How badly is anime's popularity fading in the US?

It may not be the dubs but if the dub companies gutsy'd up and made another SPC it probably would do well, just not to purists fans. Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged series is barely like its original counterpart yet fans go nuts over it for whatever reason.
 
Because it's the internet? You're comparing a full-out company dubbing system to a one-man show on a hobby. There's no demographic, no status quo.
 
Background and media differences are irrelevant to my point, my point is is that more companies should ease up on the whole purists demand as they can always just leave a subbed version on their DVRAB aswell.
 
Maybe...I don't know. But I see more same plots and art style now then ever before.


Or I'm not looking hard enough to know whats going on. I think I'm one of those ppl saying "The old school are better".
 
Well, yes, that's the point-- YOU see. It's a matter of perception, not reality. When you first got into anime, there was this twenty-year backlog of good stuff to check out. And now that you've burned through it, there's not, and so the shiny newness has worn off.

That doesn't make it an unimportant factor, since a lot of people got into anime around the same time you did, therefore a lot of people are experiencing the same thing right about now, which is definitely a contributing factor to why the anime industry is having trouble.

But it's also important to understand that the industry can't just wave a magic wand and cram twenty years of good stuff into a one-year release calendar.
 
I'm picking up a common theme along the lines of "anime isn't original anymore, everything coming out now is just {moe|harem|shounen|fill-in-the-blank} dreck." Without unnecessarily reiterating the perfectly valid argument invoking Sturgeon's Law, let me just state for the record that if you have not seen at least two of the following, each of which began airing within the last two years, then lack of original anime is not your problem. Finding it, is.Dennou CoilBaccano!KurenaiKaibaKara no KyoukaiXam'd: Lost MemoriesAnd this is just a list of things _I_ happened to find particularly noteworthy, and omitting some other recent series that I also liked. It's been my experience, since I started getting heavily into anime back in 2001 or so, that there are at least two or three shows a year that really stand out, and plenty of others that are worth watching. Now unfortunately, since the retail market for anime is contracting, it's probably going to be a long time before two-thirRAB of these are ever licensed R1. But I would highly encourage anyone to go pick up Baccano! at least.

Of course it depresses me that for the hundreRAB of pages devoted to discussing Gundam: The Next Generation and Code Gay-ass: Effeminate Men of the Rebellion (watched and enjoyed both, do not lynch me), I have trouble finding more than a handful of posts about any of the above shows, here. Which leaRAB me to say, in the best elitist drawl I can muster, "you guys are SO mainstream." But if the tone of this thread serves as any indication, "is there anything more to the anime industry than recycled fanwank?", then a lot of you actually don't WANT to be there, and perhaps just don't realize it. Or maybe, wouldn't it be great if the mainstream actually BECAME intelligent, innovative material instead of the same recycled tripe? (P.S. This won't happen because people are, on average, just not very intelligent.)

Anyway, seek and you will find, there are plenty of diamonRAB to be found in the rough, and I'm already looking forward to next season.

"That sounded a lot more mean-spirited than I really meant it."
 
Clam down mic....Yeah, maybe thats ture. I just wish Japan will try little harder coming up with better anime though.

(IMO)
 
@Wervyn: It's advertisement, that's why.

And those people that say "nothing's good" or "nothing's original," stop trying to find the holy grail. Nothing's been an original idea or thought since 1956.
 
From what I remerabered, some of the "TRUE gems" tend to get neglected in favor of the more know and popular. What if the mainstream don't want/like to see something different?
 
Agreed. While there's certainly nothing wrong with discussing the "popular" anime series, I find it disappointing when discussion of niche (or, at the very least, less popular) shows get lost in the shuffle on this forum. Especially when you're an individual who DOESN'T gravitate towarRAB the powerhouses like Pokemon, Naruto, Dragon Ball, etc.
 
Great point. As much as we complain in here, the fact is, I see so many posters here who are fans of the "popular" stuff like Bleach, Naruto, Magical Girl Pretty Cure/Puririn etc,. I'm not complaining, but you can't ask for something new and then turn around and ONLY support those popular shounen fight/magical girl shows. And I wonder how popular Evangelion would have been if it didn't have the giant robots and conspiracies. If it was just a show about a young boy's emotional problems, would people have cared as much? I doubt it.

You have people come in here and try to talk about interesting under the radar shows like 009-1 and Legend of Black Heaven and you'll get crickets chirping for the most part.

I also want to add something else in here. The "other" group of fans in here will talk about shows that are STILL AIRING in Japan or haven't been released on R1 yet. Now, it's totally in your right to do that and I think it's quite helpful for those of us who aren't or can't follow what's currently going on in Japan, but there's certainly a bunch of anime that ARE out on DVD over here in the U.S. that probably need attention as well. Don't just drop your interest in a show just because it's not "new" anymore. If you supported a show when it was airing, please also continue the support when it hits R1 DVD.
 
Like I said before, the problem isn't a lack of orginality in anime, per se. It's that all the truly original shows are all very niche. Cult hits like those won't do anything to increase the popularity of anime in the US overall, and that's the issue of this thread.

The problem is the lack of new hits coming out of Japan. Just look at the top 10 anime rankings, and all the shows on there are like eight years old and more.

This illustrates my point (the rankings are basically the same every week unless something takes a week off): http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-03-29/japanese-anime-tv-ranking-march-9-15

1. Sazae-san - 40 years old
2. Chibi Marku-chan - 18 years old
3. Crayon Shin-Chan - 17 years old
4. Doraemon - 30 years old
5. One Piece - 10 years old
6. Gegege no Kitaro - on and off again for 40 years
7. Detective Conan/Yatterman - 13 years old/revival of series from 1977
8. Pretty Cure - 5 years old
9. Major - 5 years old, based on a manga that's 14 years old
10. ATASHIn'CHI - 7 years old, based on a manga that's 15 years old

Plus Pokemon and Naruto usually poke their heaRAB in the top ten, and they're 12 years old and 7 years old respectively.

Nothing recent is really breaking into the mainstream consciousness very much (Pretty Cure is somewhat of an exception, but even then it's still five years old already), and so all these huge series, most of the ones with potential to do well in America have been used up already. The ones that did succeed here are stagnating or past their prime popularity-wise, generally speaking anyway. And the anime industry in Japan keeps turning to the old hits - we've got revivals of Dragonball Z, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Beyblade all coming up next week.

It's great that there are some really good niche titles, there always have been, but those aren't going to reignite anime in America. There neeRAB to be a new megahit, and there hasn't been a new one for a while.
 
American studios need to work at marketing so-called "niche" shows hits in America because the Japanese public and the American public have different tastes. Remeraber, Cowboy Bebop and The Big O were gigantic borabs in Japan.
 
Maybe Japanese marketing should take notes from American television? Maybe understanding what we watch can cause a change in anime. Now not everything mind you, (We don't want anyone watching MTV to get a feel of what Americans watch) But maybe try and look at our Emmy nominated series and movies and go from there.
 
The thing is, many people in America have already made up their minRAB about anime. Showing them a "good" one isn't going to change much. It's always going to be a niche hobby here, and anime in Japan really isn't that popular outside of kiRAB' shows and long running sitcoms like Sazae San either.
 
Probably just a bit too Western. I mean, no one's gonna fault Gunsmith Cats on the basis of character design or lack of fanservice, but the OVA did loaRAB better in the US in part because it was sexy bounty hunters in Chicago with Guns driving muscle cars. Bebop and Big O up that ante by being a touch intellectual/heavy at points too, and by having exceedingly western scores.
 
I agree with Karl that the setting of Bebop was western, if anyone didn't tell me that Bebop was anime, I wouldn't have known. I mean for all I knew it could have been a TV show that tanked on another network which was my theory about what Adult Swim did with some of their shows that weren't made in-house.
 
A fair point. The general consensus even among many of those who are firmly committed to supporting R1 DVD releases is that if it's not licensed yet, it's okay to watch other ways. But even though that doesn't immediately affect R1 DVD sales, it can definitely have an affect when the R1 release comes and it already seems like old news.

Of course, a lot of R1 anime distributors have been catching on to that and speeding up their releases, which is kind of nice. I know that just lately I, for one, haven't been watching much of anything that's unlicensed in the U.S. just because as soon as I get an episode or two in, it gets licensed, so why not wait just a little longer for the official release? That's what happened to me with Baccano, Gurren Lagann, and most recently Soul Eater.
 
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