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Discuss the new article by @Charles EP M. here
I stumbled into getting interviews, and they're definitely a thing that opens new doors - Watton pointed me to Anime Babes, which really helped part of my argument and is also a fascinating bit of history in its own right. Anime used to be a Not For Women thing.
That is sitcom levels of "potential for title misinterpretation", especially if it was on the mid-90s internet...So in 1995-96, a group of teenaged and early-20s female fans created their own fanzine,Anime Babes, in an attempt to plant the flag, talk about what they wanted, create art, and “petition video companies” for different product.
There's probably an article or two in exploring 'media whose creators clearly never expected it to appeal to girls/women'. I always think of how the Pokémon franchise (which, remember, has a blank slate protagonist you're meant to project yourself on) never thought to add a female option until the expansion to the second generation - which is absolutely baffling considering the gender balance of its OG fans as you can see on the modern internet.I stumbled into getting interviews, and they're definitely a thing that opens new doors - Watton pointed me to Anime Babes, which really helped part of my argument and is also a fascinating bit of history in its own right. Anime used to be a Not For Women thing.
The handy thing for me is thanks to the work of women like Dr Gibson, Julia Round, Jenni Scott etc in basically just the last six years, I can actually do research without also needing a modest budget and academic contacts - British comics in general have long been a wasteland of info beyond a few titles, and girls comics worse than that.
I stumbled into getting interviews, and they're definitely a thing that opens new doors - Watton pointed me to Anime Babes, which really helped part of my argument and is also a fascinating bit of history in its own right. Anime used to be a Not For Women thing.
There's probably an article or two in exploring 'media whose creators clearly never expected it to appeal to girls/women'.
A lot of gold in them thar hills - also media where one gender or the other was steadily pushed out or downplayed. Science fiction in general forgetting women had been around, for example. It also came up in research and in various anecdotes for years, girls and boys were reading each other's comics but only comes up so much. (More women have admitted to this and wrote letters in back in the day than vice versa)
I wonder how much of it ties into perceptions of marketable toys as well?
Transformers comics come with ready made toys for boys, but, so says the marketing department, what can you sell to girls from a romance comic?
There was a time in which tv networks used to cancel cartoons that were mostly viewed by young girls regardless of how high the viewing figures were because they were deemed less likely to buy the merchandising. They decided that 4 boys would make them more money than 10 girls.
I find it fascinating just how into anime the wife used to be growing up in 90s Wolverhampton.
That did in Young Justice not that many years ago, IIRC.
I got the impression at the time that's the direction DC Thomson were feeling their way towards with The Beano Video and its sequel. I think the problem is that VHS tapes were just too expensive at the time for this to be practical, there's a reason why James Goldsmith posting them out to everyone in the 1997 election was considered to be an example of big-money extravagance.It is interesting that if you go on eBay and search "anime vhs" almost every single item will be a UK tape with a Manga Entertainment logo. You'd expect it would just be American releases, but no, loads of old UK anime stuff. And it tends not to be Dragon Ball Z or Tenchi Muyo! or anything else that would become super mainstream, it's all Tokyo Babylon and Urusei Yatsura and things like that.
One interesting thing I've heard of is that there was a brief attempt to do a "video comic" which would basically be a monthly tape sold in newsagents on a subscription basis with one episode of The Guyver. @Charles EP M. has any of your research ever turned anything like that up? It was talked about in a recent episode of Sonic the Comic the Podcast as something that was advertised in STC in 1994.
I got the impression at the time that's the direction DC Thomson were feeling their way towards with The Beano Video and its sequel. I think the problem is that VHS tapes were just too expensive at the time for this to be practical, there's a reason why James Goldsmith posting them out to everyone in the 1997 election was considered to be an example of big-money extravagance.
I've not heard of the video comic before but that sounds fascinating. The cost of videos seems the killer though. (Wonder if "the DVD comic" could've been tried in the mid-00s?)
Initially, the Guyver was released by Manga Video as a monthly video comic. As marketing ideas go it's a bit of a nightmare, but actually proved stunningly effective - it was in the HMV top ten for a good while, and went a long way to giving anime some mainstream publicity.
It occurs to me that the sweet spot might be if the VCD caught on in the West - or maybe this could have been tried with manga in the East where the format was more popular, and then spread to the West.
I see, that is true. I seem to remember Japan also had CED magazines, but these were more associated with live action film fans (with trailers and previews etc.) Given CEDs and their players were cheap to make, them catching on in North America and Europe for that kind of niche (as they couldn't compete with VHS and Laserdisc for their intended purpose) could allow this - but then we're really going back years with PODs.I feel like that might be a non-starter in Japan because most of the most popular manga are released on a weekly basis in anthology magazines while original video animation was (I'm given to understand it's not as viable as it used to be, what with the Internet being a factor now) its own thing and turned out material that could be respected in its own right (i.e. it wasn't all sequels to popular material). Tenchi Muyo! became very popular as an OVA, for instance.