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Answerman - What Happened To World Masterpiece Theater And Shows Like It?

0nsen wrote:

Ano Hana is moe, WMT isn't. They had the chance to update WMT, but I guess making it moe would've only turned off their core audience.

They kinda did with Les Miserables, show was really good. Kid Cosette was kinda moe.

As always, it is about money and recovering production costs, ignoring pure passion projects that are effectively money sinks or animation demos, it simply is not feasible to see a modern anime production company to regularly make mini-movies adapting foreign stories and make an actual financial return.

It always surprised/confused me that neither of the Anne of Green Gables adaptations wound up on Canadian television. Apparently the first one even get an English dub!

FenixFiesta wrote:

As always, it is about money and recovering production costs, ignoring pure passion projects that are effectively money sinks or animation demos, it simply is not feasible to see a anime production company to regularly make mini-movies adapting foreign stories and make an actual financial return.

Well if there's no audience, and I mean no audience, not in Japan or overseas, it's not a bad thing. They were made in the past, because they made money. You wouldn't make something that has no audience, it's not taking a risk, it is knowingly burning money.

Angel'sArcanum wrote:

Could someone like Discotek potentially put them out if they were willing?

Allow me to speak out of my ass for a while: I don't think there are many difficulties in licensing WMT anime, since from what I gather they were made by a single company. However, I do not belive Discotek will license and release them. While vocal, the ones who, right now, would enjoy the shows enough to buy them is very small. These are anime that basically you can't give away for free, looking at download numbers. I honestly don't think many would pay for them.

However, all is not lost. Flanders, Anne and Heidi have gotten bluray releases in Japan, so there MUST be some interest in those series.

Primus wrote:

It always surprised/confused me that neither of the Anne of Green Gables adaptations wound up on Canadian television. Apparently the first one even get an English dub!

Didn't it air in French on Radio-Canada in the 1980s and/or 1990s?

I grew up watching the Saban adaptations of Little Women and Tom Sawyer on HBO so I've always had a soft spot for the WMT - not only WMT, but the various other anime adaptations of Western kid-lit done by the same studio (Nippon Animation), like "Maya the Bee," "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" and the "Manxmouse" and "Peter of Placid Forest" TV specials that were aired on Nickelodeon. I was an unusual boy - never much into Voltron, Robotech, Star Blazers or the other shounen action series that formed the backbone of most other millennials' budding fandom.

Sadly there just never seemed to be much of a market for it in English-speaking North America, even in Canada where anime like Candy Candy and Honeybee Hutch were regularly aired on Radio-Canada (French-language CBC) and other French language channels.

(Mexico and the rest of Latin America are a different story.)

Contrast that to the Philippines where Princess Sarah was so popular it spawned a domestically produced live-action remake. I guess it's telling that so many of the anime from my formative years of fandom are now showing on a Christian station (Little Women and Swiss Family Robinson along with Tatsunoko's Superbook and Flying House series of Bible stories).

I've always been impressed by the visuals in the WMT series, especially the ones from the '80s and later. Yes, the early ones from the '70s look rough, but by Princess Sarah and Little Women the attention to detail and fluidity in the movement in the animation is simply amazing. Swiss Family Robinson from '81 grabs attention for its eye-popping, colorful backgrounds as well. Given that, even after Miyazaki and Takahata left NA during/after Anne of Green Gables, there was still a lot of cross-pollination between Nippon Animation and the Miyazaki-Takahata core/Studio Ghibli in that era, that shouldn't be surprising. (Speaking of Anne, it's apparently a big reason Prince Edward Island gets a lot of Japanese tourists to this day - which makes the fact that it apparently never aired in Canada, at least not in English, all the more unbelievable.)

Apparently it started airing on Radio-Canada in 1989. That only makes the lack of its broadcast in English Canada even stranger!

Apparently English Canada did get at least one World Masterpiece show: The Bush Baby. I've never been able to confirm it myself, but assuming these aren't all the same person, it looks like the show ran on TVO and Access Alberta in the 90s. ANN's encyclopedia lists two regulars of the Montreal English VA scene as cast members. The novel's author lived in Canada, so why while it wasn't a headliner, I guess it made sense?

edit: I did some digging through the CRTC's database and found that Bush Baby was approved as Canadian content on June 14, 1993. I guess that dub actually happened.

andyos wrote:

As a British viewer, I tend to compare the WMT series to some of the more 'literary' children's cartoons by the Cosgrove Hall studio, such as its stop-motion Wind in the Willows and later projects such as Truckers (from the Terry Pratchett book) and its feature-length cartoon version of the The BFG, two decades before Spielberg's.

You speak of Cosgrove Hall cartoons with literary aspirations, yet you decline to say so much as a word on Fantomcat? Egad, such a glaring lacuna that is!
(Avenger Penguins is perhaps a more debatable case.)

But I'm really surprised when the gender-swapped version of Remi, which ws also shown on the same local TV channel as the ones previously mentioned, was originally a bust, though it gained favor with the viewers here.

Great piece on the WMT series. Always fascinating to see the Japanese interpretations of Western children's lit standards, and the odd ways these adaptations make it back to the West via TV and home video - and how the American market seems to miss out on the English-language dubs many of these shows got, from TVO airing 'Fables Of The Green Forest' right on through the dub of WMT's Christopher Columbus anime, which got at least one VHS release.

FenixFiesta wrote:

As always, it is about money and recovering production costs, ignoring pure passion projects that are effectively money sinks or animation demos, it simply is not feasible to see a modern anime production company to regularly make mini-movies adapting foreign stories and make an actual financial return.

Which is kinda weird given that the WMT shows were produced over 30 years ago, I'm sure most of them made back their cash quadruple times over.

Strangely another series Nippon did, though not a WMT series that some may recall, was an adaptation of The Jungle Book that used to show up on a lot of Christian stations in the 90's.

StudioToledo wrote:

FenixFiesta wrote: As always, it is about money and recovering production costs, ignoring pure passion projects that are effectively money sinks or animation demos, it simply is not feasible to see a modern anime production company to regularly make mini-movies adapting foreign stories and make an actual financial return. Which is kinda weird given that the WMT shows were produced over 30 years ago, I'm sure most of them made back their cash quadruple times over.

WMT ran out of pure sponsorship and ratings. It's not like Precure who lives off its merchandising. That's why it aired at primetime family night at 19:30. When its ratings fall off 15%, that's when it started to decline. And what killed it wasn't some other anime. It was those wacky Japanese reality tv shows.

StudioToledo wrote:

Strangely another series Nippon did, though not a WMT series that some may recall, was an adaptation of The Jungle Book that used to show up on a lot of Christian stations in the 90's.

That show was great. Would wholly recommend it. I think it even surpassed some of the weaker WMT entries.

Interesting post on Reddit anime today. A guy was looking for an English version of Bush Baby because it's based upon a book his grandfather wrote about his aunt and her pet. He found a copy and was able to watch some of his family history- the animators didn't even change the names of his family members. That would be surreal.

I live in Israel, and the WMT shows were a huge part of the '80s generation's childhood here. They got the best treatment in translation, dubbing etc. done by the good people of our (then-only) public TV channel. They're still being broadcast on different channels here to this day, with the old dubs, and "3000 Leagues in Search of Mother" got a nice DVD release here (Hebrew-dubbed only, but with notable credit on the box to Takahata as a director).

It's a shame that there's so little interest in these shows nowdays - I think they're not just great pieces of storytelling, but also an important history lesson; the roots of many elements in Miyazaki's works, as the coming-of-age plots of "Totoro" and "Kiki", or the European aesthetic of the latter can be traced to his work on the WMT shows.
BTW - if you want an English-subbed DVD of Heidi, there is a Chinese release of the compilation films which includes English subs. Not as good as having the original 52-episodes show, but good enough.

WMT ran out of pure sponsorship and ratings. It's not like Precure who lives off its merchandising. That's why it aired at primetime family night at 19:30. When its ratings fall off 15%, that's when it started to decline. And what killed it wasn't some other anime. It was those wacky Japanese reality tv shows.

And even late 80's stuff like Gunbuster that displays a more contemporary anime aesthetic at the time are still often dismissed because they don't look "new" enough. Like, they definitely look like anime, but those differing styles from more modern sensibilities still turn a lot of people off (at least from my personal experiences).

It's a pity World Masterpiece Theater never found a fan base in The West as haveing watched a video on Progression in Akage no Anne by a reviewer I follow on Youtube made me want to at least hunt it down. But from what I can find fansubbers don't even want it. Heidi, Girl of The Alps would be another one but it's 52 episode Anime from 1974 and even having been directed by Isao Takahata I don't it would ever get released here.

It's shame there is some real good talent in the "classic" series but barring someone willing to Kickstart something I don't think any of them would ever get released. I guess it's one of those things where there who care about it but not enough to make it commercially feasible to release it.

Anyway, with the fact that there's huge lacking interest with everything children related among the online anime community and being what everything that was said already in the article, there's no chance for WMT to make surface anytime soon.

The best aspect of these series is that they can deeply touch you, cause they're sensible and have characters you can relate to, since they go through stuff we had lived in our lives or something that really could happen to someone. You can feel exactly what they're feeling because it's portrayed in such a realistic way. You feel empathy for those characters to the point they you don't see them as simple characters - they become people close to you, whom you care and share the same feelings of hapinness, anxiety and sadness. Empathy. That's what is so fulfilling about the WMT series, the empathy that dominates you. I haven't watched every WMT series yet, but those and I did - and I hope many others I'll watch as well - are among the best and most valuable presents I ever got in my life, if not THE most.

Well this is a surprise. I didn't know that these shows were not received very well outside Japan. Where I grew up, these shows were (and until a few years ago still) part of regular kid's block programming in the morning. At least 5 of them were re-aired so many times there was a point I could recite the entire plot with little to no effort. Now that I think of it, I think most (except maybe five or so) of the WMT series were aired locally.

The Anne of Green Gables anime might have been affected by the Montgomery people not wanting anything that could seen to be competing with Kevin Sullivan's series/films which were airing on television in English Canada at the time. (The Green Gables stories went into public domain in Canada in 1992 but the Montgomery estate has been very litigious over merchandising rights and even claims that they still have TV rights to the stories.)

And this is exactly the realization that pains me as a general animation enthusiast. As a fan of Japanese animation and its particular history, it saddens me how obscure some really great older Japanese animation is. And even more so than general animation fans, "otaku" nowadays are mostly looking specifically for more "mature" fare, the stuff they can't usually get from western cartoons, with the kind of stories and art that most modern anime involve. When someone says they're a fan of Japanese animation, rarely are they ever talking about anything past the mid 90's (perhaps not even that old, I've talked to people who refuse to watch Cowboy Bebop or the original NGE just because of their age). That's a shame, because while fans of classic western animation aren't that prevalent as it is, the amount of people who know and/or appreciate classic Japanese animation before it was "anime" are even fewer. The earlier stuff that was inspired by the west's animation aesthetic is seemingly doomed to never connect with a large audience. EDIT: aside from Germany, apparently.

People will generally prefer the similar item that is made by their own culture, simply because better cultural familiarity will make for better entertainment for most. (This is part of the same reason that sports anime don't catch on in the US; there's always been enough live action Western sports movies and TV series.) There's a lot more serialized US television in the last decade or two; consider that X-Files was very serialized for its time, but recent regular old police procedurals like The Mentalist have as much A-plot and B-plot complexity as it did. All that means is that fewer Americans are going to look to Japan for "normal but serialized" plots, especially since American media has been producing science fiction and fantasy serialized entertainment from Buffy to Game of Thrones and Westworld.

ohhh america... you should not write "west" when you have no idea what's happened REALLY in Europe.
I grow up in Germany and here they had all this masterpieces series in German Dub! And I know thats lots of this Series was also in other Europe countries on TV. LOTS of the series may even ALL of this Series. French and Japan worked well together at this time and produced my all time favorite Animation/Cartoons TOGETHER!
Also in Germany lots comes out later on VHS and then on DVD, of course in German Dub (like in other European countries in there language).
I grow up with all this 70,80,90 Series. Yes we had already this Series in the 70s here and they was repeated in the 80s and 90s still, so thats I who was born in the 80s also watched it.
Also why you don't know thats lots of this Series was produced for the Europe market? Japan always tried to make Series outside them. The same like Amerika.

Specifically Heidi who is originally by a German Author, all german, swiss and Austrian people know and watched it, also they have lots of other Heidi adaptations.

Sorry for my bad englisch.