Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Wed Mar 07, 2018 12:44 pm

ABED wrote:Kunzait often brings up bootlegging, but how big was that market? I have a hard time believing it was ever all that big, and certainly nowhere near mainstream. I'm sure DB was known in the US, but it was a very small number of people.
In a general sense, or for anime specifically?

Generally speaking? Bootleg VHS trading had almost always been a massive, massive underground market throughout the entirety of the 1980s and 90s. It was not "mainstream" in the sense that you generally of course weren't going to find any of these tapes sitting in a chain video store (though you'd certainly see them popping up in mom & pop stores quite often).

But... the black market for VHS bootlegs was MASSIVE during those 20 or so years. To degrees that I'm still shocked that anyone who was alive back then was somehow unaware of.

People had all kinds of outlets for trading these tapes. There were basement sales. Of the literal sort: if you lived in any kind of urban or inner-city environment, it was not hard at all to come across some rundown old Church or abandoned building where sellers would regularly set up shop a few times a year and people would generally know to come looking on X or Y day and month by word of mouth. Or small stalls from street vendors, who sold tapes right out in broad daylight on particularly busy streets. Or local grocery stores (especially ones in Little Tokyo or Chinatown areas) which would have them all up on racks. Head shops were also fairly common places to look: generally speaking if you knew and were cool with the people who worked there, they'd sell you bootleg tapes of all kinds of obscure lost or foreign oddities.

There were tapes of anything and everything from unaired Television pilots, to unreleased films (I was a huge horror buff, so Italian giallo as well as Mexican, French, and Southeast Asian horror were things I collected on bootleg VHS in robust quantities growing up), to foreign movies and TV shows never released in the U.S., and even sometimes actual security cam footage taken from stores and office buildings showing all kinds of weird, sick, and otherwise humorous real life incidents that became the pre-internet equivalent of "memes".

My dad was friends with someone who was an active seller himself. When I was little, my dad owned literally hundreds and hundreds of tapes that were filled to capacity with sometimes as much as almost half a dozen movies each (since tapes back then could hold as much as 6 to 8 hours or so worth of footage). His old apartment was literally filled with stacks upon stacks upon stacks of the fucking things, most of them filled up with classic Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest kung fu and Wuxia films (which was one of the earliest ways that I got into the genre growing up), along with some fairly fucked up grindhouse films (rape movies like Forced Entry weren't uncommon amongst his collection).

Kung Fu bootleg tapes in particular were ever present almost everywhere in most inner-city neighborhoods in general. My dad's personal collection was by no means even CLOSE to the end of my collecting of those during those years: all you had to do was go down to the right street corner, or get to know the right people (be they people who worked behind the counter of the local mom & pop video store, or just the right friend of a friend of a friend's cousin, etc).

I've talked about this a bunch in the Wuxia thread, but there's a reason that hip hop and black culture has such a massive, massive connection to classic Kung Fu films and Wuxia: grindhouse theater showings and bootleg VHS tapes of those things were an almost intrinsic part of growing up in "the hood" so to speak. Lots and lots of people from those kinds of poorer inner-city areas, especially dorks like me and my friends, had a collection and were always on the hunt for more. The weirder and more bizarre, the better.

Superstar rap groups like the Wu Tang Clan didn't just miraculously all of a sudden become famous and have instant magical access to these films out of nowhere within a vacuum: they were at one point just regular guys growing up in the projects, no different than a hundred people I'd known my whole life from places like where I grew up, who got into these sorts of films because bootleg tapes of them just came with the neighborhood and were a part of daily life there, and would later incorporate their iconography into their own music (as did tons of other rap artists at the time).

But while bootleg VHS tapes were definitely more readily visible and easily available in more "ghetto" areas, they were by no means totally isolated away from higher class areas. College campuses in particular would see oceans of these things make their way across dorm rooms all across the country. I lived not too terribly far from two of the most prestigious colleges in the country (Yale and NYU): tons of guys I hung out with as a kid were students in both those schools who'd come into all kinds of unique and weird films and shows from around the world through tape trading among different dorm houses.

And all that's not even getting into the Tokusatsu/Kaiju end of things, particularly Godzilla. Godzilla bootleg VHS tapes were SO utterly and indescribably available for just about anyone to find, that you'd literally have to have been encased in stone at the bottom of the ocean to not know that those were things that people owned and passed around among their friends. Most ANY non-chain video store or any comic book shop during the latter half of the 80s and entirety of the 90s carried them. In bulk. Godzilla was a film franchise that was without question WAY more known through its bootleg tapes than it was from almost any sort of official release it had gotten back then. Odds were overwhelming that if you knew someone who was into Godzilla, they were into it specifically through bootleg VHS tapes.

For anime in particular, it was largely raw (unsubbed) and genuinely niche and legitimately obscure during the latter end of the 70s (where it was primarily the domain of Sci Fi convention halls) as well as - to a gradually lesser and lesser degree - much of the early half of the 80s.

By the latter end of the 80s though, fansubs very much took off and anime bootleg tapes quickly became exceedingly ubiquitous. During the 90s, the things would show up at ALL the above venues for obtaining tapes, and then some. The video store right across the street from the project I lived in as a kid would have anime fansubs just show up on the racks on a fairly regular basis (that was how I saw the OVA Birth uncut and in Japanese during a time when only the edited dub was available).

There were all kinds of stalls at the local mall that would sell them (one time a friend of mine walked away with the whole Patlabor TV series on a couple of tapes several years before it got licensed for around 30 bucks just because he happened to find it from the right vendor at the mall). This local head shop called Charms that my friends and I always used to hang out at would sell a veritable treasure trove of anime fansubs: one of my closest friends (the one from whom my "Kunzait" handle originally stems from) would go there regularly to buy and follow the series Fushigi Yuugi more or less as it was airing in Japan, and also where I got a bunch of the Yomi/Raizen-era episodes from Yu Yu Hakusho. All of this was during the mid-90s or so.

Fansub bootleg VHS tapes were the original origin and genesis of all kinds of anime fandom pastimes that people now take for granted: the very first ever AMVs started out as "extras" that fansubbers would put together just for fun to bookend "compilation" tapes: tapes that functioned almost like random "mixtapes" that were filled with a sampling of random episodes, movies, and OVAs from all kinds of disparate and diverse anime series (that functioned almost like a sampler buffet of what the subber or seller in question had to offer).

You could get something that would start off with a few episodes of Irresponsible Captain Tylor before moving on to an episode of Maryuu Senki, then to one of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure OVAs, an episode of Ranma that Viz had yet to get to at the time, the uncut Megazone 23, maybe some Slayers, Kimagure Orange Road, a random Dirty Pair outing, a 3x3 Eyes ep, DBZ Movie 8 (because that thing showed up on damn near every other anime mixtape out there to the point where it felt almost mandatory), and finally end off on something arty and odd like Take the X Train or Memories... before capping itself off with maybe a Devil Hunter Yokho AMV set to Phil Collins "In the Air Tonight" or something random like that.

Fandubs were also something that got their start on these tapes: they were fairly rare (like genuinely rare: I can't imagine there were more than a dozen or so attempts, probably less than that, across 20 someodd years since the effort to create those back then was obviously monumental). Decades before the first Abridged series, there was an infamous fan parody dub of Macross from the very early 90s. Fairly sure there was a stab at one of the Ranma OVAs as well. People would even do things like take bits and monologues from standup comedians' like Bill Hicks or David Cross and dub them over onto various scenes from different anime that matched up (as closely as possible anyway) to whatever they were talking about.

Come the mainstreaming of the internet around '94 or so, and forget it: you could join all kinds of different mailing lists from different subbers across various Usenet forums and some of the earliest ever anime websites and get regular (or semi-regular) updates on different available series. Or just order out whatever individual tapes directly. This was how I'd gotten a ton of my latter episodes of Fist of the North Star (stuff from the Hokuto no Ken 2 era), as well as some of the bits of original Dragon Ball I was missing, among other things.

An anecdote I've shared a few times on here is how by the mid 90s Dragon Ball had become so widely well known and recognized among anime fans through years and years of being a fixture in the fansubbing community, that there were even a few video and comic book stores here in the U.S. that would put up Japanese banners and marquee ads for GT during the lead up to and first few months or so of its original Japanese airing (so this would be early-ish '96 or so) in an effort to attract anime buffs to check out the store's general anime and manga selection. Some American arcades had even imported the three DBZ arcade games, because there was enough of a "cult" interest in the franchise as early as '93/'94 or so (especially among import-savvy gamers).

One of the more unusual and unique outlets that I remember getting raw anime episodes from: the earlier mentioned close friend (who I got my username here from) wound up enrolling in a "penpal" service around '95/'96 or so. Basically it was a mailing service who's goal was to better "connect" different kids from around the world (again, in very much a "pre-internet" sense). She made friends with a Japanese girl her age through it who was living in I think Shibuya or some such area. One of the things that the penpal service allowed you to do was send each other packages filled with all kinds of knick knacks and artifacts that were somehow "representative" of your home country and culture.

My friend would send this girl things like American music CDs (usually from underground hardcore punk or riot grrrl bands who had material that was harder to come across in Japan) and in return the Japanese girl would tape various anime shows off of Japanese TV and send them back my friend's way. This was how her, and by extension me and the rest of our little clique, wound up seeing and following (albeit raw) Neon Genesis Evangelion AS it was airing week to week/month to month on Japanese TV. Which, gotta say, was pretty damn sweet. Show definitely blew our minds, even raw.

This was also the reason for why (as I've talked about in a bunch of threads, including the Wuxia one) there used to be such a great degree of overlap between anime fans and fans of Hong Kong movies and live action Japanese film: the two would very often share the same groups of sellers or be sold together in many of the same channels and outlets. When you start collecting tapes for one kind of generally strange and odd piece of foreign media, you're gonna find that its a very small hop, skip, and a jump over to delving into another one that's just across the pond. That connection of course went away as both the tape-trading aspect of fansubs died off in favor of digital, as well as the core fabric and makeup for U.S. anime fandom itself radically shifted post-Cartoon Network.

All of this kind of stuff wound up on COUNTLESS tapes that disseminated all across the country from coast to coast. It was without question a fairly massive cottage industry for sure, especially by and throughout the bulk of the 90s (and even for most of the 80s, bootleg VHS was still INSANELY sprawling well outside of anime).

If you lived deep within the thick of someplace like rural middle of nowhere Iowa or Alabama or Kansas or someplace like that, then I can see definitely how something like this might pass you by. But if you were in any sort of metropolitan area or major city or relatively large urban area of some kind, and furthermore if you were fairly socially active and regularly went out and interacted with other extroverted people, and even more so if you and your circle were heavily interested in weird, unusual oddities of film and television media... then this stuff wasn't THAT deeply hidden. You had to basically be living in an underground cave (or under the thumb of wildly overprotective parents) in order to not glom onto the fact that there was an entire, thriving subculture of dorky Gen X slacker-types tooling around places like comic book, record, and video stores passing stuff like this around on the regular.

As far as numbers go, because this was a black market there's almost no way to know for sure. Was Dragon Ball's fansub audience in the millions? Almost undoubtedly not, no way (though it was almost certainly probably much larger than a lot of people on this forum would likely assume, since the average fan these days seems to assume that almost virtually no one knew about this series back then, which isn't even remotely close to accurate).

Was the audience for anime fansubbing as a whole that high? Mmmmmaybe possible? But I can't say that for sure: almost certainly not in the 80s at least, because the audience was still gradually building for it back then from out of the depths of true, genuine obscurity. The 90s though its fairly possible if not incredibly likely: I can attest just from personal experience that any level of difficulty in obtaining anime raws or fansubs was virtually wiped out of existence by at least as early as around 1990/1991 or so. Both Robotech/Macross and Akira made damn certain of that during the late 80s. By that point and onward, you didn't have to even be LOOKING for anime to run across plenty of it within the VHS tape trading realm.

Was the audience for bootleg VHS trading IN GENERAL (beyond anime) that high though? In the 80s or 90s? Oh, almost definitely and without question. Just within major cities like New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago etc. ALONE would probably bump it well into that realm, never mind all the areas that were even relatively closely nearby.

For point of personal reference: I was just a dumb, regular elementary school kid living relatively close to the border between New York and Connecticut. I wasn't some kind of genius child prodigy, I damn sure wasn't rich (I grew up in relative poverty), and I wasn't privy to some super top secret society that had the keys to the vaults of Toei or Toho or Golden Harvest like some kind of dorky Illuminati or whatever.

Seriously, I can't even count now the number of conversations I've gotten into with folks from around here now who would treat me with complete and utter incredulity that I or anyone else could've possibly known about any of this kind of stuff prior to 1999 or 2000 or so (which I would conversely respond with a sentiment of "How does one get to be a nerd with a pulse from before then and somehow NOT know about any of this?").

When really, all that separates me and my experiences from any average regular on a place like this that's relatively close to my age is 1) location and environment (since I know there are a lot of U.S. users here who live or otherwise grew up somewhere in the rural depths of Middle America), and 2) I had a heavily active social life, hung out largely around people way older than I was (most, though not all, of my closest friends growing up in the early part of the 90s were usually in college or around college age - sometimes a bit older - while I was in elementary and middle school: I was the "kid brother" of the group), and had parents who didn't give two shits about or overly monitor what I watched.

That's really all it boils down to: living in or near active civilization, having a relatively active social network of real life friends, and otherwise not being heavily sheltered and overly chained down to things like Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.

In all honesty, I didn't think that those combination of factors was really all that relatively rare or especially unique and uncommon until I first joined communities like this one a little over ten years ago and started hearing a steady and almost seemingly never-ending stream of stories and testimonials throughout the years since from people - both here and on loads of other similar forums and communities - about how depressingly (sometimes genuinely heartbreakingly so) goddamned socially isolated they were kept by their families (or general life situations) as children growing up, along with how obscenely and ludicrously over-regulated and obsessively monitored and restricted their media viewing was by their respective families.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:47 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Gaffer Tape » Wed Mar 07, 2018 12:53 pm

Kid Buu wrote:
ABED wrote:Kunzait often brings up bootlegging, but how big was that market? I have a hard time believing it was ever all that big, and certainly nowhere near mainstream. I'm sure DB was known in the US, but it was a very small number of people.
Dragon Ball has never been mainstream in the US. Not even now.
It once had a Burger King Kids' Meal tie-in promotion with toys and everything. I don't see how it could possibly prove itself more U.S. mainstream than that. Well, maybe if they'd landed McDonald's...
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by ABED » Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:16 pm

I get that things don't become popular in a vacuum. I've read enough biographies about Metallica and pro wrestling to understand the value of tape trading, but I never got the sense that the exposure was nearly as great for any particular act as when they achieved mainstream success. Popularity through tape trading only goes so far. I understand overall the market was pretty big for bootlegging, but not for any one particular act or movie or TV show, at least not relative to mainstream success. I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this, but it sounds a lot like the long tail where the success of this particular market isn't made up of a couple big hits, but mainly due to a large number of niches.

I'm not discounting your experience, but I'd be interested to see the statistics about tape trading back then.
It once had a Burger King Kids' Meal tie-in promotion with toys and everything. I don't see how it could possibly prove itself more U.S. mainstream than that. Well, maybe if they'd landed McDonald's...
I forgot about that. Great point.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Night Owl » Wed Mar 07, 2018 1:31 pm

The rampant ABUSE of capital letters to EMPHASISE key points is REALLY irksome. Good reading otherwise.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Wed Mar 07, 2018 3:07 pm

ABED wrote:I understand overall the market was pretty big for bootlegging, but not for any one particular act or movie or TV show, at least not relative to mainstream success. I'm not sure exactly how to phrase this, but it sounds a lot like the long tail where the success of this particular market isn't made up of a couple big hits, but mainly due to a large number of niches.
It entirely depends on what aspects of the market we're talking about in the first place. Overall I think that what you're saying here is generally the case as a whole; but at the same time there are also notable examples like Godzilla which kinda torpedo this particular idea. Even to this very day (well long into the digital era) Godzilla as a franchise, among Westerners at least, is still to one degree or another synonymous with the old VHS tape trading market from which it originally grew out of.

Same with anime. While as a medium overall, it definitely grew as a consequence of the overall totality of the combined smaller and bigger hits within the VHS fansubbing market... there were definitely without question also some hits that were much, much bigger than others that can be attributed to helping principally drive the market upwards.

I'm not entirely disregarding what it is you're saying: just also noting that even within a "niche" market like anime fansubbing, there were certain titles that were CLEARLY of bigger focus than others and which generally helped push the medium into greater and greater prominence. Dragon Ball was certainly one of those (especially once the Cell arc first started in Japan; that's when it REALLY kicked into overdrive) as was titles like Macross, Gundam, Dirty Pair, Kimagure Orange Road, Megazone 23, Patlabor, Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Galaxy Express 999, City Hunter, Lupin III, Saint Seiya, Slayers, Tenchi Muyo, Fist of the North Star, Yu Yu Hakusho, etc.

That may sound to a younger, modern fan who believes that this was at that point a tiny little nothing industry like I just rattled off within that above list the vast bulk of what was out there at the time: but that's anything but the case. That above titles that I just rattled off the top of my head were just the very tip of the outermost edge of a much, muuuuuuuuch bigger iceberg and merely represent a very infinitesimally small sampling of some of the much bigger and more prominent titles that were helping to drive and grow the market. The overall rabbit hole of everything that was out there (both big and small scale) went much, much, muuuuuuuch deeper.

For every massive iconic hit like Dirty Pair or Galaxy Express or Lupin that you had, there'd be several countless dozens more smaller niche hits like the aforementioned Fushigi Yuugi and Irresponsible Captain Tylor or Flame of Recca, Red Photon Zillion, Ogre Slayer, Combustible Campus Guardress, The Vision of Escaflowne, Ah! My Goddess, and a literal vast ocean's worth more from there. And the total number of those more "top of the heap" hits were hardly at all a small amount to begin with.

And that's of course not only just keeping things to stuff that most modern fans would even recognize as being anime in the first place (since like I said in another thread, the market back then was also prominently full of tons and tons older-skewing affairs that wouldn't even register as Japanese anime of any kind to most post-Toonami U.S. fans; your Twilight of the Cockroaches and Angels Egg kinds of titles and the like) its also not even getting into stuff that was actually officially licensed back then but still had a fansubbing presence from well before and during the time in which it was being steadily licensed (which is how everything from Dominion Tank Police to Bubblegum Crisis to Urotsukidoji and tons of others first proliferated).

I've no doubt that well before anime first crossed over to the "children in deep rural Kentucky" levels of mainstream via Cartoon Network, that the fansubbing market had over the years in total pushed thousands upon thousands of different distinct anime series, franchises, and titles from throughout the 80s and 90s (and even some from the 70s).

And like with any market (no matter how "under the radar") that gets THAT ludicrously dense, some hits are gonna float more predominantly to the surface of the pond than others. So while yes, overall I'd agree with you and say it was the general totality of the whole thing that ultimately drove anime fansubs as high up to the surface as they'd gotten by their apex in the 90s... there were also without question some marquee big name heavy hitters among the group (that are more apt to jump to the forefront of people's minds than others) that were in their own ways downright iconic for their time even.

In other words: it isn't like the anime fansubbing market was just one massively large flatbed full of individually tiny and middling-level hits that were on an otherwise even-keeled level of notoriety. There were some fairly dense layers to it, with some hits breaking out in a big, big way more prominently than others (and even some of those lesser-hits still managed to cause their share of a stir and attract their own relatively smaller but no less rabid fanbases). And among that layered pyramid, if Dragon Ball wasn't at the very apex, it certainly wasn't any more than a single rung or so below it.

In the pre-Cell arc years, it was definitely a couple notches lower (though again, not to any ridiculously buried degrees of ultra-obscurity here: even less than a year into my fandom in 1990, I'd still managed to at least HEAR about it and know of it as an active presence within the broader anime community and fanbase), but once that post-Future Trunks/Artificial Humans wave of newer fans had hit around '92 or so, DB's degree of visibility among fansubbing shot way, way, waaaaaaay up within very short order.

Oh and before I forget, another fun factoid about how various anime (and manga) titles would spread and take off back then from seemingly nowhere: college dorms. More specifically, through roomates when one (or more) of them were foreign students studying from abroad from places like Japan itself, or really any part of Southeast Asia where anime has a more immediate presence.

Foreign college students from anywhere from Tokyo to Hong Kong to Taiwan to South Korea to Thailand, etc. would bring raw, untranslated manga or anime VHS tapes from back home with them; which were then seen (and further spread) by their U.S. roomates and campus friends. This was how a TON of titles as early back as, yes, even the 1980s (more so in the latter half) had also gained a foothold into the Western/U.S. fanbase at the time during some of its earliest years.

This was especially prominent throughout film or art colleges; but really, if you were going to college and lived on campus at any moderately prominent school (regardless of major or focus of study), odds were fairly high that you'd meet people from across the Pacific who'd bring this stuff from back home with them. Whereupon it would then proceed to spread like the clap across not only that campus, but throughout the then-burgeoning World Wide Web and into wider fandom as well.
ABED wrote:I'm not discounting your experience, but I'd be interested to see the statistics about tape trading back then.
I wish I had that info myself. But like with anything that exists within a black market, its all but impossible to pin down to an exact figure. All I can report on is what I was privy to at the time: which was a pretty goddamned vast ocean of a thriving underground cottage industry that spanned both ends of the country rather than the moderately to tiny sized backyard swimming pool full of close knit friends and family members that a lot of younger/later fans seem to be under the impression that that's all there was before CN and Toonami at the turn of the millennium.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by doomydoomydoom » Wed Mar 07, 2018 5:59 pm

Kid Buu wrote:
ABED wrote:Kunzait often brings up bootlegging, but how big was that market? I have a hard time believing it was ever all that big, and certainly nowhere near mainstream. I'm sure DB was known in the US, but it was a very small number of people.
Dragon Ball has never been mainstream in the US. Not even now.
Huh? DBZ is the biggest anime/manga franchise this side of Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh! in the U.S., in other Western countries too. Unless you meant Dragon Ball '86, which of course is not all that beloved over here and many causal fans have never seen it. But take it from me, I had the T-shirt and Piccolo Burger King figure circa 1999 - 2002, and I had never seen a second of DBZ nor did I have the opportunity to catch it on TV until late 2002. And anytime you have anime characters starring in a Ford commercial, you can be sure that anime is something like "mainstream."

As for the rest of it, Kunzait laid that all down. To supplement what he said, some anime lived and died in the West by their fansub popularity. Fushigi Yuugi was most likely licensed due to its immense popularity in the tape trading scene courtesy of these folks http://www.animezu.com/Anime/cels/pics/ ... uugi1.html, same for Marmalade Boy which they also did. Tomodachi Fansubs was a family affair (with a couple of translators from Japan on the team) that ended when the wife/mom who generated the whole project started having doubts and guilt pains; she ended the whole thing after receiving no contact from Japan regarding her inquiries as to whether or not they were OK with her and her family fansubbing their properties. A very, very naive line of thinking from today's viewpoint, but such were the times.

Besides the security cam stuff that Kunzait mentioned, some other kinds of things people discovered on bootleg tapes that were very popular were really bizarre oddities like Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a "midnight movie" kind of hit on many a band's tour bus, like Nirvana. Nekromantik really made the rounds among horror fans who were looking for the nastiest shocks. There's even the time when Chris Gore, a movie and game critic from my home state, lent Charlie Sheen a copy of something called "Guinea Pig" that he obtained from the tape trading circuit. Sheen watched it and was hysterical; he called the FBI and told them he was in possession of a snuff film. Investigative hijinks from both the FBI and Japan ensued and it was discovered that it was just a bunch of horror movies by Hideshi Hino adapting his own manga with some awesome special effects. But in the pre-Internet, pre-YouTube days there was no way Sheen would have known that. All he had was a tape, a label on it, and somebody telling him "dude you gotta watch this this is insane."

That was just the only way to see a lot of good shit if you liked to watch things, even if you weren't looking for extreme horror or Asian action or anime. There was no YouTube. Even in the era of YouTube, around 6 years ago I trawled around some DVD trading lists where you can still find all sorts of stuff. But again, YouTube has largely replaced all of that. Bootleg tape trading was the precursor to what you can find on YouTube and other video streaming and torrent sites today.

There's plenty of good reading out there about the Shaw Brothers kung-fu bootleg trading scene which Kunzait alludes to often if you want to know more about what it was like; search for "World Northal Shaw Brothers," "history of kung fu bootlegs," etc. Kung fu films have far messier release histories than Japanese films/anime and it was an extremely fascinating thing. Many of the bootlegs and sometimes OFFICIAL VHS releases turned out to be the same cut and censored prints which were aired on New York City television and other markets, as an example.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Kamiccolo9 » Wed Mar 07, 2018 6:28 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: I've no doubt that well before anime first crossed over to the "children in deep rural Kentucky" levels of mainstream via Cartoon Network, that the fansubbing market had over the years in total pushed thousands upon thousands of different distinct anime series, franchises, and titles from throughout the 80s and 90s (and even some from the 70s).
Hey, fuck you man. We had Speed Racer tapes :P
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Kid Buu » Wed Mar 07, 2018 6:32 pm

DBZ is one of the more popular anime series in the US but anime for the most part is a niche hobby. DBZ movies couldnt even get a major wide therater release like the early Pokemon movies did. US food companies have used Ranma 1/2 in their promotions but I would not call that mainstream here either.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying DBZ is some unknown franchise outside on this forum. It's just that I think DBZ popularity gets overstated ok this forum at times. I've even seen people here say that DBZ is more popular than Christianity or The Beatles in the west.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Wed Mar 07, 2018 7:07 pm

doomydoomydoom wrote:Besides the security cam stuff that Kunzait mentioned, some other kinds of things people discovered on bootleg tapes that were very popular were really bizarre oddities like Heavy Metal Parking Lot, a "midnight movie" kind of hit on many a band's tour bus, like Nirvana. Nekromantik really made the rounds among horror fans who were looking for the nastiest shocks. There's even the time when Chris Gore, a movie and game critic from my home state, lent Charlie Sheen a copy of something called "Guinea Pig" that he obtained from the tape trading circuit. Sheen watched it and was hysterical; he called the FBI and told them he was in possession of a snuff film. Investigative hijinks from both the FBI and Japan ensued and it was discovered that it was just a bunch of horror movies by Hideshi Hino adapting his own manga with some awesome special effects. But in the pre-Internet, pre-YouTube days there was no way Sheen would have known that. All he had was a tape, a label on it, and somebody telling him "dude you gotta watch this this is insane."
Dude... can we like, hang out or something? :lol:

Seriously, you're one of maybe like TWO other people from here (at the absolute most) that I know of who would bust out any kind of reference to something like either Nekromantik or Guinea Pig AT ALL, much less together in the same paragraph. 8)
Kid Buu wrote:I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying DBZ is some unknown franchise outside on this forum. It's just that I think DBZ popularity gets overstated ok this forum at times. I've even seen people here say that DBZ is more popular than Christianity or The Beatles in the west.
Just because some fans here wildly overstate things doesn't necessarily mean that DBZ isn't mainstream. The moment you get a fast food tie-in or get continually referenced on network TV shows (everything from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Two and a Half Men has referenced the show and characters explicitly by name) or a shitty live action Hollywood movie, you've officially joined the club of "the mainstream". TMNT was certainly never more popular than Christianity or The Beatles either. Does that make it somehow NOT mainstream then?

There aren't very many icons of geek culture or even general pop culture that you can legitimately put up alongside the same tier as things like Christianity or The Beatles: closest contenders I can really think of that might fit are Star Wars (which yeah, that definitely fits) and perhaps MAYBE Harry Potter (and that one's possibly more of a stretch). But its not a very large list either way. If "bigger than Christianity or The Beatles" is gonna be our main barometer for what is or isn't mainstream, then there's very, very, very exceedingly little that would qualify as mainstream at all.

Dragon Ball Z became "mainstream" in a very broad and undeniable sense almost as soon as it blew up on Toonami (anime itself as a broader whole I would argue did to a degree well before that even, but any room there might've been for debate prior to that was certainly out the window the moment DBZ and Pokemon landed in mainstream middle American kids' collective laps); without a doubt it more than qualified by the year 2000 at the very latest. Simultaneously, a lot of hyperactive and overzealous fans ALSO still greatly over-exaggerate the degree to which DBZ is mainstream. Both of these things can be (and indeed are) true.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by dougo13 » Thu Mar 08, 2018 7:26 pm

It would be fun for a lot of old time fans to just sit around and talk about the old days. Many people don't get the history of anime fandom at all. I used to keep a box of stuff around that was labeled just that. It included letters, early fanzines, CFO materials, APAs, etc. going back to the late 1970s. Then there is the cross-over with the video tape trading community starting out with the Videophile's Newsletter back in the late 1970s. For me, that's where anime tape trading starts. For fansubs though there were groups that were not affiliated with each other that I was aware of as well as groups that knew each other. We kept things going through Usenet as the WWW had not been created at that time. That and BBSes. But mostly stuff had to be done through snail mail. Fansubs really took off when 2 things happened. The first was the creation of the Amiga computer and the second was the creation of Substation Alpha. These two (along with the genlock for the Amiga) was the real starting point though there are other things that went on I can't discuss that also produced fansubs. Then there were also things like "Airline prints" of foreign films that sometimes turned up on foreign language channels. So, for instance, my copy of "My Youth In Arcadia" I have was recorded in July 1983. That copy was dubbed off by a lot of fan groups and watched by a ton of people. But other groups like the CFO had been showing subbed stuff from the foreign language stations since the mid to late 1970s recorded on Betamax tapes and later VHS. Hawaii was one place that had a lot of stuff from day one though because of the large part of the population who were of Japanese descent. So many live series were shown there with subs starting in that middle to late 1970s period. Anime was shown that I know of from the mid 70s as well. Many of those shows turned up in the hands of tape traders as well as bootleg stores catering to the ethnic populations in a lot of places. Not where I live though. The numbers of people who were Chinese, Japanese, Viet, etc. were ridiculously small. But I was able to start out watching a lot of Kung fu films in Chinese with English subs when people moved out of this area and they started to send me tapes. We also didn't have a theatre showing those kinds of films and the university clubs didn't show them or were unaware of them. But I started to push anime at science fiction and comic conventions from the early 1980s and things took off from there. I had my own contact in Japan from about 1979 with my first tapes showing up in early 1980. Wow! Seems like a lifetime ago. That all came to a head in 2000 and I stepped away from anime completely for almost 10 years. And then when I got back into it the world had changed a lot to the point I don't do much with it anymore. I have to leave it to younger fans. But it's fun to reminisce once in awhile....

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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by doomydoomydoom » Sun Mar 11, 2018 10:32 am

Kunzait_83 wrote: Dude... can we like, hang out or something? :lol:

Seriously, you're one of maybe like TWO other people from here (at the absolute most) that I know of who would bust out any kind of reference to something like either Nekromantik or Guinea Pig AT ALL, much less together in the same paragraph. 8)
HAHA, so that impressed you eh? I do what I can. :P I've plumbed the depths of cinema; sometimes I think I know way more than I should about those kinds of movies. But when I was a teenager I tried to seek out as many obscure exploitation and arthouse movies as possible, thinking it made me hardcore. :S "HAH! 'AVATAR' IS AN EPIC MOVIE?! YOU'RE NUTS. NOW '1900', THAT'S AN EPIC MOVIE!" " 'PARANORMAL ACTIVITY?' PHFFT! TRY 'TENEBRAE!' " "NAW BRUH I HAVEN'T SEEN 'THE HANGOVER', I ONLY WATCH GOOD MOVIES LIKE 'STRAW DOGS' AND 'VIDEODROME'."
dougo13 wrote:It would be fun for a lot of old time fans to just sit around and talk about the old days. Many people don't get the history of anime fandom at all.
It's true that a lot of kids today don't really know or care. They might think a lot of the classics are just too old and dated, too slow (since plenty of series of the time have upwards of 20 and even 30 episodes), some as Kunzait said don't look or feel like "anime", too "arthouse", the list goes on. They live in the "now" too much (trust me it's overrated) and don't care how the early anime buff scenes came together. But new Lupins (WHOO PART V IS COMING!), new Go Nagais and the like are maybe clue-ing some in to what it's all about though. And we're getting more classic manga than at any point in the past 30 years, so to me that really counts for something.

But as for getting the old fans together, The Old School Otaku Forum is basically the only place where people congregate and discuss the old days. And of course there's sites like this where there's always some question popping up about the history of DB in the U.S. which ties into it. Every other week somebody asks about the Anime Labs fansubs, or maybe they hear about the 90s Ocean dub and discover DBZ Uncensored which is thankfully still being hosted, and they want to talk about the Ocean dub, or some old article about FUNi, or this very topic right here where somebody wants to hear straight from the horse's mouth whether or not DB was completely unknown over here before 1995 - 1998.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by ABED » Sun Mar 11, 2018 10:50 am

I keep forgetting DB picks up new fans and how long it's been since DB/Z first aired on TV so it's easy for me to forget not everyone was here during those days.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by SuperCyan2 » Sun Mar 11, 2018 10:52 am

Kid Buu wrote:Dragon Ball has never been mainstream in the US. Not even now.
This. The English-speaking market is very close-minded and will only watch certain anime series (normally shonen) than expand their horizons and check out the masterpiece gems that exist out there. I never understood the reason behind this, to be frank.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by VegettoEX » Sun Mar 11, 2018 1:36 pm

Your response makes absolutely no sense in light of what's already been discussed, though.

Super hardcore anime fans not watching basic shonen is an entirely separate point from Dragon Ball specifically having been extremely mainstream in America to the point of receiving fast food tie-ins, consistent references in other mainstream media, and professional athletes invoking it on a near-daily basis.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by DBZAOTA482 » Sun Mar 11, 2018 3:29 pm

Kid Buu wrote:DBZ is one of the more popular anime series in the US but anime for the most part is a niche hobby. DBZ movies couldnt even get a major wide therater release like the early Pokemon movies did. US food companies have used Ranma 1/2 in their promotions but I would not call that mainstream here either.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying DBZ is some unknown franchise outside on this forum. It's just that I think DBZ popularity gets overstated ok this forum at times. I've even seen people here say that DBZ is more popular than Christianity or The Beatles in the west.
The DBZ movies weren't in theaters because they're not very long (most of them run at below an hour) and FUNimation couldn't afford to put in theater.

I agree a lot of fans overstate the show's popularity and influence (Batman and Spider-Man shit all over it in that regard) but I think you are understating it by denying its mainstream status. A show's impact on one nation rekindling interest in an entire franchise is not something to gloss over at all.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by RandomGuy96 » Mon Mar 12, 2018 5:34 pm

A Dragon Ball animated movie received a respectable theatrical release in the US where it was treated like an actual film, and was the first Japanese movie to be shown in IMAX 3D. That has to count for something.
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by dougo13 » Wed Mar 28, 2018 12:41 am

RandomGuy96 wrote:A Dragon Ball animated movie received a respectable theatrical release in the US where it was treated like an actual film, and was the first Japanese movie to be shown in IMAX 3D. That has to count for something.
Lots of things get that treatment but for a long time other than art house or ethnic cinema releases or film festivals, Japanese films don't do well in general release. The only one that comes to mind was Ran by Kurosawa which was had a general release. The DO put on specials theatrically once in a blue moon but they really are a premium to go see. The last one shown at my local theater wasn't even in the Ultra AVX room but cost more than going to see it in that format! Not too many takers. The last time we had retro films was a couple months back. Went to see Jackie Chan's Drunken Master with a whole other 2 folks at that showing! How do you make money this way? Probably means the theater won't try that again anytime soon. With that in mind though I really hope they do run the new movie even as a special one time showing. Will have to take my lumps on the English voices but would still be nice to see big screen. Would be great to take in the premiere in Japan though. Wonder if they will have contests with that as a prize? Time will tell...

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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Puaru » Wed Mar 28, 2018 10:29 am

Kunzait_83 wrote:
With regards to things like Speed Racer, Robotech, Voltron, etc. what you're doing here is making the very same mistaken and wrong assumption that most people on Kanzenshuu have been making about U.S. anime history for roughly as long as I've been here: you're assuming that the "edited for mainstream kids TV" end of the industry is literally all that there ever was to it prior to either Akira or the late 90s CN-explosion.

This of course is entirely not true at all. The North American anime industry has ALWAYS, from its very beginnings, been two-pronged: the "edited for kids TV" aspect - which is WAY disproportionately over-focused on in this community - is only one of those. The other of course being the home video marker, which was always a COMPLETELY different animal entirely.
The thing is though, that even though there was of course an anime FANBASE in the west back in the 80's, anime as a concept was largely unknown by the GENERAL POPULATION. A few individual shows like Voltron and Battle of the Planets and such were big hits, but the vast majority of the population either thought of them simply as cartoons that just so happened to be from Japan, or didn't even know they were from Japan in the first place.

Again, I'm not talking about anime fans or even nerds in general, I'm talking people in the broadest sense. If you were to survey random adult people in the 80's and ask them what Voltron was, a lot of them would probabaly be like "it's a cartoon that my kids like". Only a small percentage of them might know that the show was made in Japan. And even most of the people that DID know it wouldn't be able to discern any general differences between a western cartoon and a japanese cartoon.

Today, in our post-Pokemon/DBZ/Sailor Moon world, most people are at least aware of a few hallmarks and stereotypes regarding anime like "the characters have big eyes" or more specific things like "they contain a lot of transformation sequences" or "when characters attack they yell out the attacks name" or "they have a lot of sexy japanese school girls in them". Or, as much as anime fans hate the idea, "they are made only to sell toys and card games". :P

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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Mar 29, 2018 2:19 pm

Puaru wrote:The thing is though, that even though there was of course an anime FANBASE in the west back in the 80's, anime as a concept was largely unknown by the GENERAL POPULATION. A few individual shows like Voltron and Battle of the Planets and such were big hits, but the vast majority of the population either thought of them simply as cartoons that just so happened to be from Japan, or didn't even know they were from Japan in the first place.

Again, I'm not talking about anime fans or even nerds in general, I'm talking people in the broadest sense. If you were to survey random adult people in the 80's and ask them what Voltron was, a lot of them would probabaly be like "it's a cartoon that my kids like". Only a small percentage of them might know that the show was made in Japan. And even most of the people that DID know it wouldn't be able to discern any general differences between a western cartoon and a japanese cartoon.

Today, in our post-Pokemon/DBZ/Sailor Moon world, most people are at least aware of a few hallmarks and stereotypes regarding anime like "the characters have big eyes" or more specific things like "they contain a lot of transformation sequences" or "when characters attack they yell out the attacks name" or "they have a lot of sexy japanese school girls in them". Or, as much as anime fans hate the idea, "they are made only to sell toys and card games". :P
This seems to be missing the entire point of what I was trying to convey throughout this thread.

At NO point did I ever once claim that anime was "mainstream" in America during the 80s. During the 80s it was very much a niche "cult" entity, known and loved by a relatively small but ravenous following. Now how small and niche that following was relatively to other cult media is subject of a discussion on its own. But before I even touch on that (again) let me put to bed once and for all here: no, I am not claiming here, nor have I EVER claimed, that anime was mainstream during the 80s. The 90s is a different story entirely (even the early through mid 90s) but throughout the 80 anime was solidly a niche entity known mainly to hardcore nerds of the time.

What's also missing from your above post moreover is the broader point I'm trying to outline when I describe the stark difference between the edited for kids TV end of the market and the straight to video market: and that's the target audience. The edited for kids TV end of the spectrum (which I've been pointing out for some time now that this community here, and many others like it, wildly over-focuses on it) of course was mainly geared towards an audience of primarily children; the home video market however, was solidly adult-aimed, with the average age range being anywhere from 17 to 33-ish or so (roughly/broadly speaking).

The point I'm trying to make here is that up until the Toonami boom in the late 90s/early 2000s, there had always been this solid barrier between anime that was heavily edited and aimed at an audience of children (with the deliberate attempt made to "hide" the show's Japanese origins from them) and anime put out on the home video market for the purposes of both cultivating and catering to an adult audience WITHOUT hiding that the material was of Japanese origins.

By that same token, the specific KINDS of anime being sold to these two markets was also exceedingly different: absolutely NO Seinen/adult-aimed anime of ANY sort would make its way onto kids' TV and instead the material shown was of course exclusively Shonen/children's anime, while the home video market was home almost largely entirely to such Seinen/adult-oriented anime titles (with some stray bits of Shonen/kids' anime sometimes slipping its way in if there was some specific point of interest or "hook" to it that made it seem unique to an adult audience).

The mistake that communities like this one always make is focusing exclusively on the history of anime in America as it pertains to the edited for kids TV market (and thus taking on the perspective of former children of the 90s who grew up largely with heavily edited Shonen on kids' TV largely within total ignorance of their Japanese nature as an overall fandom-wide identity) while TOTALLY ignoring and remaining oblivious and ignorant to the OTHER side of the coin, where there was a market of largely older teens or grown adults who were mainly consuming anime through VHS tapes (both officially licensed and unedited as well as bootlegged/fansubbed) with full and complete awareness of what anime was and encompassed as a Japanese/foreign medium.

This all has the consequence of presenting an incomplete and heavily skewed view of the history of the medium and the fanbase within North America prior to 1999 or so, and thus gives most fans today the impression that A) anime was MUCH more obscure and hidden away from North American viewers during both the 80s and bulk of the 90s than it actually was and B) drilling in the notion (be it consciously or unconsciously) that Shonen titles have always been the overwhelmingly lone dominant force in the Western market and are thus the only part of anime (and manga) that really ultimately matters and are worth consuming, discussing, examining, and otherwise generally paying any kind of attention to.

The broader table of discourse thus gets ENTIRELY tilted towards fostering and perpetuating a fanbase whose priorities and perspective on anime are overwhelmingly slanted towards children's anime almost damn near exclusively and at the direct expense of their giving focus or priority towards most any kind of older-skewing works in the medium: in many cases its to the point where Shonen, since the early 2000s, has become SYNONYMOUS with the very concept of anime, and there exist a great many large swaths of fandom who genuinely believe that Shonen and Shojo are literally ALL there is to the medium.

NONE of this has a damn thing to do with any kind of notion that anime and manga were known to the mainstream public during the 1980s: what this is also missing is just how much there was in the way of cottage industries for niche and cult media during that decade. I'm one of the few people on this particular forum who has actual cognitive memories and living experience of the 1980s (albeit as a child myself granted, but one who at least was generally invested in and paying much more attention to non-children's media of the time) and what almost NEVER gets brought up in these kinds of discussions (generally from people who either weren't alive back then, or were the sorts of kids who only cared about other kids cartoons of the day) is the degree to which niche media within now-archaic outlets like VHS bootlegs, pirate cable channels, small print run magazines and comics, and so on found their way out into the world (provided, once again, that you were living in a more heavily populated urban environment and weren't out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but farmland and suburbia in your surroundings).

Yes, these things were niche by their very nature, and no Joe and Jane Average generally didn't follow them or even know about them: but both the level of awareness of them within niche subcultures as well as the ability to both learn of and access them as even an average person, was a LOT greater back then than people on forums like this one today seem to understand. So long as you had a driving interest in unusual forms of art and media and weren't shut off from broader society by location, it generally didn't take TOO much effort to at least become aware of something like anime and manga back then. No more at least than other similarly cult entities of geek media like it back then like it such as indie comics, punk rock bands on small DIY labels, foreign horror films from Europe and Asia, martial arts/Wuxia films and media from Hong Kong, and so on.

Its not so much that I'm arguing that anime and manga were known far and wide as household names in the middle of small town Nebraska (they obviously weren't of course): its more that I'm trying to illustrate that the degree to which anime and manga was "heavily hidden" away from the rest of American society tends to be VASTLY overstated by modern fandom, who themselves tend to be either A) kids who grew up HEAVILY sheltered and insulated from non-mainstream media if they were alive back then, or B) people who weren't alive at all at the time, and thus don't really have any contextual way of understanding the nuances of how niche subcultures generally developed and grew back then without the kinds of internet-based resources we have today.

Generally the latter camp (B) seems to find that it'd be just out and out IMPOSSIBLE for ANY kind of niche subculture to grow in ANY way without something like the modern internet, youtube, torrents, and social media there to bolster them. When in reality, that wasn't the case at all. The former camp (A) meanwhile often seems to just blanket assume (often even just subconsciously) that the entire U.S. population was somehow every bit as insulated and shielded from broader non-children's media as they were when they were kids. Also of course not at all the case.

Finally, my other broader point in all this is to impress the matter that the broader mainstream of America being made aware of anime and manga primarily through the conduit of a children's television entity like Cartoon Network has also, in its own way, been damaging to the image of the medium throughout the U.S. mainstream: much like a lot of the fanbase itself, if the general American mainstream thinks of anime, it thinks of stuff like Pokemon and DBZ. Which are, of course, children's anime/Shonen. The notion that there exists OTHER kinds of anime that's aimed at adults has become HEAVILY buried over time due in no small part to the monolithic presence of Cartoon Network's impact (and its continued throngs of devotees) that looms large over the whole thing here.

Hell if anything, that there exists Japanese animation which is heavily adult-oriented and not made for children was probably MUCH more prominent in the American mainstream in the early through mid-90s just PRIOR to the Cartoon Network explosion, due to titles like Akira, Ninja Scroll, and Ghost in the Shell making their fair degree of a splash (albeit obviously not to the same size as Pokemon, DBZ, and Cartoon Network in general) within more film-academic circles, which had a way of leaking its way out into the broader public in ways that don't generally happen as much in today's film landscape.

The advent of Pokemon, DBZ, and Shonen titles on Cartoon Network helped do a LOT to overshadow and bury that whole end of the medium's movement in the West, re-framing the whole discussion around anime as "mega-popular, money printing, merch-selling, uber-franchise fad phenomenons for kids from Japan in the same vein as something like Power Rangers" rather than what the broader window of most anime discussion in America was prior to CN, which from around '89/'90 to '99 or so was generally "cutting edge, experimental, and artistically progressive animation for adults from Japan that's helping to break down cultural stereotypes and boundaries about what animation can or cannot do for which kinds of audiences in the West". And yes, that latter conversation was indeed also happening even in mainstream circles (to a somewhat more comparatively limited extent) within the 1990s (not as much the 80s of course) just prior to the wake of anime on Cartoon Network and Toonami.

The long and short of it being, the Pokemon's, Digimon's, DBZ's, Yu Gi Oh's, and Naruto's of the anime landscape were given a MASSIVE push into mainstream prominence in the West post-Toonami, while the Akira's, Ghost in the Shell's, and Perfect Blue's of the anime world were pushed MUCH further underground and off of the cultural radar than they EVER were at almost any point during the 90s (the 80s of course, being a whole different matter, the "grass roots" era that helped usher in the increased mainstream visibility for anime in the 90s).

Meaning we (as a broader fanbase/community) basically sacrificed artistic substance, creative growth, and mature/cerebral sensibilities and leanings in favor of toy and merch sales, and trend-chasing fad-oriented pandering to small children (and adults who are still stuck in an arrested state of perpetual fixation on childhood interests), and largely cheering that transition on as a community: with the net benefit that's most often touted (within fans and by fans mind you) being that soccer moms in Missouri will now gape at you less blankly than they did before when you mention the word "anime" in front of them.

And me personally, I've been trying to argue (for many years, and often fruitlessly) that that trade off wasn't in any which way the least bit even vaguely close to worth it, and whatever "validation" one gets from the general American public now understanding that anime = cartoon from Japan is TOTALLY undermined and rendered completely meaningless when the main kinds of anime being thought of, focused on, or given any kind of cultural weight are mainly just hollow, empty, commercial shit meant to sell plastic junk to kids, and most of the real, substantive, artistically meaty titles are often now in many circles rendered even MORE obscure, underground, unknown, and niche than they generally were during the medium's overall more "obscure/underground/niche" era of U.S. history.

In other words: who gives two shits that everyone now knows what anime is, when the broader palette of anime that's being focused on in the West has degraded and deteriorated so drastically and become so hopelessly infantilized?

If given a choice solely between two relative extremes, I'd much, much, MUCH rather have an anime landscape that's comfortably niche-ish but not SUPER niche (more or less where it was at during the early half of the 90s) but still primarily fosters a fanbase that mainly values and cares about artistic progressivism and creative growth in animation (both for high brow art house fare as well as more broad and crowd pleasing entertainment for adults) as opposed to a landscape where sure, almost absolutely EVERYONE now has at least a baseline knowledge of anime as an entity that exists, but that knowledge is HEAVILY skewed and slanted almost entirely towards solely over-focusing on and deifying infantile and corporatized garbage for toddlers and tweens as if those are somehow revolutionary and "mature" solely because they're only MILDLY more edgy than Western cartoons and have a sense of continuity and serialization to them: which is what we have now and largely have had right along since the early/mid 2000s or so.

Of course the fantasy land ideal is to have the best of BOTH those worlds: have the entire Western mainstream be widespread cognizant and aware of anime while still allowing anime to thrive as an adult-focused and creatively progressive medium that trailblazes towards an animation industry that caters to a WAY broader palette of audience demographics and storytelling genres than simply just a binary of "children's kiddie schlock" or "Simpsons-esque adult sitcom"; but that's neither here nor there, as ultimately (unlike so much of the vast majority of 2000s and 2010s geek culture it seems) I simply don't give - and never have given - two flying fucks about chasing after the mainstream public's recognition or validation for my favorite art forms if it means sacrificing everything that made those works valued or noteworthy to me in the first place.

And yes, I'm well aware that a LOT of the problems here also extend even moreover to what's going on in the industry over on Japan's end of the equation; but that's a whole entirely separate topic unto itself. This thread mainly relates to America's (and thus the U.S. fanbase's) end of things.
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Kunzait's Wuxia Thread
Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Puaru
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Re: Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

Post by Puaru » Thu Mar 29, 2018 5:26 pm

Dude, take a look back at what you said earlier:
Kunzait_83 wrote:
DBZAOTA482 wrote:I was being hyperbolic with my comment. Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, and Robotech, and Voltron were successful but the west didn't really know they were anime at the time and just thought of them as cartoons.

It wasn't till Akira where a serious movement for anime in the mainstream was sparked.
This is all completely and totally incorrect.
You just said that this dude was "completely and totally incorrect" in his statement that anime didn't get any attention in the MAINSTREAM during the time of Speed Racer, Voltron ect.

That is why I told you that, no, this guy was in fact correct, as anime did indeed lacked recognition in the mainstream at the time.

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