CHIGAU!! Sho-Nen!
GOD won't make any deals with HUMANS;
because - he has the power to destroy everything...
some wiseguy once said that peoples' convictions are determined by the times. Did you know that your favourite song is the #1 hit in your high school seniour year? That's BS. Still - It's hard for me to think that DBZ, Yu Yu, Bastard!! and JoJo aren't the classics of shonen anime out there.
As much as I think.. Oh! this is such a cliche, 16 episodes of GET BACKERS I've seen, I can't get enough, and if the frickin BGM wasn't so good I would just take a nap.
Gungrave is 4 times slower than it needs to be, but the perfect JoJo is 2 times faster than the norm. GB is too fast paced for me, but I'm so tired from "Oh! Da TEARS!" That I have to rest for the night ; 1. I wish tomorrow wasn't a woork day.
All the cliches are there, but I am such a hopeless loser for them.
"Let's GET it back!"
posted by Sniperboy @ 8:36 PM
7 Comments:
bah, that wiseguy is full of it. otherwise, why would I have fallen in love with Saint Seiya almost two decades after it had been made? :3 DBZ, Yu Yu, and the others are classics for two reasons imo. the first IS that they were indeed part of an era for us, but the second is that they personify a genre itself. Sure, they weren't the first story of their type, and they certainly won't be the last, but they marked a level of excellence that we can now associate with "shonen" itself. Did many of those happen to be shown in our childhood? Yeah, but it's just coincidence. If all convictions were determined according to what I liked in High School, Every Little Thing would still be my favorite band ^^;
Yuuu~
Oh yes! DBZ was shown on TV, and YuYu.. I picked it up when I went to Japan as a kid and promptly tried to find all I coudl about it : )
I was wondering tho is it 'standards' because it was shown at such a critical and influential time in my childhood.
Well JoJo and Bastard!! were not tho I mention those mainly because of their fast yet effective pacing (not that they arent classics tho...).
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
BTW I REALLY like KASUKI's chara design : )
http://www.tbs.co.jp/getbackers/chara/kadsuki.html
if you know me and my tastes tho - there's gotta be a hitch to it ; ) there's a lot of REAL cool chara designs in this series. (plus a lot of bad ones.. mainly for he cannon fodder) The "animation character designer" is really good too! Reminds me of The "You're under arrest" chara designer...
hmmm... well, every generation has its heroes in my opinion, but it changes for everybody with the times. But sometimes the times keep other people from seeing the classics as well, it just sort of happens that way. I mean, my "growing up" stages weren't like yours, and the first anime I ever saw was the 5th DBZ movie (vs. Cooler, damn that was great stuff...) on a 3rd gen video tape that Fei lent me in our freshman year of high school. So I started my experience of shonen anime from there, and just because I watched G.I.Joe and Transformers before that (which I admittingly loved... and still do, in that wonderfully cheesy 80's fashion :D) didn't mean that I held them in any higher regard. Stuff like DBZ did things that nothing else ever did, and that's why it's become classic.
I think DBZ and Yu Yu just happened to come out in an era when that type of story was popular (just as you can see in other stuff from the 80s, like Saint Seiya and BOY). Since then, social climate in the states have branded DBZ and Yu Yu as the "newbie" shows and somewhat polarized them from new audiences, and now the in-thing is Naruto, One Piece, and other next gen shonen stories (and I like both~ the comics, at least ^^). So what's happened is that these older stories have simply been alienated from new audiences by trend/social climate, and therefore we get the Initial D/Love Hina era that we're in now instead of the DBZ/Orange Road era that we grew up with. Now, this has pluses and minuses, and I think the biggest minus is that it keeps many people from watching a certain thing just because it's not "in" or "cool," like with the DBZ thing. Dude, I'm going to just take my kendo gear to a convention sometime and clock every single person who "hates" DBZ on the head, because I KNOW they probably haven't watched more than 2 minutes of it. I personally prefer the comic myself, but the anime is way better than its reputation (in the states) gives it credit for. On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with the Initial D/Love Hina generation either. It's probably what a ton of people have grown up loving, and you know that there's generations that precede us that grew up with different heroes as well. The thing that pisses me off are "old school elitests" (like Nemuren... man, I need to get that guy some air...) who insist that the past is and always will be better, because that just shuts you out to new possibilities.
I mean, even today you can see the influence that classic shonen anime has had. look at something popular like Pokemon! sure, it's all... uh... well, it's pokemon ^^;;; but you can't deny that certain aspects of shonen anime haven't influenced its method of character development (god, I hope you don't think me sacriligeous for that comparison ^^;) Just think of it this way: at its peak, DBZ captivated 25% of the Japanese nation AT ONCE with its ratings. That's epic. The only other J-show that I've heard of being able to do as such was GTO (the drama, I think, which was a totally killer shonen manga-esque show in itself. and it had Kaneshiro, instant bonus points :3). And I consider GTO classic as well, it's just that good. So for me, I'm just waiting for that next epic shonen story to come along. real "classics" are never grounded in the past.
that guy has pretty cool designs too :3
Yuuu~
Haha chigau!! It's not Keneshiro!! But it was SORIMACHI! (also another person I like very much!)
Sure you define classic very well. But why is DBZ more influencial to us than say Ashita no Joe? Surely when you see it also has some emotional attachment.
/slaps self
guh, how could I mix the two up...? ><;
anyways, I'm going to state the clearest reason (for me) as to why DBZ is more influential than Joe: I know DBZ better. In Japan, it's a little different. Not knowing Joe is like not knowing who Shakespeare is; it just doesn't happen. I mean, I met NOBODY who didn't know what Joe was, while I was there, even among my generation. But Joe was also a powerful reflection of contemporary (for the late 60's, early 70's) economic slumps and the ensuing social conditions of the time. One could even say it personified a real-life shonen-anime struggle to "overcome the odds," and that's why it holds its place in Japanese society. Conversely, Americans are generally stupid enough in their own history (I mean, we celebrate a fake holiday (Thanksgiving) for crying out loud ><;;;), and it's not surprising that many are not familiar with this history of Japan either, thus nullifying the historical significance that the story can have to them. There's a ton of additional factors that come into American disregard of the series (versus something like DBZ) as well, the most obvious being the age factor. Joe is much older than most anime fans out there, and- sadly enough- that can make them easily disregard it. Social conventions heavily work into this as well. When Americans think of boxing, they probably think of... uh, Mike Tyson, ear biting, and Street Fighter's Balrog @@; Put this beside a shonen concept with "ninjas" or "pirates" and generally most people are probably going to pick the latter as what they believe to be "cool(er)." And probably the most important reason? I'd have to say that's the expansion of the fanbase, and this applies to Japan as well. 80's was seriously a golden age for anime where high quality stuff that could appeal to everybody had outlets that all could afford. DBZ was simply able to touch way, way more people all at once, burning its memory in their hearts forever.
I, sadly enough, have not read or seen Joe, but I... uh, accidently read the ending ^^; but even then, that was totally a "holy shit" sort of moment for me. It didn't matter how old the thing was or that I had only picked it up at that moment (in 2002), but I could FEEL the power from that scene. If nothing else, I'd say pure quality makes a classic what it is, I had just never gotten my hands on Joe before that day.
Yuuu~
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