Later Fandom

[Heero]

Hell, in all honesty if I didn't get into anime when and how I did during that particular time and surrounded by the kinds of anime and people that I had been, I very much doubt I would've honestly cared for the medium a great deal much (if at all) if my first impression of it was through the highly skewed filters that so many other people in the U.S. would get their first taste of it from during the late 90's and early 00's American mainstream explosion of the medium.

This in all honesty is why I think the anime companies (and fandom in general) FAILED in that key time period. Cons and companies "sold out" to trying to find the "mainstream" and in so doing kind of abandoned the real fans of the medium. There are exceptions of course, but I think when anime had such a high profile, everyone should have tried hard to encourage fandom rather than trying to "grab a buck". *sigh*

[davemerrill]

This in all honesty is why I think the anime companies (and fandom in general) FAILED in that key time period. Cons and companies "sold out" to trying to find the "mainstream" and in so doing kind of abandoned the real fans of the medium. There are exceptions of course, but I think when anime had such a high profile, everyone should have tried hard to encourage fandom rather than trying to "grab a buck". *sigh*

Not to be contrary, but the 1995-2005 period was a time of tremendous success for the marketing of Japanese animation in the United States - Sailor Moon and Pokemon were tremendously popular. Pokemon still is. Where the "industry" failed, in my opinion, is by releasing damn near everything they could easily get a license to in the hopes that something would stick. There is an awful lot of dreck clogging up the used DVD stores, the thrift stores, the landfills, all anime titles that somebody somewhere thought would make them a buck. Consumers by and large walked away from the medium because they saw it as a cheap fad, which is how it was treated. The same thing happened in England, only much faster.

In Japan there's a vast back catalog of influential, well-remembered classic anime series- Yamato, Aim For The Ace, Tomorrow's Joe, Rose Of Versailles, Astro Boy, Kimba/Jungle Emperor, Time Bokan, the Nippon Sunrise WMT series - that were popular and well-regarded, and keep the medium grounded in at least one level of genuine popular culture. Similar series exist in America, but there was no attempt to build on the success of the past, except for ADV's wonderful Gatchaman DVD sets and Voyager's half-assed Star Blazers DVDs. To my knowledge nobody on this side of the Pacific even TRIED to release "Anne Of Green Gables" (which is a license to print money up here) or "Future Boy Conan", which with its Miyazaki pedigree would sell like fireworks on the 4th of July.

Of course in the past five years, nearly every industry has been taking a beating in the global economic beatdown; maybe the failure of the American anime industry was merely the canary in the coal mine.

[Heero]

Not to be contrary, but the 1995-2005 period was a time of tremendous success for the marketing of Japanese animation in the United States - Sailor Moon and Pokemon were tremendously popular. Pokemon still is. Where the "industry" failed, in my opinion, is by releasing damn near everything they could easily get a license to in the hopes that something would stick.

I actually completely agree with this statement. It's sort of what I meant. In the late nineties, several companies (Viz being the MOST notable in my mind, but others come to mind) made a play for "the average kid" to the detriment of their marketing to FANS. (not saying they didn't market to fans, I'm saying they completely took the fanbase for granted, and it showed) Rather than building a new generation of fans that would've bought Japanese LDs to build a fansub community, they (like you said) built a fad that burned out quickly. Heck, look at ill-fated ADV. Rather than IMPROVING their connections to Japanese anime companies and trying to build more ANIMATION fans, they spent years trying to gin up a LIVE ACTION Evangelion movie. Don't get me wrong, the recent live action Yamato movie is pretty cool, but I like anime because I am an ANIMATION fan, I don't need anime companies trying to find ways to convert their licenses into Hollywood movies. But that's what ADV did, they were trying to become a mass-market conglomerate.

Pokemon is not a fair comparison since the GAME tie-in is a major factor in it's continued success, but if the companies had really wanted to BUILD the base, they'd have used (for example) money from Sailor Moon to truly sell Card Captor Sakura (rather than the re-edit) and maybe PreCure. Or companies would have done more to encourage anime conventions rather than just trying to get 15 year olds to buy the latest DVD of "random flashy title". When we put together the "Princess Tutu Cast party", it had one goal, to market that title. We paid (asked for ZERO money from ADV) to bring several of the Japanese cast and got events together and all we asked was a little help CONTACTING American staff/cast and maybe a mention to help get the word out and it took a LOT of effort to get that. This literally should have been a five minute conversation that ended with "yes, please" from the company but instead was weeks to months of run-around.

[davemerrill]

For me, the anime boom years were also frustrating - there was so much capital floating around that was completely wasted on some of the most forgettable nonsense that underpaid in-betweeners ever got underpaid to in-between, while amazing properties that would have appealed to both serious fans and casual viewers were dismissed or ignored.

There's an image floating around of a scan of evidence entered into the current court case between ADV and Funimation; it's a list of what ADV paid for a whole raft of their properties circa 2005. It's amazing how much cash they threw away on literal junk. Not to mention the live-action Eva movie. They could have taken all that money to Vegas and had a much better time with it. Fed some orphans. Anything.

[Brain Trash]

Poor Curtis. My apologies, my stray comment wasn't intended to lead us all around this particular mulberry bush, at least not here anyway. As fascinating of a discussion as this can easily be (since really, its the sort of dense topic we could easily be at back and forth for some time), this really doesn't at all seem like the appropriate thread to have it in. Someone should probably make a post-mortem thread elsewhere where we can all soundly and wholeheartedly indulge in a proper autopsy regarding what the fuck happened to the North American anime industry (and fandom) during and after the late 90's, should folks here remain suitably interested in such a topic.

I'll throw this much out there for the time being though:

In the late nineties, several companies (Viz being the MOST notable in my mind, but others come to mind) made a play for "the average kid" to the detriment of their marketing to FANS.

Replace the word "fans" with "adults" and you're on the right track.

[TSOJ]

Hell, in all honesty if I didn't get into anime when and how I did during that particular time and surrounded by the kinds of anime and people that I had been, I very much doubt I would've honestly cared for the medium a great deal much (if at all) if my first impression of it was through the highly skewed filters that so many other people in the U.S. would get their first taste of it from during the late 90's and early 00's American mainstream explosion of the medium.

This in all honesty is why I think the anime companies (and fandom in general) FAILED in that key time period. Cons and companies "sold out" to trying to find the "mainstream" and in so doing kind of abandoned the real fans of the medium. There are exceptions of course, but I think when anime had such a high profile, everyone should have tried hard to encourage fandom rather than trying to "grab a buck". *sigh*

It wasn't just anime. I was a big SF fan between 1977 and 1990. The biggest SF con near me was Minicon, in Minneapolis. It was run as a general "for fans by fans" get-together. Right after the first Star Wars film, and then the beginning of the new Star Trek franchise, the Minicon concomm would get into little arguments over the mainstreaming of SF. Some people wanted SF fandom to remain as it was - closed and clique-ish. Others saw the greater attention by "mundanes" as a way of opening fandom up to a larger market which would benefit everyone together. Right about this time, we started seeing for-profit cons popping up and the anime groups (which up to that point consisted of 5 people in a dark room at one end of the hotel during the con) left their shadows to come out into the light themselves. I left Minnesota in 1992, and came back in 1996 before continuing down to Dallas. I was able to visit Minicon again, and in the short time I was gone, it had become unrecognizable with younger, college-aged fans that only knew what was in the theaters, and hadn't cracked a book in their lives. In Dallas, I attended Project A-Kon, and it was the exact same situation.

I think the mainstreaming of both anime and SF does come from the "anything to make a buck" mentality that sees fandom as just another source of revenue. It's unavoidable, because publishers, distributors and creators want an increasing, stable market. They couldn't live with fandom being so small at the time, and so pushed for ever greater growth. The result being that they pretty much killed themselves off on their own crap.

But, so much of the blame lies with the Japanese rights owners. Before Funimation got involved, Robert Woodhead and a couple of other importers had commented on how the rights owners of Dragon Ball wanted $1 million flat from any country that inquired about it. There was absolutely no attempt to understand the U.S. market, and the fact that that kind of money didn't exist then. ADV, AnimEigo and US Manga Corps bought what they could afford to, trying to snowball the small incremental profits into something that would let them get the big-name draws some years later. It didn't help that cable TV was just starting out, and Cartoon Network was still a few years away, limiting distribution streams. If the Japanese rights owners had just set their sights lower, and collaborated more with the existing importers to bring over DBZ, Sailor Moon, et.al, then there would have been less need to flood the market with any old thing. This doesn't mean that anything would have changed in the long run, though. Anime would have gone the same route as SF in either case, simply because that's how capitalism works in the U.S.

[TSOJ]

Of course in the past five years, nearly every industry has been taking a beating in the global economic beatdown; maybe the failure of the American anime industry was merely the canary in the coal mine.

This is a key point. I was talking to Tiffany Grant at Project A-kon about 5-6 years ago, and she was absolutely deflated over the lack of voice-over work for dubbed anime. Basically, people just weren't buying, and she couldn't see how the industry could change that. And I think that a lot of the problem is as you say - the economy isn't picking up for the people that want to buy stuff, anime or not. Another issue, though, is that the real draws - Naruto, One Piece, Bleach - don't buoy up anything else. Pokemon may still be popular, but that's the only direction money is going - into Pokemon. Naruto, Bleach and One Piece only bring money into Viz. The fandom is too shallow and single-minded. It's not that these are anime fans, wanting to try other new things but not having the money for it. These are Naruto or Pokemon fans that don't care about anime. I agree with you, anime was the canary in the coalmine, but it was never a very health canary to begin with.

[TSOJ]

Poor Curtis. My apologies, my stray comment wasn't intended to lead us all around this particular mulberry bush, at least not here anyway.

Heh. I'm used to it. Things haven't changed much in that respect from the old Fido days. Anyway, thanks for the big welcome. Glad you liked the DBZ summaries.

As fascinating of a discussion as this can easily be (since really, its the sort of dense topic we could easily be at back and forth for some time), this really doesn't at all seem like the appropriate thread to have it in.

Well, if moving this into another thread runs the risk of killing the conversation, then we could just continue it here.

In the late nineties, several companies (Viz being the MOST notable in my mind, but others come to mind) made a play for "the average kid" to the detriment of their marketing to FANS.

Replace the word "fans" with "adults" and you're on the right track.

This is the problem with marketing. If you have a pure marketer, they're going to go after the money and eventually kill off whatever golden goose they're feasting off of. Upper management will be happy because they get their annual bonuses, but you lose the people that helped create the market at the beginning. The ideal is to have an anime fan that has marketing skills, who works to "keep the company real". But, this is also doomed to failure eventually because the investors wouldn't be satisfied with the fiscals at the end of each year. It may be better if the entire industry died a fast death and made room for a new generation of fans to start over from scratch. Failing that, we need an upstart that has industry ties and deep enough pockets to keep the company running without going public.

[davemerrill]

This is a key point. I was talking to Tiffany Grant at Project A-kon about 5-6 years ago, and she was absolutely deflated over the lack of voice-over work for dubbed anime. Basically, people just weren't buying, and she couldn't see how the industry could change that. And I think that a lot of the problem is as you say - the economy isn't picking up for the people that want to buy stuff, anime or not. Another issue, though, is that the real draws - Naruto, One Piece, Bleach - don't buoy up anything else. Pokemon may still be popular, but that's the only direction money is going - into Pokemon. Naruto, Bleach and One Piece only bring money into Viz. The fandom is too shallow and single-minded. It's not that these are anime fans, wanting to try other new things but not having the money for it. These are Naruto or Pokemon fans that don't care about anime. I agree with you, anime was the canary in the coalmine, but it was never a very health canary to begin with.

Well, if you're counting on a niche fandom to support your career, then you're probably going to fail. Unless you really like your day job. The money has never been in the animation itself, it's been in the ancillary merchandising, and when you take a TV show that ran on-air in Japan and generated advertising and toy revenue, and then put it on DVD in the States without the benefit of a TV broadcast or any advertising to speak of, your sell-through is going to be teeny tiny. Your profits are going to be teeny tiny. The Japanese licensors are going to be amazed that their amazingly popular property didn't do better (see: City Hunter, Fist Of The North Star) and eventually are going to take their ball and go home (Bandai).

That's one of the dirty little secrets of the "anime industry" - there isn't one. In the States most of the voice actors had day jobs - even the "stars" - they would be speaking to convention ballroom full of fans on Sunday and on Monday they are back at work. Half the localizers are out of business, the print magazines have all gone away except for OUSA, the 'anime' section in Blockbuster is gone, Suncoast is gone (talk about a canary in a coal mine). In Japan the industry was and still is dependent upon a tremendously underpaid workforce- http://altjapan.typepad.com/my_weblog/2 ... wling.html - and is dealing with, again, a mindset that believes DVDs can be sold for astronomical sums to die hard collectors, not to the masses at Wal-mart.

Put this in the context of the economic slump AND a technological revolution that gave most people the ability to download or stream whatever they wanted to watch, and you have an "industry" that isn't going to be around for very long.

I think the only segment of the anime fan world that continues to survive and to thrive is the anime convention scene; most anime cons continue to see increased attendance. I've been predicting attendance would level off for something like five or ten years now, so I'm pleased to be wrong, but other than "the things are fun and relatively cheap" I have only murky theories as to why this is.

[Heero]

In the late nineties, several companies (Viz being the MOST notable in my mind, but others come to mind) made a play for "the average kid" to the detriment of their marketing to FANS.

Replace the word "fans" with "adults" and you're on the right track.

Actually, I meant it exactly as said. When Ranma was released on VHS (before DVD) the dubs were $5 cheaper than the subs. The explanation put forth was that due to the lower production of the subs they were more expensive to produce. Now, to be fair, that was likely entirely true but Viz COULD have amortized the cost across all versions or could have simply done a better job of explaining to customers or even added extras to the subs and made it a "collector's edition". Instead, they did none of that and just basically TOLD the sub fans "you're not our target market". (yes, that STILL annoys the hell out of me)