The Decade in Review: The English Language Adaptation Industry and Fandom Part 2

And now it’s on to the second part of my decade review of the English language adaptation industry as well as fandom, which of course covers the USA, UK and Australia. In this part I’m looking at the Australian anime industry and fandom, English speaking fandom as a whole, controversies in that fandom and the US industries, anime tourism, tokusatsu titles released in English and industry icons who passed away.

As I live in Australia, I thought I’d dedicate a paragraph or three (or four) in regards to bumpy ride decade we had over here. The biggest surprise was the continuing resurrection of Siren Visual. The company was the distributor for Manga Entertainment back in the 1990’s, but with Madman Entertainment becoming the dominant force here from the late 1990’s onwards, they had fallen on hard times. The early 2000’s saw them releasing a pitiful number of anime titles on DVD, then an ill-advised venture into ero anime, with all of their titles being cut to ribbons to appease local censorship classifications, and unwanted attention from religious right campaigners. Finally, they got it together in the mid 2000’s releasing titles from Sentai Filmworks, Aniplex and Funimation. They also ventured into subtitled only titles with anime still not released in other countries in English on DVD or blu-ray with “Welcome to Irabu's Office”, “Hakaba Kitaro” “Nodame Cantabile” and most surprisingly, “Monster”. But things would come crashing down late in the decade when their distributor, Gryphon Entertainment, went belly up and they seemingly couldn’t secure a new deal with anyone else. While they continue to have booths at the dealers area in every single anime convention in the country selling old stock, it seems unlikely we’ll see any future releases from them.

Out of nowhere in 2012, a new anime company arrived on the scene; Hanabee. Founded by Eric Cherry, former CEO of Siren Visual, initially the company sold gaming merchandise from franchises such as “Red vs. Blue” and “The Guild”. Most of their titles were sublicences from US based companies like Aniplex of America and Sentai Filmworks. Unlike Siren Visual, Hanabee did not release any titles that had not been previously released in other English speaking territories. Like Siren Visual, things unravelled at end of the decade for reasons unknown, with the recent “Initial D” movies being the last release for them around mid 2018. Like Siren Visual, the company always seems to have a booth at every anime convention in the country. Their website now sells mostly gaming merchandise and old anime stock. An update at the end of 2019 stated that the company went under a restructure due to a focus on US company Rooster Teeth. They stated they want get back into anime, but considering Madman Entertainment’s stranglehold on the market, that seems unlikely.

Finally, on to Madman Entertainment’s wild ride of the last decade. One of the biggest things to happen to the company was the constant change in ownership over nearly a decade and half. Back in 2006, toy company Funtasic bought them out for AU$34.5 million dollars. Fast forward eight years and Funtasic was a floundering as a company. The co-founders of Madman plus a small coalition of investors then made an offer to Funtasic to buy the company back for significantly less, AU$21.5 million. To paraphrase Kerry Packer; you only get one Funtasic in your lifetime. Despite Funtasic agreeing to the deal, two years later the matter ended up in court, with Funtasic saying Madman owed them an additional AU$2.5 million credit adjustment. The court rounded the amount owed down to a measly AU$268,000. Later Japan came knocking, with Aniplex becoming a minority shareholder in the company in 2017. In early 2019, Aniplex purchased the anime division for AU$35 million.

Animelab celebrate their one millionth subscription 

While their home video division kept pumping out titles over the decade, the company branched into other areas. The Madman Screening Room evolved into a part free, part subscription service called Animelab in 2014. Despite the competition from Crunchyroll and other overseas services, the streaming service did incredibly well and eventually reached over one million subscribers within four years. In 2019, Animelab was merged into a consortium of other international anime streaming services headed up by Funimation, to steam a far wider selection of titles. As in the US, theatrical animation became a major part of Madman's business. Their annual film festival-like tour of anime films, Reel Anime, was phased out in 2013 in favour of limited runs of single films. Initially these were “events” as with the “Puella Magi Madoka Magica” and “Love Live! The School Idol Movie” screenings, which included bonus items and giveaways at some theatres. However, after these two films, anime in cinemas proceeded without much fanfare. In fact, outside social media, there seemed to be little promotion of anime films. Despite this, Madman had some big hits with these films; for example, “A Silent Voice” grossed over AU$600,000 at the box office.

It wasn’t all sunshine and light for the company. They lost distribution rights to Viz manga titles in 2016 to local distributor Simon & Schuster. For their 20th anniversary, they held the inaugural Madman Anime Festival. The event was so successful it became a touring event with conventions in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. This was after several well-established anime conventions gave up the ghost, mostly in the early part of the decade with the decline of university anime clubs mostly to blame (anime clubs were usually the core part of the committees who ran them). Anime conventions certainly didn't die out with Animaga (Melboune), Smash! (Sydney), AVCon (Adelaide), GeeCon (Darwin) and AICon (Hobart, finishing in 2018) keeping the tradition going. Tons of Japanese guests came to these conventions including Shinichi Watanabe, Yuko Miyamura, Sakura Tange, Kotono Mitsuishi, Toshihiro Kawamoto, Megumi Ogata and Toru Furuya.

Gerry Harvey

After years and years of threats, the federal government finally came through and charged 10% GST on all goods bought overseas from 1 July 2018, regardless of their cost. Previously it was only for goods valued over AU$1,000 (or AU$500 if you are getting stuff delivered via a courier). The main instigator of this law was Gerry Harvey of large furniture and electrical goods chain store retailer Harvey Norman. As Australians are big shoppers on overseas online stores, this move didn't exactly make him popular. The government decided that it should be retailers collecting the tax and then sending the money to the tax office. Many people scoffed at this arrangement, yet somehow many online retailers complied including CD Japan and AmiAmi. However, companies like the Right Stuf and pretty much all UK retailers did not add on GST to Australian orders. This inconsistency led to an unfair advantage for these retailers. Worse was to come with Amazon refusing to collect the tax, and publicly berating the federal government by threatening to block Australian customers from buying products from their overseas sites. The government didn’t fold and on 1 July 2018 Australian citizens could no longer order products from any of their international sites. Amazon eventually relented and began paying the tax while allowing Australian customers to buy products from their US site. However, all other international Amazon sites are still blocked to Australian customers, including the Japanese site. This was quite disastrous for Australian anime fans who wanted to buy cheap blu-rays, books and other merchandise.

While cosplay continued to expand into almost a more mainstream hobby, unfortunately harassment of female cosplayers became an issue at conventions. Explicit anti-harassment policies were enacted by conventions in the early 2010’s, mostly under the banner of “Cosplay Is Not Consent”. Though it should have been something that was common-sense to most, it served as a reminder to fans that cosplayers deserve respect and as a voice for cosplayers in order to report harassment.

Vic Mignogna

As the alleged cases of sexual assault and harassment by Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey seeped into the public domain in the final couple of years in the decade, anime fandom had its own “Me Too” moment. Initially this appeared as a list of harassers complied in a spreadsheet on a website called “Broken Staircase”. The idea was people could anonymously send in allegation of harassment which would be entered on the spreadsheet. This method always had the potential to be abused, and was with one very prominent person being included on the list who was completely innocent of the allegation being levelled at him. Unsurprisingly the website was taken down after a short while, but did resurface in an alternate location.

With momentum against sexual abusers and harassers building, the US anime industry’s worst kept secret was brought into the public domain. Several women including voice actors Monica Rial and Jamie Marchi, publicly accused fellow voice actor Vic Mignogna of sexual assault and harassment. An avalanche of accusers and allegations, both from fandom and the industry were publicly aired with Mignogna being terminated from his contracts with Rooster Teeth and Funimation. Mignogna categorically denied the accusations but made a public apology at a convention soon after. He then filed a defamation lawsuit against Rial, Marchi, Rial’s fiancee Ron Toye III, and Funimation with Mignogna’s fans coughing up an absurd US$236,000 to fund the case. Funimation then filed an anti-SLAPP motion which is a piece of legislation designed to provide for early dismissal of meritless lawsuits. The legal team for Mignogna was laughably incompetent. The end result was that his lawsuit was dismissed and he was forced to pay the defendant’s legal fees which amounted to US$223,042.42. Regardless, Mignogna’s fans seem to blindly support him despite the mounting evidence against him.

Internally, fandom had a very difficult decade. It became more fractured and deeply divided than ever before. There were several factors that caused this, but the main catalyst was probably Gamergate. Mixed in with that debacle was sites like 4chan and 8chan (which were both born from large anime communities), lurching to the right or more correctly the far right. But this also mirrored a more fractured political scene in the US with the general population becoming entrenched with one side of politics. To be blunt, this all happened around the 2016 US election. Rightly or wrongly, those from the left and right began to inject politics into anime, even if it was there or not. Fandom became surprisingly prudish, with a new moralism creeping into anime fandom. But not from the Christian right as you’d might expect, but from the left. Those on the right also chased phantoms like “political correctness” being inserted into anime (when it wasn’t the case). At times it really felt like anime fandom was at war with itself and wanted to wipe the other side out. The fracturing was so bad that niche pockets within fandom actively despised other niche pockets of fandom. However, it was quite apparent that the vast majority on both sides never really understood fandom or how that fandom consumed anime, the history and tropes of anime or even Japan itself. You could easily argue that social media enabled this division, and that division was stoked and exploited by individuals for personal and political gain. By the end of the decade, many in fandom were bemoaning social media and pined for the fandom of the previous decades of message boards, fan websites and blogs.

The Anime Man & Akidearest

Aside from the seemingly perpetual growth of podcasts (the vast majority of which weren’t worth listening to), the growth and incredible popularity of Youtubers soared. Of course, this also applied to Anitubers (i.e. Anime Youtubers). I am fully aware that I am not in the demographic these Anitubers appeal to, however to be brutally honest, most of the material they put out isn’t all that entertaining or informative. You could easily argue that a fair whack of it is utterly juvenile, serves no real purpose other than to generate controversy in order to get more views (e.g. saying a popular anime “sucks”), promote falsehoods, are completely ignorant of the history and fandom behind anime and even promote piracy over legitimate companies. Despite this, popular Anitubers such as Akidearest, Gigguk, The Anime Man, Mothers Basement and Digibro often have followers in the millions.

In the latter part of the decade, a couple of what could only be described as scams were pulled on anime fandom, but oddly never reported widely on English anime news websites. First up, the Flying Colors Foundation who promoted themselves as a non-profit organisation that wanted to engage with the western anime community in order improve the anime industry. This would initially done via a survey filled in by fans and promoted heavily by popular Anitubers. Red flags started to be raised mid-way through the survey when it asked rather intrusive questions about mental health, including if you had a mental health condition and if so, what you were diagnosed with. The survey wasn’t exactly anonymous; you had to fill in a valid email address at the end of the survey in order to submit it. There was also the fact many filling in the survey were teenagers. The whole thing was rather ethically dodgy to say the least. It was also hard to figure out who was running Flying Colors Foundation. Their senior leadership was cloaked in secrecy until the organisation eventually relented and publicly released the information. However, it was revealed by one fan journalist that there were many more people working for the organisation than revealed, a lot with industry connections. They also claimed that they weren’t paying Anitubers to promote the company, but that had been contradicted by Anitubers themselves who stated they were paid. It was quite obvious that Flying Colors Foundation was set up with purposes of marketing stuff to anime fans and to sell analytics data to companies. There wasn’t anything non-profit about it. When found out, Flying Colors Foundation backpedalled quickly and eventually shutdown operations, stating they’d publicly publish the data from the survey. That never eventuated.

The other scam was the ill-fated cryptocurrency Otaku Coin. Unlike the Flying Colors Foundation, Otaku Coin was immediately treated with a great deal scepticism by fandom. Created by online anime merchandise shop Tokyo Otaku Mode (who also had a hand in the Flying Colors Foundation), Otaku Coin’s goals were vague to say the least. It was apparently meant “to closely and seamlessly connect fans worldwide with creators and otaku-related companies and contribute to the preservation and development of otaku culture”, whatever that meant. 100 billion coins, were to be released with 39 billion of those being distributed to the Otaku Coin Fund for the intent of funding operating expenses, which was a much larger amount than is common for such a scheme. Their website also stated that a percentage of that money would go to the Otaku Coin Preparation Committee Administrative Members, who were oddly a group of people separate to those listed on the Otaku Coin website. While the initial concept paper says that fans will be able to support the wider anime industry with their coins, in reality the coins could only really be spent easily at Tokyo Otaku Mode or other companies involved with creating Otaku Coin. It all seemed rather dodgy and fans stayed away from the scheme in droves.

Easily one of the biggest niche fandoms to emerge in the decade was Sakuga fandom. While this type of fandom had been active in Japan since the 1980’s, it was intriguing that it suddenly became popular in the west this decade. Essentially this fandom focuses on the animation itself and tries to identify the individual animators for well animated scenes. Some parts of fandom did suggest Sakuga fandom only cared amount the quality of animation and not about the plot or anything else, I felt this was misplaced criticism of those fans. Without animators there would be no one to create the anime we love. While voice actors, directors and screenwriters are well known to fans, animators also deserve recognition as well.

Unicorn Gundam statue outside Diver City
Tokyo in Odaiba 

Although anime fans had been making trips to Japan since at least the 1990’s, “anime tourism” seemed to really take off in the 2010’s. While some smaller Japanese tour operators designed tours specifically for western fans, other tour companies were formed to cater to them. Tours catering to specific hot spots such as Akihabara and the Ghibli Museum also emerged. The decade also saw the emergence of new otaku type attractions like the life sized Gundam coupled with the Gundam Front museum in Odiba and the AnimeJapan convention. Of course, there were the traditional otaku events such as Comiket which exploded in popularity, almost to the point where it became almost unworkable. The Japanese government eagerly jumped on the bandwagon with their “Cool Japan” promotional package, but ultimately didn’t spend the money in the places it was need and was rightly criticised as a waste of government funds and a missed opportunity. Coinciding with all of this was mainstream tourists who saw Japan as a hot new destination. By the end of the decade many tourist spots had become overflowing with foreign tourists, some behaving badly, much to the local’s disgust.

Believe it or not, Harmony Gold was still flogging “Robotech” during the last decade. But the company had several legal issues with the three properties which made up the series. Tatsunoko, whom they licenced the properties off back in the 1980’s, claimed Harmony Gold owed them US$15 million in damages, claiming they had breached their contracts including sublicensing the shows and not paying home video royalties. Unbelievably Harmony Gold won and Tatsunoko actually renewed their agreements to the three series for at least another decade. This dashed the hopes of “Macross” fans in the west who had thought that other "Macross" anime series in the franchise would be up for grabs by licencors after the original deal would have expired in 2021. However, licensing agreements with the franchise are far more complex than the mantra “Harmony Gold won’t let anyone licence any Macross anime” that western anime fans constantly repeat.

I thought I’d like to talk about movements in tokusatsu in the west in the last decade because a lot happened in a very short period of time. First up with the freeing of the “Ultraman” licence from Thai production company Chaiyo Productions. Sompote Saengduenchai, founder and president of Chaiyo Productions, claimed the late Noboru Tsuburaya (of Tsuburaya Productions, creators of the “Ultraman” franchise), who had died in 1995, had given him and his company a contract which had given him rights to everything related to “Ultraman” including characters outside Japanese territories, in exchange for a monetary loan. Essentially this was utter bullshit based on what was a highly dubious legal document. After years of legal wrangling, Tsuburaya Productions finally won the case. In July 2019, Mill Creek announced they were distributing the entire franchise on blu-ray in the US, starting with “Ultra Q” and “Ultraman”.

In a surprise move, Shout! Factory, who distributed the “Power Rangers” franchise, began releasing the original Japanese versions of the “Super Sentai” franchise “Power Rangers” was based on. Beginning distribution in 2015 with “Zyuranger”, the company released every series up to “Hurricaneger” and in addition “Jetman”, which was never used for the “Power Rangers” franchise. The DVD sets unfortunately ceased in 2019 due to Hasbro's acquisition of the “Power Rangers” franchise from Saban Brands. In the final year of the decade, Criterion announced their 2,000th release and it was a doozy; a blu-ray box set of the entire showa era “Godzilla” films, i.e. every film from the original 1954 film to 1975’s “Terror of MechaGodzilla”. It was an amazing set with some fantastic extras, though maybe the packaging was a little unwieldy and it could be argued that the artwork didn’t really represent the era the films were created in.

Fred Patten with Osamu Tezuka in 1980

And finally, I am unfortunately ending this post on a rather sombre note. But I must mention that the decade also saw the passing of numerous key players in the industry; Fred Patten who was key player in anime and furry fandom, served as a publicist at Streamline Pictures and was also an avid archivist of anime fandom paraphernalia and fandom historian. Voice actor Peter Fernandez who was most famous for the lead role in “Speed Racer” also left us. As did “Robotech” creator and founder of Streamline Pictures, Carl Macek. Sadly Toren Smith, who set up Studio Proteus back in the very late 1980’s and translated and released some of the best manga ever produced in English via Dark Horse comics, also went before his time.

Well, that wraps up my reviews of anime in both the Japanese and English adaption industries. It took over six months to complete, but I got there in the end. Who knows what will happen over the forthcoming decade? 2020 has already thrown quite a few curveballs and we’re just half way through the year. To be honest, I am not all that optimistic about the future. I just hope creative industries such and anime and tokusastu continue to thrive and fandom continues to enjoy them.