Monday, May 9th, 1:00 am
Update
- Jay Navok
Pokewhat? Part 1
I've been reading a book lately called "Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise
and Fall of Pokemon." In the book I came across the following quote, from a
Pokemon animation director:
Another Japanese anime TV and movie series called Sailor Moon was popular
a few years ago. When the movies went on the silver screen in the United States,
very little was altered visually. The outcome was a moderate hit but the series
never got to be like the big craze it was in Japan. Our research in this case
suggests that things like Japanese writing showing up on signboards in the
background and uniquely Japanese family settings distract American kids,
preventing them from really becoming absorbed in the movie's fictional world.
A lot
of our forum members have disagreed with this, with good reason. I'm going
to lay out some of my arguments against this quote here.
To begin with, several of his facts are wrong. None of the Sailor Moon films
were ever in theaters in the United States, and the vast majority (albeit not
all) of Japanese signboards in Sailor Moon were digitally edited to have English
in their place, just as the case with Pokemon. Kubo is vague on what “Japanese
family settings” the series is supposed to depict, but it would be difficult for
American children to discern any difference between the so-called Japanese
family settings in Sailor Moon and what they saw in American television series,
given that the protagonists’ family in Sailor Moon is surprisingly Western in
terms of lifestyle. (She has a two floor house, a nuclear family of both parents
and a younger male sibling, sleeps in beds, etc.) In fact, the opposite case
could be made, as Pokemon’s notion of family (where the father is consistently
absent at work) seems more Japanese.
He is right, however, that the Sailor Moon series did not reach the
popularity of Pokemon. But it was not the fault of the localizers; indeed, given
the limitations of the series in the American children’s television market, its
performance is remarkable. Consider Nintendo’s television strategy for Pokemon,
a subject surprisingly absent from the book. Pokemon performed number one in the
ratings for much of 1999, reaching a record for a children’s show hitting those
ratings for consecutive months. In addition to Pokemon’s general popularity and
video game tie-ins this was for two reasons: First, the show was given prime
morning slots on the WB Network’s Saturday morning cartoon run, and was heavily
advertised during the weekday afternoon cartoon blocks. Second, it lacked
competition. Other networks, such as CBS, NBC, and ABC, were slowly eliminating
their Saturday morning cartoon blocks; they became unprofitable as cable
channels were capturing the market. In fact, Pokemon’s only main contender
during its Saturday morning timeslot was Spongebob Squarepants on Nickelodeon, a
cable channel. Pokemon had hardly any competition on Network television, save
Fox’s “Fox Block” animation slot which, at the time, the network executives were
thinking of canceling due to poor ratings. Furthermore, the WB Network quickly
began airing Pokemon reruns five-days-a-week during their after-school animation
block, allowing those who had missed an episode on Saturdays to easily catch up
with the storyline.
Pokemon was one of the first anime on American television ever to enjoy
concerted television saturation. In contrast, other anime that had made
headlines in years prior, such as Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball, were syndicated,
and no efforts were made on the part of their production company (DiC) to make
the broadcast efficient. Two networks in the same market could have one of their
shows; in where I lived in Connecticut, for example, both UPN 20 and WB 11
showed Sailor Moon. While one could see this positively, thinking that it
promotes the show on two networks, this actually damages the property. Stations
choosing to syndicate the shows had no incentive to push either Dragon Ball or
Sailor Moon; in the television market, it is not good for a show to be in
competition with itself. In addition, many networks put them at bad timeslots
(WB 11 aired Sailor Moon weekdays at 6:30 am; Pokemon was usually shown during
‘primetime’ on 8 am on Saturdays), giving the prime timeslots to American
cartoons, perhaps out of contract with other companies or because they
considered the American cartoons more reliable. Lastly, there was no
concentrated advertising campaign, no corporations sponsoring ads during the
timeslots on a national basis, nor were there other tie-ins such as video games,
card games, etc.
There are two other arguments I'm going to make next time. One, the fact that
Sailor Moon was a gendered series, versus the non-gender-specific Pokemon. Two,
Pokemon being based on a video game, and not a comic series, which furthermore
came out at the same time as the anime began to air, also played a major role in
its success vs that of Sailor Moon.
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