Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Crunch(y) Time
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mdo7
 Posts: 7043 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Given that we've already been adapting webtoon/manhwa into anime, I would propose adapting an OEL manga into anime to ticked off any remaining OEL haters that are still out there (fragments of those haters), I would propose MegaTokyo, Aoi House, Amazing Agent Luna, & Vampire Cheerleaders to be the one that should be given anime adaptation.
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SinisterOracle
Posts: 487 |
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Crunchyroll Originals get a lot of hate (rightfully so) but I happen to love God of High School and Noblesse. I rewatch both routinely. Tower of God and In/Spectre are decent adaptations but both deserve better. Dr. Ramune had some good laughs. Meiji Gekken: 1874 was okay but could’ve been better. Shenmue was Shenmue without everything that made it Shenmue. I haven’t watched the other originals as they didn’t appeal to me.
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tintor2
 Posts: 2280 |
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Seems Crunchy is the only one who licensed the Fuuto Pi prequel movie about how Shotaro became the hardboiled detective. I wanna watch that.
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4722 Location: New York |
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It’s worth remembering the WHY of Crunchyroll Originals before judging the shows. They were made for the exact same reason Warner is making original anime now, there was a very palpable fear that FUNi and Netflix were going to outbid them on shows, not to mention bankroll their own as members of production committees, so it made sense to make original content from the ground up they didn’t have to worry about competing for licensing rights. I think the announcement Amazon wants to try anime again on top of Netflix’s continued investments is probably what’s stirring this on.
Then Zaslav began slicing Warner’s assets in the name of pairing down the legendary WB Discovery debt, and the new owners realized their position as handling roughly 70-75% of anime meant they didn’t need to make original content. Even if the CR Originals were all hits, it likely would have been seen as an unnecessary expense. The shows themselves, hoo boy. It didn’t help that no one really knew what they wanted the CR Originals line to actually be. Was it all the shows they had fingers in the pie of? Obviously not because otherwise Rising of the Shield Hero would probably have been retroactively made one since CR is heavily invested in it. Was it straight anime like Tower of God or were anime-adjacent shows like Onyx Equinox deemed OK? And was Toonami considered part of the CR family at the time given the co-productions between the two and the fact that they had the same parent company? If so, why not give them Shield Hero or did Warner’s infamous inter-department rivalries prevent that? Then you just deal with the random changes that hit the productions because a lot of the ideas were deemed incompatible with CR’s audience (The HGS creators being pressured to add more blood and language to what is clearly a Y7 show, Onyx Equinox’s tone being all over the place to an almost hilarious degree) or getting materials that people didn’t care about like a legion of Webtoons, including one from disgraced writer Warren Ellis after his improprieties were bought to light. It was not primed for success, even if the logic behind it made sense to a point. |
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johnnysasaki
Posts: 952 |
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Onyx Equinox was actually pretty solid. It was the only Crunchyroll Original I wish it wasn't prematurely cancelled. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4760 |
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I wonder how much of the new Hayate thing was at least an acknowledgment of how things went for the CR Originals. The idea of co-producing/flat-out owning things seems to remain strong, and we've now seen higher-ups flub things like not promoting Dan da Dan because it wasn't exclusive. At least some of the initial reception to HGS was that Crunchyroll was using "support the anime industry" as a selling point, and the first thing out of the gate for their Originals was going to be something that was more like the various anime-inspired shows that you saw on Cartoon Network. A studio in Japan isn't going to be met with the "How is this anime?" question. First impressions make a difference, and nothing after that was much of a hit that would have shifted that.
Personally, the "original" I liked most was Inspectre, but I don't know that that did much for them. Crunchyroll streamed season 2 with as much acknowledgment as it would any other seasonal show with a dub. |
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kytten
 Posts: 10 |
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Always forever sobbing about FreakAngels.
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RickyTheRat
 Posts: 37 |
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Has it really been that long? It still amazes me to this day how anyone at Crunchyroll thought High Guardian Spice was anything anime fans would want. The Crunchyroll Originals brand would eventually course correct with successful and beloved series like Tower of God but the initial growing pains were something to see. Perhaps one of the biggest consumer base misreads of all time and a case study that needs to be preserved and studied by future companies.
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1309 |
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What a coincidence, just some weeks ago I saw some unfortunate sad news about High Guardian Spice's creator, Raye Rodríguez, having his follow up show, I think it was called "Reclaim Gloria", being shelved at Legendary Studios, despite him and the rest of the staff having worked on it for almost three years and Raye himself has had many troubles finding work in the animation industry, which is actually a recurring problem for many artists in the Western animation industry these days. I personally didn't like HGS, I felt like it had potential, but it had no place being on an anime streaming service and I think most of the Crunchyroll Original projects were mostly filler, something that Warner Media ordered quickly. But the thing is that, after Sony (Funimation) aquired Crunchyroll, Warner continued the idea of making their own original anime but this time for [adult swim] and the results haven't been exactly a success, with Ninja Kamui, Rick and Morty: the anime and most disastrous with Uzumaki.
Honestly, aside from HGS (and that was more because of a bile fascination), none of the CR Original caught my attention and in fact only Tonikawa, Onix Equinox, Noblesse, Kumo Desu ga, Nani ka?, Tower of God and The God of High School were dubbed into my language (Spanish). I remember people saying that Onyx Equinox was made with the intent of appealing to Latin American viewers, despite the fact that the series was bases only on Mexican mythology, but as a Latin American I can say that the series wasn't very well known, but the few people that saw it liked it and it was cool that Alejandro Vargas Lugo (known for voicing Grim in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy LatAm Spanish dub) voiced Yaotl in both English and Spanish. Going back to Sony/Crunchyroll's new plan of making original anime with this company Hayate, I'm kind of skeptical with the whole idea. |
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juaifan
Posts: 170 |
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Maybe it's just me but it never seems like a good business decision to center your decisions based on negativity and vindictiveness. I don't think anything like that can truly prosper if it requires a constant stream of hatred to fuel. Not that I would particularly care if Crunchyroll continued to throw money in the incinerator but I think it would be in their better interest to make things people actually like instead. If this was 25 years ago MegaTokyo would no doubt be something I could see someone trying to turn into an animated series in the age of streaming originals. But it's well past it's peak and people caring about it. |
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mdo7
Posts: 7043 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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There's a reason why I want OEL manga to be adapted into anime in the same format we witnessed manhwa/webtoon get anime adaptation. The same OEL haters that hated on OEL manga also hated on manhwa/webtoons and manhua too (and this was back in late 2000's/early 2010's, way before you joined ANN). Seeing manhwa/webtoons getting anime adaptation has made the haters looked like fools and fans of these medium really happy to see that Japan are willing to adapt manga-like graphic novels to anime really add credibility to it. The fact that Scott Pilgrims would get an anime adaptation really makes me hopeful we could see OEL manga could get the same treatment like that and manhwa/webtoons based anime adaptation. The reason I want it to happen is to well stick it to the haters face the same way these same haters hated on manhwa/webtoons before they got anime adaptation. That's what happened to RWBY pre-2014 and when it's announced it'll go to Japan in 2014, and then the eventual anime adaptation in 2022, the haters just shut up or they just go "if you can't beat them, join them I guess". That's why I wanted the OEL manga I listed to get anime adaptation, I want it to be a final straw to the haters that hated and bashed OEL manga back in 2000's and early 2010's. |
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Wyvern
 Posts: 1634 |
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HGS would have been greenlit around 2018 or so, when the animation industry was in a pretty different place than it is now and the biggest hits were shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, My Little Pony, etc. Upbeat fantasy comedies with a cute look and a darker main storyline lurking beneath. I think Crunchy wanted their own series with a similar style and vibe. The idea was probably to attract new viewers who might be more into western cartoons than anime, not to mention sell cute character merch. But by the time HGS actually came out, all the shows I listed had aired their final episodes and that era of animation was pretty much over. It looked dated from the moment it released. And also, the whole idea to attract cartoon fans to an anime streaming site was probably always going to fail. You need more than ONE show that vibes as a "cartoon" for that to work. Every other Crunchyroll original was either a legit anime, or looked like one. It made HGS stand out as a weird outlier. All in all, it was a botched idea made all the worse by terrible marketing and execution (and yes, the show itself wasn't very good, but plenty of worse shows have succeeded on Crunchyroll before.)
Honestly regardless of how you feel about HGS itself, Raye Rodriguez was an absolute trooper regarding its reception. He poured half a decade of his life into this project only to see it torn to shreds by bigoted losers and pathetic trolls before it even premiered, and to see it never given a chance thanks to Crunchy giving it one of the worst marketing campaigns I've ever seen. And yet Rodriguez was very chill and resilient about the whole thing, never feeding any of the idiotic drama that surrounded the show and never engaging with the trolls despite them clearly being desperate for him to do so. He could teach a master class in keeping your public cool. And yet his reward for all this is that now he can't find work and is now dangerously close to running out of money. It's depressing how we treat our artists in this culture. HGS was not a good show, but even bad shows deserve better than this. Last edited by Wyvern on Tue Mar 25, 2025 4:57 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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VirgilTB4
 SubscriberPosts: 18 |
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I could never understand why Crunchyroll held back High Guardian Spice as long as they did. Quality aside you have this completed series. It’s 2020 when everyone was a literally captive audience. People were watching anything and everything including a lot of animation, some of which was no better and sometime worse in quality. People who never would have watched animated shows normally were watching and yet you hold it until all of that is gone. From a business perspective it’s baffling.
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FilthyCasual
Posts: 2467 |
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It's very weird only caring about what other people hate instead of what you actually like when considering stories you want adapted. As for Crunchyroll, whatever name they're slapping on their new coat of paint is irrelevant. And as for the article, comparing Tower of God to Hunter x Hunter is a very strange choice. |
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King Chicken
 Posts: 148 |
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I imagine they held off in hopes that all the incredibly bad PR that came from the initial announcement would die down. It's not really an exaggeration to say the entire English speaking anime community was trashing the show non-stop when it was announced and for years after the fact. Hard to say if it would have been better to release it back during the peak of that or try to wait out the storm. Perhaps it didn't matter as once it did finally come out a new wave of mockery popped up now that people had the actual show to post clips of and discuss. The only time I've seen a similar phenomenon was Marvel's New Warriors. Unlike High Guardian Spice that comic would never see the light of day and was buried forever though. |
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