i'm a big transformers fan. love the toys, and until recently had a huge collection, but couldn't bear to pack it all up and move it to a new place, again, so sold most of it off. i collected the comics up until #75 or so, and watched the cartoon religiously after school everyday (the original cartoon) when i was a kid.
time's passed and i've made it to my 30's but still look at sports cars and imagine how they'd look if they transformed into a giant robot and blasted the heck out of some evil jet plane. :D
along comes a new transformers cartoon, transformers: armada, and i along with countless other adult-children thought we'd give it a watch. i think to a person, we all hated it. but why?
i think it's part of the pokemonization of the u.s.
it seems like hasbro and others see all this money being made in japan, and instead of trying to do something that will be the next big thing, they just buy the rights to the japanese version and dub it in english.
i know the toys are originally japanese, but the cartoon from the 80's and the comic books were american, and they were awesome.
i'm not trying to dis anime, as i'm actually a pretty big fan. the thing about anime is that it's aimed at different age groups depending upon the content, but all of them share some qualities such as the 'superdeformed' or 'chibi' characters. this is a cultural phenomenon in japan and is hard to translate to english, or i imagine, any other language.
so, the new cartoon uses styles that are different from what we are all used to and different from what we _want_ to see. i think we would all love to see a cartoon done in comic book style.
this brings me to my other point. the japanese cartoon is aimed at a different demographic than the product in the u.s. in japan tf armada is aimed at young children who are just discovering there is something in the world besides pokemon, around 6 or 7 years old. the toys in the u.s. are aimed at kids, particularly boys, in the 10 to 12 years old age group. 4 to 5 years makes a huge deal in the level of sophistication one can use in telling a story.
