Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Cashing In
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4631 Location: New York |
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No mention of Dragonball being used for cereal advertisements? My old-headedness was all but confirmed when I did a double take seeing Goku on a box of Reese's Puffs.
The monster that is capitalism is something we have to endure, if only because the means to make these shows has to come from somewhere. And with a legion of writers in Western animation being repulsed at the idea of selling toys to kids being synonymous with a legion of bombs in Western animation (Oh hai Transformers Earthspark) it continues to remain a needle that's difficult to thread. Writers want to have higher aspirations than selling plastic toys and phone apps, and they should, but at the same time, if you're not exciting kids and selling products, your production will run out of money and be written off for taxes. It's probably why Bush Sr. signed the Children's Television Act into law in 1990, which required educational content in certain shows...and led the network's to eventually abandon their children's programming for lower-maintenance informercials. Yeah, saying it out loud, capitalism can kind of suck. |
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R. Kasahara
 Posts: 711 |
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That was weird but also kinda awesome. Maybe one day we'll see sports anime characters on a Wheaties box. From the column itself:
Yes! Collecting is ideally about the love of what you're collecting, the love of the process of collecting, and, in the case of media tie-in items, the love of the source material. I do but also really don't get niche scenes where collecting is more about racking up social media likes. People can collect for whatever reason they like, sure, but approaching it like a consumerist popularity contest just seems empty and soulless to me. Then again, a lot of modern visual social media is like this. Just yesterday I learned about "fridgescaping". The silliness never ends... |
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psh_fun
 Posts: 102 |
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I love merchandise and I'm thankful anime has a ton of it, especially the kind I like like cool roleplay items and sexy figures. I don't know why some western writers think its beneath them. I dont like many western cartoons especially these days but I would love it if cartoons had high quality merch like Japan does. Video games are a bit better at this and Im starting to see more merchandise of western games that are cool but maybe its because most games these days are for adults so adults have the money to collect this stuff. It'll still probably be rare to see stuff like bikini figures of western games though due to cultural reasons. |
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Daidan12
Posts: 68 |
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Gundam will always be king. Gundam Build Fighters is the best hobbyist anime in the medium.
Can I make my Gunpla move and fight others? No. Can I share the same joy that Sei did every time he build one of his favorites? Yes. Can I feel the same hurt when I see one of my own figures be damaged in an accidental fall instead of a weekly battle? Yes. Can I smile the same way when he nerds out about his Gundam Build Strike when I nerd out about my Gundam Exia because it's the best Gundam ever designed and I love it? You bet I will do it for years if anyone bothers to listen to me and even if there's no one to listen. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1603 |
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It's nuts how Bandai execs treated G-Witch considering that it basically restored the franchise to cultural relevance. Giving it half as many episodes as Gundam series traditionally get, and then when it concluded just trying to clumsily retcon away the main couple's relationship when the central love story had been the driving force behind the show's popularity. Arguably the industry's biggest unforced error of the decade so far.
You'll never make it at Luna Nova Academy with that attitude. 
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OpenYourEels4TheNextFeels
Posts: 141 |
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Actually, the Canadian dub never adapted MaxHeart. The Singapore English dub apparently did get to it, but the Singapore English dub didn't change any of the characters' names (as far as I can find). |
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Jabootu
Posts: 280 |
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Wyvern said:
Ha! Well, we all have our crosses to bear. Besides, I suck at languages, so that right there would doom me. Also just noticed that my rather innocuous previous note has been excised, which, irony alert, kind of proves I was right in the first place. I guess I missed the site rule where it's OK, even encouraged, to toss dark aspersions at capitalism but that criticizing socialism is beyond the pale. We can't have our discussions muddied up with a variety of opinions, after all. |
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2412 |
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Absolutely wild assertion that Alya isn't an immensely popular series with an immensely popular anime adaptation.
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Jabootu
Posts: 280 |
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I don't know about that, but it doesn't have to be a huge success like, say, My Dress Up Darling. A mid-sized hit that has fervid fans would do it. Two of the seven anime figures I own (five being the bandmates from K-On!) are Maples from Bofuri. That was, as far as I can tell, a mid-sized hit at best. And you can call those figures a waste of money, but I smile whenever I look upon them, so I'd argue otherwise. The worst is when you love a show that has a really small audience. I would pay a pretty amount to buy a figure of, say, Koguma from Super Cub, so no go there. Nor have I ever seen any figures for Rei from March Comes in Like a Lion, sadly enough. |
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John the Dark Lord
Posts: 266 |
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A comment by the director during an interview that came in the booklet of the last BD implies the decision to make G-Witch only two cours long was done early during production. At the very least, early enough that they made a big change to the premise - having Miorine be a student at Asticassia - because the show was only going to last two seasons. It's likely they simply didn't thought it would be a good idea to give it more episodes when everyone was already prepared to end it in 24, especially since there seemed to be some production troubles, at least on the technical side. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 700 |
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You “don’t know why” because this isn’t a real thing. Both Beatdigga and you are going off on some imaginary writers to justify some weird grudge. You know who gets to make decisions about what merchandise is made and sold? Not the writers! You know who wishes their corporate overlords would have faith in their product enough to put out merchandise? The writers! Even in the rare cases where shows get merch it’s after the fact and misses the initial wave of hype. And this isn’t limited to small or new properties. Large corporations like Disney dropping the ball or simply ignoring their own shows is the norm anymore in the world of penny pinching decisions. It has nothing to do with the staff involved in the shows, some weird ideas about bikini statues, or any other conspiracy nonsense. |
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Avec ou Nous
Posts: 154 |
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You are overselling Witch From Mercury way too hard here. Gundam had plenty of "cultural relevance" before Witch From Mercury aired as it's one of the biggest franchises ever. Even if you want to say the IP had a spike of success in recent years it was happening before WFM even aired. Most sources cite the 2020 pandemic bringing in a lot of sales to the Gunpla as a nice boost. I also have to express heavy doubt on the show was only popular due to shipping. Most people don't care about that stuff. Maybe some people only watch shows for shipping but most people watch it for the story or other reasons. That's like saying the main draw of Bleach is Ichigo and Orihime's relationship or One Piece's main claim to popularity is Luffy and Hancock. |
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Wizardizar
 Posts: 12 |
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It's not shipping though. It's not people reading between the lines and looking at sub-text. It's literally the text. Not gonna make claims as to how much it played into the popularity but it's crazy to think that one of the main plot thread of the series (and one of the only plot thread that really gets resolved by the end), didn't play a role in it's popularity. Like, their relationship is the story. Anyways, this show made me buy a bunch of gunplas when I had no interest in Gundam before, so it clearly worked on some people 
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Beatdigga
Posts: 4631 Location: New York |
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Well, bikini statues are their own thing, but a lot of 80s productions were too far in the "sell stuff" direction, and writers made it clear they didn't like it. The Simpsons poked fun at a lot of the new laws that were being enforced at the time in one episode that ended with the kids' TV news show being canceled and replaced with The Mattel and Mars Bar Quick Energy Chobobot Hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HErRwSpla0 That's admittedly my favorite bit making fun of blatant merchandise cartoons, but Garfield and Mighty Mouse both had segments laying into generic toy-selling cartoons and such a sentiment was common, hence the, what some would say, overcorrection. https://x.com/JoshuaTookes/status/1743296325687382175 It's a difficult needle to thread, not helped by the parent company not being on the ball, or the merchandise being subpar quality (apparently that was part of the reason Thundercats 2011 was eventually canceled, the toy quality was horrendous). And that sweet spot will always be tough to hit. But when you do hit it, you sell a lot of model kits, and make a lot of money. |
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Jabootu
Posts: 280 |
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Responding to Beatdigga (and I suspect he'd agree with me on this), I'll note that if the plan is to sell lots of toys via your cartoon show, a prerequisite is to make a show kids love. I was too old to get into the '80s kiddie cartoon shows, but the fact remains that the kids who grew up watching He-Man or GI Joe or My Little Pony dearly loved (and love) those shows and loved and love the toys attached to them. That's part of my puzzlement with bemoaning this sort of thing. You can't just throw anything on the tube and somehow magically "force" or "pressure" kids to want the toys. Go to any Ollie's Bargain Outlet and see the shelves and shelves of aging figures cluttering the shelves because no one really liked the movies and shows they were attached to.
So you make a show that kids adore and then as a natural byproduct of that they want the figures and such. This is by no means ominous. This kind of gets ignored by critics, but the fact is capitalism succeeds by providing things people want to spend money on. Can you create a need in the consumer? In certain cases, and then to some extent, yes. That's pretty hit and miss, though, and even when it succeeds it generally results in a fad rather than a lifetime obsession. Does the fact that Mattel sponsored He-Man to sell dolls invalidate the joy it brought to millions of kids? I don't see how. |
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