Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do TV Networks Air Reboots Instead Of Originals?
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5554 |
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TLDR: The general masses are to blame for everything wrong. The fact that they CROPPED images just makes me want to vomit
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Codeanime93
Posts: 599 |
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I wonder why Adult Swim won't air the old part II episodes of Lupin the 3rd. I mean Discotek released them recently again back on DVD with the English dub, granted, they only dubbed 79 episodes out of the 155 but still. Probably again license problems.
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Polycell
 Posts: 4623 |
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They played them all the time back in the day, so it probably comes down to them being able to get the new 16:9 hotness.
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ssgOverlord
 Posts: 91 |
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I'll treasure my 2 Level sets for as long as they're the best way to view the first 34 episodes of DBZ.
That said you had the Orange Bricks from 2007-2009, followed by the Dragon Boxes from 2009-2011, and then shortly after the Level Blu-ray sets (at lower episode counts VS the other box sets). Add Kai into the mix in 2010, and it was just way too much for even hardcore buyers to keep up with. I really hope DBZ gets a proper Blu-ray release someday. |
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Mr. sickVisionz
 Posts: 2175 |
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To be fair, NBC doesn't broadcast Cheers during primetime either. Old stuff is old stuff and TV is always on to the next big thing NEW thing, whether live action or anime.
As for cropped vs uncropped, I think this is solely an argument for the most hardcore of hardcore fans. They generally don't crop half of someone's head off or do stuff that would stick out as looking weird for people who never saw the original 4:3 presentation. If it meant older anime could get shown on TV with a better reception vs this stuff is never ever broadcast under any circumstances... I'd vote for airing it cropped and letting people buy the original format on disc if they were so inclined to do so. Nobody really batted an eye when they did this prior to wide screen TVs and called it "pan and scan". |
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BlueBeast33
Posts: 151 |
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The 1999 version of HxH is incomplete and only adapts up to the end of the Greed Island arc. It's pretty obvious why the 2011 version would be shown instead. They're not going to show the same story on television twice for a long running series, so it's pretty obvious that they would choose the one that tells more of the story. I understand wanting to see more classic anime on television, but Hunter x Hunter is the wrong example to use.
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Know what they should've done? Instead of cropping the video, they should've stretched it! While I'm not entirely serious about that, when YouTube rolled out 16:9 videos at a time when most footage was captured in 4:3, a lot of uploaders, and I mean a LOT, used the stretch tags to fill in the pillarboxes in that way. Hardly anyone noticed. I did, and I kept my 4:3 footage in 4:3. I got a bunch of complaints afterward, and some people requested I use the stretch tags, at least one of whom didn't realize it, well, stretched the video (he genuinely believed YouTube somehow would extrapolate what was in each frame and fill the pillarboxes in with more visual area, calling it "magic," and he ignored every attempt I made to explain to him what a stretch tag actually does). If you look at some commercials on TV, you can tell they were shot in 4:3 and stretched to fill widescreen. I can't tell if, in these cases, they didn't realize they were distorting the image, or they did so knowing most viewers wouldn't notice.
I don't know the circumstances behind it, but the original Mobile Suit Gundam never completed its first run. I thought it was due to low ratings, but I heard it's because of 9/11. Certainly though, I felt the same way as you: It was hard for me to watch due to how grainy everything was, the limited animation (anime limited animation of the time I couldn't stand, though I could watch Hanna-Barbera limited animation just fine), and the rather forced comic relief (which is, actually, a problem I keep seeing in anime to this day).
Letterboxing is when there are black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, which happens when you're watching 16:9 stuff on a 4:3 screen. (Or a number of other long aspect ratios.) This was a bigger problem, of course, when 4:3 was the most common TV resolution. Pillarboxing is when the black bars are at the left and right. When you have both letterboxing and pillarboxing, with black bars on all four sides, that's windowboxing, which happens when, say, you have a 16:9 screen that's receiving a 4:3 signal of 16:9 footage. (Unfortunately, this is the situation I have at home, as our TV's HDMI is broken and is beyond the warranty period, so we just plugged it into composite and will likely keep it like that until it stops working.)
There are a few channels dedicated to older programming though, such as Boomerang and Turner Classic Movies, though they are both money sinks and are mostly just kept alive by the passion of the people who run those channels. (And their content has been getting progressively newer, though they're still both predominantly pre-HD.)
Not to mention the 2011 version goes much further into the series (naturally). Toonami is now in the Chimera Ant story, which is further than what the 1999 series reached, including the OVAs.
Oh yes, and we ought to mention the Viz dub for the 2011 version is so much better than the 1999 version. The 1999 version felt like random people pulled off the street (in other words, the Law of Ueki approach).
My best guess is that it's because the manga was not a good seller for Viz. Many years ago, it was even described on this very site as "the best manga nobody read." For one reason or another, people in North America continued to latch onto Yu Yu Hakusho and mostly ignored Hunter X Hunter (but that may be because FUNimation wasn't finished dubbing Yu Yu Hakusho yet). And I can say that during the major anime conventions of that time, you'd see a Hunter X Hunter cosplayer once in a blue moon. Whatever the case, it was only a few years ago that Hunter X Hunter finally started catching on, and I think that gave Viz the confidence to start dubbing the anime. Hunter X Hunter even made it onto Viz's Weekly Shonen Jump lineup, at least when it's not on hiatus.
Adult Swim used to have a Q&A column, of sorts, making up the "we'll be right back" and "back to the show" bits. In one of them, someone asked why they never seem to finish Lupin III. For once, they gave an honest, detailed, non-joke answer, and within Williams Street, they even had a term for this phenomenon known as "The Lupin Cycle": Lupin III would often be the most requested show whenever they asked their viewers what they should show or what shows should return. So they'd bring it back. However, while it would get off to a good start, viewership would then sink like a rock and became a financial loss (similar to One Piece on the current Toonami--which, incidentally, was an example of a pre-HD anime until around late 2015, when it reached the point where the show switched to HD). This drop in the ratings forced Lupin's removal from the block, upon which, after enough time, people would again demand for it to come back. Other shows have had it happen before and since (such as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and Samurai Champloo), but Lupin III is the one with the lowest ratings and thus got canceled and revived the most. That being said, this may be another joke answer, but it certainly didn't feel like one.
They did so for Fullmetal Alchemist, but then again, the first anime was such a hit for the network and had already finished so long ago that Brotherhood didn't feel so much like showing the same thing twice (well, up until the first anime overtook the manga) as it was a re-airing. That, and the first Fullmetal Alchemist aired long before Brotherhood even existed. Had Hunter X Hunter wound up on Adult Swim Action before 2011, there's a good chance both of them would've wound up on the block too.
Well, technically, since this is a matter of opinion, as cropped video is more popular than pillarboxing (or letterboxing during older times), it is not wrong at all, and if you strongly disagree with it, you are the one on the fringes with a niche opinion. Purists tend to occupy the fringes. Nothing wrong with that (at least as long as you're not shooting people or something), but you do have to keep in mind that for most people, you will be the one they consider wrong. |
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G S Palmer
 Posts: 246 |
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I can't believe they didn't call it "The Lupin Loop". What a missed opportunity. |
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samuelp
Industry Insider
Posts: 2242 Location: San Antonio, USA |
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Has anyone ever attempted to show 4:3 shows with an extra wallpaper on the sides or other stuff to make it look less black pillar-y?
I know a lot of retro games will do that when ported to new systems and I think it would make showing 4:3 shows on widescreen TVs a lot more palatable to the masses. Heck you could throw in like trivia or notes about the show on the sidebars to make it more interesting. Has this ever been attempted on tv? (I see it sometimes on Japanese variety shows when they show an old segment that was filmed in 4:3) |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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They're currently doing that on Toonami. Shows in 4:3, like Outlaw Star and some of Dragon Ball Z Kai, have these weird blue, turquoise, and purple moving swirls against a black background where the pillarboxes would be. It must be working, as they've been doing this for at least a year now.
Heh, it would've been punnier, but it's an inside term so they just call it whatever they want, and it falls in line with other "The _____ Cycle" phenomena that had already been talked about online at that point (most notably "The Sonic Cycle," but "The Zelda Cycle" existed as a term among Zelda fans already during then, but hadn't yet grown beyond it), all of which are essentially repeating, regular patterns of the behavior of fans. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 1837 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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Toonami Asia has the annoying practice of cropping 4:3 shows into fake widescreen. On the SD feed. (AFAIK there isn't an HD feed.)
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 943 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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One trick I've seen is copying the left- and right-most whatever percent of the picture, applying a very heavy blur filter to it, and using that to fill the blank area either side of the actual picture.
I don't really see that happening for a full-length episode of anything or a movie. (Yes, movie. Lots of movies, primarily in the black and white era, were originally shot and shown 4:3.) Trivia and notes like that have to be researched, compiled, and set on the screen, which is employee man-hours and therefore expense that TV networks are unlikely to be seen as worthwhile for old content that they're mostly showing to fill time. |
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Aksys
Posts: 4 |
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I actually don't mind how it is presented visually but...
Personally I prefer the reboots over the originals because they usually have better story pacing. Original DBZ for example had the "Kai" treatment and I liked it because of the adjustments in its pacing. 2011's Hunter x Hunter also had better pacing as it balanced the original content with unique storytelling. Although if you have watched the original HxH you might feel that the reboot seemed to rush the Hunter Exam arc. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Letter-boxing is also commonly used when showing 21:9 widescreen films in the 16:9 format like 2001: A Space Odyssey. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2636 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I know GSN does something like that for their old 4:3 formatted game shows. Cash Cab, for example, gets a purposefully garish-colored series of vertical bars, I guess to imitate a stage curtain. Even some DVDs get this treatment, like with some of WWE's DVD compilations, as 4:3 footage will get some sort of labeling for the release where the pillarboxing would go. It's admittedly not an ideal solution, but there's really no "solution" in the first place. At least Toonami is trying out 4:3 content, so hopefully the viewership doesn't drop off too badly. |
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