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I have never seen an episode of Berserk. Don’t think I ever heard of it, even, until I heard fans in Europe and America talking about it. Frankly a huge portion of the stuff that gets popular among anime fans overseas is comparatively minor stuff over here, watched by the sort of people who go to fan conventions and take digital pictures of 30-year-old women dressed in “futuristic” schoolgirl costumes.
My wife was born in 1976 and watched lots of shows as a kid. Her youngest brother is 11 years younger and she watched a lot of stuff with him when he was a tyke. So she has seen two generations worth of popular anime shows. We sit down to watch one of the anime channels we get on our cable setup every once in a while and see all kinds of things we haven’t heard of. When an ad comes on for Cowboy Bebop she doesn’t know what the show is. I don’t know either, really; it’s another one on my never-watched, never-heard-of list. The show has a considerable following overseas, but isn’t really on the popular culture radar here.
The average Japanese person my age grew up watching things like Hokuto no Ken, Kinniku-Man, and Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro. Maybe a little bit of Pro Golfer Saru action, or some Dragon Ball when the show first started in the late 1980s. (It was actually good before they started leaving planet Earth to fight random aliens and defeating them with the OMFG LAST OUNCE OF STRENGTH!!!1 and then discovering that wow, there’s a whole new planet filled with even tougher foes.) The popular cartoons in Japan are often not the ones that overseas fans latch on to. It’s interesting to observe.
There’s a good What Japan Thinks post looking at the cartoons from the 1990s that people today most want to watch again. At the top of the list is Warau Serusuman (The laughing salesman), which I read in manga form and enjoyed a lot. Another interesting list (linked at the top of the WJT post) is this one, which details the top 100 anime as picked by people responding to a poll on TV Asahi’s website. The comments (Where is my all-time favorite? Those top picks are dreck!) are as predictable as they are angry.
I was actually surprised to see that Chibi Maruko-chan came in only at #86 on that TV Asahi list, and that Sazae-san didn’t make the list at all. Those two shows fill a heavily watched Sunday evening hour, and are probably among the most-watched cartoons in Japan, along with things like Doraemon (#31).
I have this idea that somewhere in Japan there is a guy who thinks the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are the greatest artistic product ever to come out of the USA and is waiting anxiously for the next fan-translated issue to hit the underground comic store. But that doesn’t change the fact that this American (and most of the ones around me) grew up watching Scooby Doo and the Superfriends. Y’know, dreck.
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