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Last edited by Yashouzoid on Fri Feb 24, 2006 11:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

I've heard this from two people so I think it's legit.

At NY Comic Con, Al Kahn pretty much said that manga will fail in the US because kids don't read and it will always be that way. To add insult to injury: he said this right next to Kodansha and Dark Horse.

Basically, he's a humongous dick. Your thoughts? Here's mine:

Good lord, how much of a worthless piece of crap are you? You're running a company that relies heavily on co-funding and localizing foreign shows, usually Japanese, and you spew this bull?

Honestly, has this guy ever read the Top 150 booklists? Does 200,000 subscribers to Shonen Jump mean anything to him? What about Naruto, Fullmetal Alchemist, Kingdom Hearts, Fruits Basket, etc. etc. constantly making rounds on the Top 150 U.S. Booklists? What about Tokyo Mew Mew Ala Mode, a spin-off of his own damn property, which has been reported to actually be doing well in sales.

And how does he get off limiting his statement to manga? By this logic, shouldn't just about EVERY book genre that tends to aim at children like, not exist? Would we even have books today?

Seriously, what an idiot.

edit: Now you can hear the bastard. Yay!

http://community.livejournal.com/mangacast/142019.html

Fact: Al Kahn is an idiot.

This has been proven time and time again.

[Edit - Sorry for the unintelligent post]

Last edited by Yashouzoid on Sat Feb 25, 2006 1:21 am; edited 1 time in total

HitokiriShadow wrote:

Fact: Al Kahn is an idiot.

This has been proven time and time again.

Yes, but this is the most solid example.

I like how The Beat put it:

Heidi MacDonald wrote:

Brandishing the kind of bravado only found in self made Hollywood moguls, Kahn let loose frank comment after frank comment like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was created by two drunks in Massachusetts."

I think the big mistake was letting a TV-and-merch type sit on a panel where everyone else was coming in from comics and publishing. Yeah, Al Kahn can get his shows on TV, have 8-year-olds fall in love with it, and buy all the toys. But you know what? This is NY COMIC-CON. This is the MANGA PANEL at NY Comic-con. And if Mr. Trailer Trash Boob Tube is going to sit there and talk down to essentially his entire audience, he's going to get what's coming to him. It's like a white supremacist showing up at a NAACP convention.

Yashouzoid wrote:

I've heard this from two people so I think it's legit.

At NY Comic Con, Al Kahn pretty much said that manga will fail in the US because kids don't read and it will always be that way. To add insult to injury: he said this right next to Kodansha and Dark Horse.
............
edit: Now you can hear the bastard. Yay!

http://community.livejournal.com/mangacast/142019.html

Actually, he would've been pummeled by at least 5 of the panel memembers:

Quote:

- Mike Bailiff: Senior Vice President, ADV Films

- Liza Coppola: Vice President, Viz Media

- Al Kahn: CEO, 4Kids Entertainment, Inc.

- Mike Kiley: Publisher, Tokyopop

- Dallas Middaugh: Director of Manga, Del Rey Books

- John O'Donnell: CEO, Central Park Media

- Tomoko Suga: Senior Manager, Foreign Rights Department. Kodansha

Yep, 5 outta 6 is a good score.

Let's see:

Probably alienated and gave the Kodansha rep some very ugly steriotypes (and possibly ruined any chances of Kahn getting some good properties to butc.....erm, aquire.)

Maybe soured Viz Media to a point.

The rest could care less.

Here's a question for all of you:

Is this actually going to become a constructive, intelligent thread about 4Kids at any point, or is it just going to be more immature "lol suck" mindless bashing that I'd be better off just locking right now? Because while we appreciate the former, the latter really is not accepted much around these parts as I'm sure most of you ought to know by now. And sadly, this thread has thus far been pretty much nothing but the latter, so...

Last edited by darkhunter on Sat Feb 25, 2006 12:55 am; edited 1 time in total

All thebashing is mostly because of all the personal (bias) feeling towards one person. I mean it's okay to dislike a company and express how you feel but to keep bashing it and resorting to name calling is just immature.

Anyways, there's an article on PublisherWeekly that explain the situation more clearly.

Quote:

But the show stopper on the panel was Kahn, who grabbed everyone's attention when he announced that manga is more of a content problem than a content solution because the U.S. is not a reading culture and American children aren't readers. And in case anyone missed it, he repeated it several times: "U.S. kids don't read!"

That seemed to really tick off the audience, particularly the librarians—there was even some hissing. After the provocative statements, Kahn's point was that entertainment firms need to think beyond print to digitizing content for a generation that will get most of its content electronically. "The content is disposable," Kahn said. "More and more of it is available for free." He noted that many people in the U.S. walk around with MP3 players or other electronic devices, whereas in Japan, everyone on the subway seems to have a "3,000-page manga."

Last edited by PantsGoblin on Sat Feb 25, 2006 1:01 am; edited 1 time in total

I listened to what Al Kahn said on that panel and wrote down his exact words on his comment on manga:

Al Kahn wrote:

I think manga is a problem. It's a problem because we're in a culture that is not a reading culture. The kids today don't read. They read less today. Every survey they're watching more television, they're on the internet more. And that content, although being keen, is very disposable because the way content gets put out now, it's gonna be put out free. More and more content will be available for free. You go to internet, you'll be able to download. We're streaming most of our shows. The reason why we're streaming them is we want kids to watch them as much as they can so they get vested in the concept and go out and buy products. The products ain't free. The content is gonna be free. And manga, in my mind, is trying to put a square peg into a round hole in the United States. It will never be a big deal here for kids that are into the computer or the internet generation. So they're not gonna read, they haven't read, it's not gonna start now.

One more comment I want to say on this is that after he said "It will never be a big deal here" he took a slight pause before saying "for kids" as if he wasn't going to say anymore but had to think about how stupid it was to say that considering where he was.

And just for fun he called "Naruto", "Naratu". It made me laugh.

Nagisa wrote:

Here's a question for all of you:

Is this actually going to become a constructive, intelligent thread about 4Kids at any point, or is it just going to be more immature "lol suck" mindless bashing that I'd be better off just locking right now? Because while we appreciate the former, the latter really is not accepted much around these parts as I'm sure most of you ought to know by now. And sadly, this thread has thus far been pretty much nothing but the latter, so...

I'm really not sure it's possible to have a constructive thread about 4kids or Al Kahn. But we could try.

He is, however, obviously wrong. Harry Potter became very popular and the movies where a result of the books' popularity not vice versa. In addition, the manga market seems to be doing very well (aside from ADV'd blunders). Several manga have made Top 150 lists, some even breaking the top 50.

And I'm sorry I didn't say anything else before, but I stand by what I said. He may be a rich idiot, but he's still an idiot. He is arrogant and out of touch with the anime fandom. Sure, he may get a lot of sales from cut DVDs and merchandise bought by parents for their 6 year olds, but the anime fandom is decent sized market and he's missing out on some money by not just ignoring them but by actively alienating and antagonizing them.

PantsGoblin wrote:

I listened to what Al Kahn said on that panel and wrote down his exact words on his comment on manga:

Al Kahn wrote:

I think manga is a problem. It's a problem because we're in a culture that is not a reading culture. The kids today don't read. They read less today. Every survey they're watching more television, they're on the internet more. And that content, although being keen, is very disposable because the way content gets put out now, it's gonna be put out free. More and more content will be available for free. You go to internet, you'll be able to download. We're streaming most of our shows. The reason why we're streaming them is we want kids to watch them as much as they can so they get vested in the concept and go out and buy products. The products ain't free. The content is gonna be free. And manga, in my mind, is trying to put a square peg into a round hole in the United States. It will never be a big deal here for kids that are into the computer or the internet generation. So they're not gonna read, they haven't read, it's not gonna start now.

One more comment I want to say on this is that after he said "It will never be a big deal here" he took a slight pause before saying "for kids" as if he wasn't going to say anymore but had to think about how stupid it was to say that considering where he was.

To an extent, he has a point. Kids these days read less and less and play games and watch TV more and more. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean we should just stop giving them things to read. Not reading is a bad thing. We shouldn't just say "well, that's the way it is" and just stop. If anything, manga could be a good way to get kids started reading.

Last edited by v1cious on Sat Feb 25, 2006 1:30 am; edited 4 times in total

nice to see what he thinks about his consumers.

he talks about digital, but what the hell does he think kids are doing on the internet? studies have shown kids that kids can learn literacy through the internet. the argument just doesn't make any sense, that's why he got laughed at.

oh and you just gotta love how he says that kids who watch Pokemon don't know anything about where it comes from. I wonder why Al? it's obvious by the way that he talks that doesn't even like anime(slanty eyes and eating rice"

Nagisa wrote:

Here's a question for all of you:

Is this actually going to become a constructive, intelligent thread about 4Kids at any point, or is it just going to be more immature "lol suck" mindless bashing that I'd be better off just locking right now? Because while we appreciate the former, the latter really is not accepted much around these parts as I'm sure most of you ought to know by now. And sadly, this thread has thus far been pretty much nothing but the latter, so...

My first post may have been a little more aggressive than what's preferable I'm sure, but honestly, it just astounds me how guys like Al here are the ones calling the shots.

I'm not willing to tolerate his ignorance all that much, either. He's made such misinformed, blanket statements about an entire industry, one that he's closely connected to no less. I wouldn't be surprised if there were more Shonen Jump readers than 4Kids TV viewers. He seems to highly underestimate the intelligence of children, too, like saying they don't read - why do we have series like Harry Potter? The trashy, angsty teen novels? And who says that kids are the only ones who could possibly be into manga? I seriously wonder if he even thinks before he speaks.

This goes beyond the whole "Manga sucks" thing, too. He just pretty much claimed that 4Kids represents Sailor Moon. How can anyone defend this man, much less support him?

BTW, I don't even think there were that many unintelligent posts beyond the first couple, so yeah...

HitokiriShadow wrote:

To an extent, he has a point. Kids these days read less and less and play games and watch TV more and more. HOWEVER, that doesn't mean we should just stop giving them things to read. Not reading is a bad thing. We shouldn't just say "well, that's the way it is" and just stop. If anything, manga could be a good way to get kids started reading.

That's actually what one of the other panelists said as a response:

Publishers Weekly wrote:

Liza Coppola quickly responded by pointing out Viz Media’s partnership with the Read for America literacy campaign. “Manga is a great medium to bring kids back to reading,” she asserted. She also noted the positive response from librarians to manga.

(of course, manga is itself a form of reading....)

And I don't know what this "internet generation" is that Kahn speaks of, but I gave my 10-year-old cousin a Tokyo Mew Mew volume last Christmas, and she practically fell over herself with delight. She knows Mew Mew through the TV show (4Kids gets a point there), but, as I have said somewhere else before, kids love seeing anything with their favorite cartoon characters on it, including comics and other related books.

Nagisa wrote:

Here's a question for all of you:

Is this actually going to become a constructive, intelligent thread about 4Kids at any point, or is it just going to be more immature "lol suck" mindless bashing that I'd be better off just locking right now? Because while we appreciate the former, the latter really is not accepted much around these parts as I'm sure most of you ought to know by now. And sadly, this thread has thus far been pretty much nothing but the latter, so...

Al Kahn said something really, really stupid. He deserves this criticism. It isn't mindless.

So just settle down there.

Yashouzoid wrote:

BTW, I don't even think there were that many unintelligent posts beyond the first couple, so yeah...

While I believe my statement was correct, it was rather unintelligent. I certainly could have added something else to it. Unless some other posts were deleted, the rest were fine in my opinion. Or at least not as bad as mine.

Last edited by Zalis116 on Sat Feb 25, 2006 1:37 am; edited 1 time in total

Perhaps if marketers didn't completely give up on kids reading, they'd realize that kids did still read...sure, lots of fuss is made about video games, but if kids are playing the right games, it's excellent for reading. I have fond memories of playing Final Fantasy 4 back in the early 90s, learning new words and asking my mom about ones that I couldn't figure out from the context.

Sure, we could stand to read more, but those kinds of defeatist attitudes aren't going to help.

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