Wednesday, May 11th, 9:30 am
Update
- Jay Navok
Pokewhat? Part 2
This is part 2 of the "Pokewhat?" series of articles. Please read
Part 1 if you
haven't already.
Another of Kubo’s mistakes is to assume an equal potential audience between
Pokémon and other Japanese pop culture hits of the 1990s. Pokémon benefited from
not attracting one gender over the other. Both boys and girls could enjoy
Pokémon, the boys identifying with Ash and the girls with Misty. Sailor Moon and
Dragon Ball, however, were distinctly gendered, the former appealing to girls
and the latter to boys. As Dosei no Senshi pointed out in the forums, “The
self-conscious kids were scared away from buying a glittery pink VHS [tape].”
Dr. Xadium told me that he had written off Sailor Moon for years as a “girl’s
show.” In general, is okay for girls to enjoy a boy’s series, as tomboyishness
is “accepted,” while the opposite, a boy enjoying a girl’s show, is still
considered immature or perhaps a deviation. This explains partly why Dragon Ball
fared better than Sailor Moon, but Dragon Ball was also limited in attracting
only certain females.
Thus, the Pokémon animated series’ success was not due exclusively to the
policies chosen for localization, but also because the potential audience for
Pokémon, compared to anime that had come to the West earlier, was much larger,
and because the series benefited from a coordinated television campaign.
The book suffers from another flaw in its discussion of Pokémon’s success and
failure, which is a lack of knowledge of the video game industry as opposed to
that of the animation and card markets.
The video game market contains myriad idiosyncrasies that other markets, such as
that for animation, do not. It does not run on an annual cycle of show seasons,
but rather on 5-6 year “video game console” (hardware) cycles, where, within
that period, particular game franchises are produced anew each time. A game
company’s profit margins are made on two to three software megahits which sell
millions of copies, the non-performing games often hitting the discount bin
within two months. Video game companies are in the business of manufacturing
franchises; once a game concept is successful, it is almost guaranteed a sequel.
Yet, only a few games receive sequel installments annually, and those are
typically sports games (each year has a new roster, requiring an update.)
Nintendo’s biggest blockbusters, Super Mario, Zelda, etc., never have sequels
released in consecutive years. Causing players to wait in anticipation is how
Nintendo keeps interest among its fans strong. The company prefers to release
one sequel every several years, sometimes every half decade, matching with the
console cycle, and ensuring that the franchise is not strained. Thus, there was
one Super Mario game released for their 16-bit system in 1992, one Super Mario
game released for their 64-bit system in 1996, and one Super Mario game released
for their 128-bit system in 2001.
Pokémon was the first of Nintendo’s franchises to break this cycle. Seeking to
cash in on the games’ success in a time when Nintendo was suffering from stiff
competition from Sony Playstation, Nintendo began releasing new editions of
Pokémon at an accelerated rate. The goal was to capitalize on the games’
popularity without having to invest much other than tweaking the existing code.
After the first two installments, Pokémon Red and Blue, were released, Nintendo
spit out Pokémon Yellow, and a Pokémon game based on the card game. Within a
period of two years there were 5+ Pokémon games released, each hardly
distinguishable from the other, a decision-making procedure that goes against
video game market principals.
One of the essayists in the book writes, “By early 2001, children had begun to
abandon Pokémon, just as they abandoned Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles and
countless other passing fads,” (pg. 18) but they miss that these fads came from
entertainment machines that differed from Pokémon. The core of the Power Rangers
phenomenon was the television series. Ninja Turtles’ core was its cartoon as
well, as the original comics were not aimed toward children. Pokémon came from a
different background, a foundation coming from video games. Its subsequent
components: a television series, playing cards, toys, etc. ran as concentric
circles ringing around the core game series. If the video game series remained
popular, unlike Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles that had few support structures
outside their broadcast episodes, interest in Pokémon multimedia (television,
comics, etc.) could also be sustained through rejuvenation of interest in the
games. (This is the case with Nintendo’s older-than-Pokémon Kirby series,
although it did not reach Pokémon’s success, the anime currently airs in the
U.S.) But Nintendo made a mistake in producing too many of the games in too
short a period, and when interest in the game faded, the collapse affected its
auxiliary media in the same fashion.
This points to another reason for Sailor Moon's lack of success compared to
Pokémon : Sailor Moon did not have the benefit of a video game franchise backing
it up. Like Power Rangers and Ninja Turtles, it was limited to its anime "core"
(and later some comics.) Video games provide a strong backbone of support to
keep interest in a series across a period of decades. (Zelda is still going
strong.) Unfortunately, by the time Sailor Moon hit the US, it would not have
made sense to import most of the Japanese games, as they were on older systems.
And what games we did receive were pure crap.
Ah, what could have been.
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