwhile there's at least one or two samurai dramas every season, or shows like Sengoku Collection that revel in samurai cliches. The only new ninja show this season is a Naruto spinoff. Last season, it was... that boob-ninjutsu show that I can't remember the name of and why bother, because life's too short, and I right? No? Okay fine, Manyuu Hiken-cho.

My guess is that there simply isn't a long, storied history of ninja... stuff like there is with samurai dramas. Meanwhile, us kids here in the West grew up with ninjas. Ninjas of the Teenaged Mutant Turtle variety, ninjas of the Sho Kosugi variety, and of course Ninjer Empires.

Ninja stuff sells well here. Maybe they just didn't get the memo that kids in the West are kind of obsessed with ninjas. And thanks for telling me you're not trolling! Always appreciated.