Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Happened To World Masterpiece Theater And Shows Like It?
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Utsugi
Posts: 10 |
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If you want to go that route, then WMT is the ultimate moe series. I'm half-joking here. WMT is full of adorable girls but without resorting to your usual moe tropes. |
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StudioToledo
Posts: 847 Location: Toledo, U.S.A. |
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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.
I love the kickin' theme tune! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJCj7HHT_LY
Spoken like a true Republican I see.
We ought to be lucky we get anything from DiscoTek at all these days (for me, I was impressed they picked up Robot Carnival at all).
And while I'm sure it's not a perfect consolation, episodes of Swiss Family Robinson in English can be had on Amazon's video service! It's a start, I suppose. https://www.amazon.com/The-Adventure-Begins/dp/B019EFG1MC/
Probably, Radio-Canada and other stations in Quebec often picked up a lot of great Japanese classics the rest of the country didn't see otherwise.
I was probably in your camp, though the difference for me was not having enough stations locally that would pick up a show like Star Blazers, and often cable TV proved to be a suitable, if not temporary home for a lot of foreign cartoons regular broadcast TV would never pick up. Nickelodeon took quite a lot of risks back then in what it played like Belle & Sebastian or Mysterious Cities of Gold. Shows that may not have tested well anywhere else, yet got a good deal of attention because it was on a network catered to a kid audience.
I sorta envy that province sometimes. At least a few outside it might have had a chance at a show like Albator or Candy Candy since that network was broadcast throughout the country.
I bet. I'm sure it came down to economics. I once heard when it came to selling these shows to Latin American or Europe, they were often cheaper to acquire over American programs back then. It wouldn't surprise me one bit.
I was more amused at what "CBN" aired in the 80's like the second "Jungle Tatei" series Tezuka did in the 60's or a cute show called "Honey Honey". Again, cable TV, especially in its infancy, often took a lot of risks like that when they didn't have quite the penetration they would have in the 90's.
You'd think. I still find it amusing how rather familiar a show like "Rocky Chuck" is (seen in English as "Fables of the Green Forest").
Which is funny considering Canada went out of its way to do a separate English dub of the 1980's "Astro Boy" series that was played on many stations like Global back then, the dub was based on the French version that was produced in Quebec I think.
I actually saw the opening to "Bush Baby" from a tape one Canadian sent me years ago with a whole lot of other opening title sequences from different cartoons he taped off his C-Band dish! I even saw the Spanish version of TMS' Remi and Treasure Island from their airings on Univision back in their heyday!
All to placate CRTC rulings for "Canadian Content", which is why shows like Astro Boy managed to slip through the cracks! Getting these shows either dubbed out of Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal usually gives them a pass.
We Americans never even seen Victor & Hugo. Around here, it seems like Danger Mouse and Count Duckula is all we know, though I did love Wind in the Willows watching that on The Disney Channel back when your parents had to PAY EXTRA for it (and also another haven for forgotten toonage like Unico, SuperTed (the good show, now Hanna-Barbera's crap) or Katy Caterpillar). Speaking of Canada, "The Raccoons" never even got a DVD release south of the Great White North at all, I find that pretty bad.
While this'll be the most obscure thing I'll say, an Arabic dub of Nippon's Remi series was aired once on one American cable channel that was in limited circulation called The International Channel, people here may recall it well for it's airings of Dragon Ball Z in RAW JAPANESE that lasted for years since they aired it once a week! That was perfect!
It is weird how that happen at all. I do recall Nippon's Christopher Columbus series getting airings on The History Channel during it's earliest years when they thought to air programs for kids involving history so that and Inspector Gadget's Field Trip often got played on the weekends alongside one of the French Procidis' shows. Certainly not maintstream enough I'm sure, though there is a place on YouTube that has the Chris Columbus series to view in total if you look for it. 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. |
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kazekaeru
Posts: 4 |
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Coming from Mexico, WMT anime were a big part of many people's childhood & are still quite beloved there. Heidi, for example, was dubbed & started broadcast in Mexico in 1978 & was left in circulation for over 30 years. It is one of the most recognizable series, along with others. There were many dub releases of some of the more famous (Heidi, Remi)
These are fantastic series that I'm trying to collect for the new generations to watch. |
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Utsugi
Posts: 10 |
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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.
That show was great. Would wholly recommend it. I think it even surpassed some of the weaker WMT entries. |
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chaccide
Posts: 295 |
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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.
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trescaballeros
Posts: 71 |
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I know a lot will disagree with me, but I prefer the gender swapped Remi from the 90s than the wangsty Dezaki Remi from the 70s.
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Haterater
Posts: 1727 |
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Would gladly buy a complete set of Little Women. Had good pacing, hardships, and good times. Good adaptation of the book and I like the Bible teachings and lessons. Rewatching episodes from Smile of a Child, I think it aged well.
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Raz_G
Posts: 72 Location: Israel |
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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. |
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StudioToledo
Posts: 847 Location: Toledo, U.S.A. |
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Reality programming ruins good creativity I feel.
It certainly does, though there were moments I felt they kept padding it a bit just to fill up enough for 52 episodes by the end. I suppose having the wolves appear distinctively cartoony (being the usual "talking animal" types we'd associate with here in the west) made for a better experience against a more serious tone as the life and death struggle for a boy in the jungle. I actually have a number of matted animation cels from this series in my collection (they have Nippon Animation copyright stamps on the back). Was pretty cool to get them as they even had the original painted backgrounds, not the usual laser copied types. Ironically, that didn't stop the Italian sleazeballs from copying what Spain did with Willy Fog by doing another show later on, cannibalizing several characters from Jungle Book in a program that already sends out red flags because of it's title. You just know someone wanted money! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDP8JTVF9Zg
Still, it must be nice for someone to know their family members were once in a Japanese cartoon! That is probably the greatest achievement known to man!
Least they did that. Often names like these either get mistranslated or left out altogether.
We have to start somewhere. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1008 |
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Yep, though ratings for everything are down in Japan, just like everything else. Sazae-san pulls in much lower ratings than the top daytime anime did in the 1980s or 1990s, and lower than even mid-performing ones. (IIRC, Ranma 1/2 never did the ratings of its sister show in the same hour, Yawara!).
Not going to disagree with that. Even positive reviews here of older stuff feel the need to comment on and give low grades to older animation (even good for its time stuff.) But even a "WMT with modern aesthetic sensibilities" would fall into the same problem of mainstream anime isn't as popular in Japan as it used to be (and the action is mostly with niche shows for anime, and reality and panel shows for mainstream Japanese TV) and mainstream anime isn't as popular in the US (because it will generally lose out to mainstream US productions). Foreigners look to Japanese anime for something that is they can't get at home, which is part of why mainstream stuff has done better in non-English speaking markets. |
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writerpatrick
Posts: 679 Location: Canada |
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Live-evil has been subbing many of these shows but they're the slowest dubbers in the world. It still allows one to get a look at these shows.
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Utsugi
Posts: 10 |
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Honestly, if shows like Yatterman, Time Bokan, and Osomatsu can get a revival, WMT can too.
Problem is, Nippon Animation is pretty much a zombie at this point, surviving more from merchandise rather than actually making anime. And their surviving series Chibi Maruko has been getting low ratings recently, so that may end up be cancelled too. |
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HeidiVonBerg
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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. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Yeah, my impression is that westerners get into anime looking for something different, and World Masterpiece Theater comes across to me as being too close to western animated programming for a lot of anime fans to care about, or if they did, there is likely domestic programming similar to it that's easier to obtain.
Depends on where you look. It's probably going to be hard to find english-language communities of fans of World Masterpiece Theater, but it won't be hard to find communities of fans into something meant for kids. Pokémon is a good example.
You bring up a good point regarding empathizing with the protagonists of the WMT stories. Would children nowadays, both in Japan and elsewhere, be able to easily empathize with them? I'm thinking about how I see, all around me, the current trend in parenting being in giving everything the child wants and spoiling them rotten because the parents want to be their children's friends. Can a child who has known no hardship empathize with a protagonist who undergoes a lot of hardship?
The thing is that this show is a product of its time. Maybe it would've worked when it was new (albeit probably not in the United States due to our aversion to drama aimed at kids that isn't Newbery Award literature), but that's just it--it was new at the time. It's incredibly dated now, and the only people who'd be interested are media historians, other scholars, people who grew up during that time, the curious, and folklorists (as most of the episodes are adaptations of folktales and literature).
Ah, politics. When something can't be explained through time, money, or politics is the next best answer.
Yeah, even the Osamu Tezuka stuff just cannot find an audience in the United States. The Alan Ladd adaptations of the 1960's anime worked, but everything after that? Not a chance. Even then, when an episode of that show was screened in class when I was in college, there was a lot of snickering and giggling over the values dissonance and bottom-quality animation. Most of the people in the film major didn't know who he was. You're now seeing it happening even with American animation in the past though. Franchises like Looney Tunes and Mickey Mouse are fighting hard to remain relevant in today's culture. Kids just aren't interested in them anymore. They are their parents' cartoons.
I never even thought of it that way, that sports anime has problems catching on in North America because there's plenty of western stories about these sports already. I had long suspected anime caught on for its exoticism, but I never gave the thought of its opposite, that series that don't catch on often are because there's a domestic equivalent already. I'd like to mention that over this decade, there's been a lot of western animation aimed at kids that is at least semi-serialized now. You have direct serials like the 2011 Thundercats, you have off-and-on serials like Gravity Falls, you have shows whose characters undergo long-term character development across seasons but is otherwise episodic, like Friendship Is Magic, and you have shows that are fully episodic but will change the status quo when needed, like The Amazing World of Gumball. I remember back in The Simpsons episode "A Milhouse Divided" that Milhouse's parents remained divorced by the end of the episode and would stay divorced in later episodes. The writing team, according to the commentary, considered that groundbreaking for its time. Now, The Simpsons is used as an example of a show that reinforces the status quo because viewers nowadays expect more inter-episode and inter-season continuity whereas it came from a time where there was none (or even negative continuity) except in soap operas because channels would rerun episodes in random order. |
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StudioToledo
Posts: 847 Location: Toledo, U.S.A. |
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Still, you had a good childhood anyway. |
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